Mongo Nation

Trippin’ balls or just tastes like ‘em?

By Jeremy Azevedo

So a few friends and I thought it would be fun to go to an absinthe tasting party Friday night at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery.

If you don’t already know the story behind absinthe, it’s liquor that has been illegal in the United States for almost 100 years because of a chemical contained within it, thujone (from the wormwood plant), largely thought to be a dangerous and addictive psychoactive compound. This is partly due to the fact that famous weirdos like Salvador Dali, Ernest Hemingway and Aleister Crowley went about saying that they were seeing green fairies and shit whenever they drank the stuff. I’m sure that the absinthe itself had less to do with these hallucinations than the fact that all these men were batshit crazy and probably would’ve seen green fairies regardless of what they drank.

Some fairies that, sadly, we did not see.

Anyway, the reasons why going to this event seemed like a good idea were twofold:

1. Absinthe has been largely illegal in the our part of the world for so long that it has achieved legendary status as sort of the holy grail of alcoholism. Any drinker worth a goddamn knows this to be true.

2. Every drinker worth a goddamn also knows that the psychoactive properties of wormwood (an essential additive of authentic absinthe) are largely exaggerated.

Question: Who doesn’t know this?

Answer: All the noobs that are sure to be falling all over the place, imagining that they are having hallucinations and stuff, providing endless lulz to those of us that can hold our liquor.

So the flier told us to dress semi-formal, which we all did. But what it failed to mention was that the dress code was actually semi-formal 1920s. This place was a freak show. Not since the early 90s, when the first Hot Topics started appearing in the suburbs, have I ever seen so much velvet, so many inventive piercings, smelled so much patchouli and mothball. Further exacerbating this horrible realization was the discovery that A.) There are no restrooms in a mausoleum (I had to go to the bathroom like a motherf**ker) and B.) There are four seemingly inexperienced bartenders serving an army of dorks in this place. We’re talking about one bartender per fifty nerds here, people.

A long-ass, sweaty line of freaks waiting on one lousy bartender.

Somehow we managed to wade through a sea of clove smoke and hats with peacock feathers and got ourselves a drink. We got a few, actually, so that I could review them for you here. This way you will not have to endure an exploration into faux-Victorian trust fund extreme-vintage fashion necro-culture as we had to. You’re welcome. Read the rest of this entry →

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