Post-Modern Drunk: I Will Show You Fear in a Mason Jar
Back in college, I fell in with a bad crowd--I've always been fiercely competetive, even about the dumbest shit ("I can move through crowds better than you!" "But my reaction time is faster than yours!" "I can kick your ass in 'Soul Caliber 2!'"), so when I fell in with a group of alcoholics with cast-iron stomachs, my entire senior year was turned into one extended drinking game: Who can stay standing longest? Who can go to class on the least sleep and the most booze? And who can drink the foulest shit out there?

I had an advantage--my drink of choice was Wild Turkey 101, a booze so strong and foul that even Hunter S. Thompson would eventually disown it. I not only drank it, I liked it. So I had a leg up when we'd get together, play drinking games while watching Tom Waits concerts or The Big Lebowski for the 80th time.

Until Jon Gesse brought the moonshine. It wasn't real moonshine--he had some standards, even then--but it was nevertheless corn whiskey, sold in a mason jar. And it was foul stuff. There's no getting away from that. If left on the shelf for too long with the lid loose it would make its own label peel off. The fumes weren't precisely toxic, in the strictest sense of the word, but it wasn't pleasant either.

It was perfect for our purposes, in other words: rubbing alcohol that didn't always make you go blind. The ideal drink for the phony tough and the crazy brave.

You drink corn whiskey straight. You can mix it, if you're stupid, but not only is this looked down on, it is quite counterproductive. The taste of corn whiskey is impossible to dillute. A mixed drink is going to taste just as feral as a shot, except that it'll last ten times as long. Nothing can cut it, and you're just going to prolong your pain, like slowly peeling off a bandaid rather than ripping it off.

A shot tossed back is the closest you can get in reality to getting a drink in an old Western: you toss it back and either smile serenely as a hole is burned in your frontal lobe, or you sputter and choke before passing out face first into a pool of your own drool.

Corn whiskey fits perfectly into the X-Treme Sports For Alcoholics mentality that pervaded my college days. It does not, however, fit into the perfectly balanced diet o' booze that makes up my life these days. It's something to keep in mind for my inevitable future living on old cardboard in a warm subway station, propositioning strangers for pocket change.

Georgia Moon Corn Whiskey in Brief
Quality: F
Taste: Creamed corn made with nail polish remover.
Aftertaste: Fear and loathing
Strength of Liquor: 80 proof (40% by volume)
Strength of Hangover: I could only drink this a shot or two a day in this last testing round, and every following morning, I had a sharp but localized pain in me gulliver all day.
Final Recommendation: A taste not even the distillers could love. Parents, give this to your children as their first drink--they'll never want to drink again, and will grow up to be repressed stockbrokers who abuse Percoset and think that cough syrup is the ultimate rush.

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