In Key West Redefining the Continental Breakfast
Our body’s tolerance of, desire for, availability to, and profit from alcohol is a constantly changing narrative in our lifetime. It starts as a naivety of, as I had no idea what alcohol was as a kid yet there was no humanly possibly way my dad sat through 8 years of my quarterly children’s theater performances at 0% BAC. As a teenager, it’s introduced to you as nefarious contraband, and that intangibility leads to you feeling edgy while drinking straight Bailey’s in your friend’s kitchen or somewhere deep in the woods, without cell phone service, around a raging bonfire surrounded by mostly strangers and that guy you always see chain smoking outside 7-11, drinking the Smirnoff Ices you’ve been hiding in your attic in the trunk that your old American Girl Dolls live in. In college, your invincibility complex blinds all logic and self-awareness, as you start your evening in a jail cell sized room, sitting on bunk beds, taking as many pulls from a bottle of well vodka as the bottle allows, before hurling your barely conscious being into one of the many dilapidated nearby brothels masked as charitable pillars of brotherhood, also know as fraternities. Your 20s promptly pull the rug out from underneath you, forcing you to question your identity, find your place outside of the controlled environment of college, rip out hearts and get your heart ripped out, all while living in a room of a shared apartment that probably violates United Nations Human Rights Laws, so you aptly submerge yourself in pickle backs and tequila shots. Reporting from your 30s, martinis strangely become socially appropriate and encouraged with all meals and the deeper you get into this decade, they start to become meals in and of themselves. From my observations, the 40s and 50s are decades of heightened adult responsibilities to which alcohol is an unnecessary foe.
Which brings us to the 60s, specifically for men, as observed through Rick Lawton. This bacchanal free-for-all of a decade is replete with Yeti coolers teeming with high ABV options, a sudden obsession with perfecting their mixology of one highly specific cocktail, and a unusually universal case of singular Tourettes where at 4pm M-F, “Welp” is gutturally uttered, followed by the immediate preparation of the aforementioned speciality cocktail. However, the pièce de résistance for this decade’s magnificent degradation? The pre-10am cocktails requiring zero occasion or questioning, acceptable 7 days a week, 365 days a year, and with a high likelihood you’ll find them on the “Boat Drink” section of the Margaritaville menu.