Normally, I am a teetotaler

I do go out for a drink occasionally; the late playwriting group I belonged to was mostly an excuse to go have a beer or two every week, and I just had a good time drinking with a writer friend of mine last weekend (my poison: Sapphire and tonic; his: gimlets). But I am mostly a lightweight, which I suppose isn't a bad thing.

The thing that makes me wary of alcohol--apart from the fact that I don't enjoy being warm and flushed--is the same thing that makes me wary of coffee: if the only way you can drink the stuff is to mix it in with things that mask it, what's the point? Perhaps I'm missing something, but I've never really understood that.

However, I have stumbled across a pretty good drink that I had to try tonight. It's an apparently not-well-known concoction called a Gin Buck. It's 1:3:12 (or so) lemon juice, gin and ginger ale. I mixed myself one that was about 1:3:18, and it was quite tasty--the lemon juice and ginger ale go together remarkably well. The gin is barely an accent (it's a shot or a shot and a half), but it makes its presence known.

I still don't understand the point of mixed drinks...but this one was good.