The Discriminating Wino

 Break on Through To the Wet Side of January  Subscribe to  The Discriminating Wino  for beer & wine reviews & more Drunken ravings of the poet do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editorial Staff. We thank you for your patience in enduring however many days you went without this month. Let this be the one resolution you hold to, this year, and forvermore: Keep being awesome! ❤️ 🍻 

Doing this Dry January thing for a week and a half has truly been an eye-opener. My eyes are open and looking at the Corona I'm drinking and seeing that it only contains 0.5% alcohol. (On the plus side, it tastes slightly less awful than the real thing. Corona, that is.) All jokes aside, I have truly, through cleansing my body, been able to finally see the light: Sobriety sucks. As we went to dinner with the in-laws last night for a belated Christmas get-together, it being Sunday, I treated myself to a glass of red wine. (That's not entirely true: my father-in-law paid.) Now, don't take this the wrong way: I love my in-laws, almost as if they had raised me (except then I wouldn't be so messed up!) During Christmastime, when I had to deal with my actual parents, I supplemented my normal daily six-pack of German lager with eggnog, brandy, spiced punch and Scotch. Let that be a lesson. I never finished reading Duke Ellington's incredible autobiography, Music is My Mist...

    I started highschool a shy white boy listening to old-school hip-hop and hardcore rap music. About halfway through my freshman year I started listening to Metallica, Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden and that got me into heavy metal and rock n roll in general. Those three bands also introduced me to The Bible and, funny as it may seem, initiated a long and convoluted religious journey that I am still on today. Because of course, heavy metal also has bands that promote satanism, either literally or through subtler means. There are also a lot of traumatized and ignorant musicians unable to believe in God or the devil, who essentially think that religion is a crock of shit. Anyway, I loved them all: but during those first few months it was those three bands I mentioned earlier who meant the most to me.     A couple months after I started listening to metal, I was at a restaurant with my Mom: a bar really, though I was too young to drink and had never had more than a sip...