VN AfterTaste

I am a scientist.
After college I went with a roommate to the cut rate grocery and bought some cheap wine. We had decided, looking around at the world and noticing the glamour and high esteem society heaps upon its career alcoholics, that we would become winos. Sometimes people do this during college, but I waited until after. Because I am a very methodical scientist.
We opened that wine, with some difficulty, and the cork fell apart. We poured the wine into glasses. We fished out the bits of cork. Science has proved this: cork is a poor stopper for drink. Also cork is not appetizing or visually pleasing. I read later that the quality of cork has been dropping for years. Some say cork connoisseurs are just looking back fondly to the cork of their salad years.
We stared at the wine and the cork. We tasted it. And then we poured it all down the sink. The experiment had failed. Back to the cork-board.

Generations ago people used to drink ale and cider all the time because the water was unsafe. It was either be a drunk or get typhus. Even the children. Especially the children. They can’t hold their liquor or effectively fight off typhus. So people were sloshed all the time. And this is why we had to wait until the twentieth century to destroy the ozone layer. We could have done that a long time ago, had we the clear headedness required.
People also didn’t like to bathe back then. Not because of the typhus water, but because of the dangers of bathing whilst drunk. It is entirely possible for drunk people to drown in the bath. And if they didn’t drown they might have caught typhus. Especially if they knew a woman named Mary– and back then most women were named Mary. Drunks tend to come up with simple and easy to remember names.
Eventually people switched to coffee, which also tastes awful, and as a result, as I said, destroyed the ozone layer. They also developed a lot of disposable products. They became very productive. They did a lot. Even things that didn’t need done. Because doing things that don’t need done is still doing something, and that’s certainly better than doing nothing. And profitable. Do not think we destroyed the ozone layer for nothing. We did it for profit and convenience.

Our society both hates alcoholics and idolizes them. They make you want to be one, if for no other reason than to stop being one; thus becoming a recovered alcoholic. So if you’re a drunk the world is yours. And if that doesn’t work you can be a recovered alcoholic. Then the world can be yours. By the way, they remind you that a recovered alcoholic is still an alcoholic, so they are all still in the same club. And like all clubs they are exclusionary. People only form clubs so they can exclude others.
If you don’t drink at all you aren’t applying yourself. And no one can help you if you don’t help yourself to a drink. A nondrinker is called a teetotaler, which sounds just awful. An alcoholic is called a social drinker. See how it works? If you don’t drink you’re anti-social.
I have noticed that whether society lauds or damns the alcoholic seems to be dependent on the financial standing of the drunk in question. A rich drunk is classy. A poor drunk is unseemly. But this is class war and to say this opens one up to accusations of the same.

Now, it’s possible that the cork is becoming sub-standard because of global warming. And, as I have explained, global warming is happening because of increased sobriety. And we need increased sobriety because it helps science. And without science we are lost. We’ll tumble into a new dark age– and it will be unsustainable because of the cork problem.
And if we run out of cork we will never be able to stop our wine in the traditional way. But maybe that will save us.