19 / The Tequila Concept
Hi all :)
I wrote an essay below, but before I share that I wanted to say hey to my new subscribers, and to my paid subscribers, and finally to my old subscribers as well. I’m going to work on formalizing and regularizing this newsletter in the New Year, as well as creating a special treat for my paying subscribers (seriously love you guys <3 ten percent of you are my mom <3). I have a few ideas I’ll be building out/exploring, but if you have anything you’d like to hear from me let me know. I love receiving feedback :D
Brief Promotion Section
My show, Exploration: LIVE! is next Friday at 7:30pm at Union Hall. This show is the most fun thing I do all month. This month we have Devon Walker, Chanel Ali, and Sara Hennessey, and throughout the show my cohost Natalie and I each share and riff on 5 notions/ideas/hypotheses we’ve been thinking about (we end up doing roughly thirty minutes of talking, in a good way). It’s been a blast for us AND for the audience, and everybody hangs out after so I really hope you can make it! Tickets are here.
Another thing: A collection of tweets about soup I posted Instagram went viral and got almost 200,000 likes, which is amazing, and I’m now fielding a dozen DMs a day of people hoping to talk to me about soup. I of course understand and appreciate the response, but I’m actually personally not that passionate about soup; I just like it and have had several thoughts about it over the past few years that I thought might be interesting to conglomerate towards some broader theory. I like this exercise – it’s exciting to discover thematic coherence in your thinking. I’ve tweeted so much over the past decade, and though I’ve mostly considered each tweet a disparate thought, in retrospect I basically have covered, like, six topics. Who knew I cared so much about vessels?
Quick Breather Section Before The Essay Starts
Speaking of bringing together disparate ideas into coherence: the essay is seriously about to start. It’s about drinking and having fun. Here it is:
The Tequila Concept
I love drinking alcohol. It’s gauche but it’s true: drinking has been a consistent pleasure in my life for almost a decade, and one that has taken on many forms. Any given means of drinking offers its own set of attendant identities to try on. I drink wine if I want to feel like a scion of a wealthy family, or a woman in her forties treating herself to much-needed leisure, or an artist wearing a skirt and big black sweater about to get into a fight about her creative process at a dinner party. I drink cheap beer if I want to feel like I’m a suburban highschooler drinking for the first time at a party in someone’s backyard, nervous but excited for the salacious pleasures of young-adult life. I drink expensive beer if I want to feel like a senior boy in college trying on the pretensions of connoisseurship. I drink brown liquor, straight, if I want to feel like a hunter, building fraternal bonds with my compatriots (rarely, then).
My favorite, though, is the tequila shot. I love doing tequila shots. They’re the hardest for me to conjure up an image for, partially because I love them so much, and partially because doing a tequila shot shot demands full engagement — not designed to underscore a conversation or provide material for a game (beer pong, etc), but an event in itself. I love the whole production of it — the fussiness of the licking of the hand, the salt, the lime, a tiny toolkit assembled hastily but precisely in a crowded bar. I love the symmetry of it too, the way a tequila shot brings together three abrasive sensory experiences – a lick of salt, a shot of tequila, and a squeeze of lime juice – so as to neutralize them. So much experience is packed into a tequila shot, demanding total concentration in the moment. Every tequila shot is a delineation, a deliverance.
In this way, tequila shots dramatize best what makes drinking interesting – namely, the pain that precedes the euphoria of drunkenness. For those who enjoy drinking, the pain, I think, can be a crucial component of the pleasure. It borders the fun, protecting and cohering it, the momentary displeasure of a tequila shot as if to say: Here the fun begins. Other forms of drinking dramatize this even more strikingly. In college I once played a drinking game where you got slapped after taking a shot of whiskey. The logic was the same – the sharp pain of the slap countered and neutralized the bitterness of the liquor, and the elements combined to create a burst of adrenaline. In drinking there is, of course, a demarcation in discomfort on the other side as well — the hangover, as if to say: here the fun has ended, but there it was. (You could argue, maybe, that the hangover is another painful prelude to another kind of pleasure – that of the lazy hangover Sunday, with its sloth, spending too much money on breakfast because you can’t make it yourself, spending a late morning and maybe a full afternoon bumming around with your friends.)
I tweeted once about how discomfort is actually a large part of the experience of going to live events, and not incidentally so but rather a key constitutional part, in the way that a shot is fun because of, not in spite of, the way it hurts. This construct is an explicit part of lots of forms of fun. There is sex, obviously, but also scary movies, roller coasters, and exercise — types of fun wherein discomfort and pleasure are so intertwined as to be inseparable.
I don’t think this type of relationship – pain as a border experience that delineates fun, a threshold – has to be so explicit, though. It’s more widespread. Have you been to a concert recently? Concerts deliver euphoria packaged in layers and layers of difficulty. They cost $40 and then cost an extra $15 because being charged $40 actually costs $15. Once you have the tickets you have to download an app, which will send you emails about bands you don’t care about until the end of time and won’t take “unsubscribe” for an answer. You get to the venue and you have to go through six layers of security, in each of which you need to bring out a different combination of personal identifications, and, because you got too high on the walk over, you’ll do it slowly as people amass behind you waiting for you to figure out that this tired woman is asking for your ID not your tickets yet so put that QR code away. In the venue, you’ll get a drink, maybe, and it’ll be $12, and you’ll find a spot to stand where you think you might get to see the performer. Maybe you’ll push your way through the crowd to get closer, or maybe your shorter, more confrontational friends will, and you’ll have to awkwardly trail them repeating “sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry,” knowing that wherever you end up you’ll end up blocking the view of someone shorter than you who’s been waiting longer and deserves it more. You’ll feel confident that you’ll be able to see the performer, at least, until someone six inches taller than you does the same thing you did moments ago and stands directly in front of you, and you’ll grow annoyed at them in the way you were terrified the people behind you were annoyed at you. You’ll check your phone and realize it’s at 28%, somehow, despite having charged it before you left your house, and that too will feel physically uncomfortable because your phone helps you move around the world and is basically an extension of your body. Surrounded by people, able only to shift your weight from foot to foot, you’ll stand waiting for the performer to start, and as the time goes you’ll realize that because of your $12 Lite Beer you need to go to the bathroom, but you won’t want to go because you’re worried the performer will start as soon as you leave, which they would, but because you haven’t left you end up standing and waiting for a full hour and realize multiple times that you would have had ample time to go and elbow your way back to your friends. Your need will grow in urgency until it becomes unmanageable three quarters of the way into the concert, at which point you’ll elbow your way out of the crowd to the bathroom, where you’ll just barely be able to make out the performer starting to play your favorite song. When the show ends and the performer’s encore is over, you’ll have to shuffle out of the venue with one thousand other attendees minus the one hundred who sacrificed the last song to beat the rush of the crowd, to the two entrance doors, where you will wait as a stuffed roomful of people exit four people at a time. You’ll walk en masse to the subway on a crowded platform where concert attendees will mix with unlucky late-night commuters and wait 20 minutes for the train, standing the whole time, needing to go to the bathroom again, another hour until you finally make it home.
And still: concerts are amazing. I love them, because wrapped up in those layers of discomfort is a sweet little chestnut of euphoria. The performer comes on, forty-five minutes late, and you feel delivered, rapturous. And that combination of feelings, I think, is not incidental: we value things for the work we need to put in to get them. After waiting, uncomfortable, lingering in indeterminacy, desperately searching for a sign that the performer might come soon, they’re here. You take videos to capture the feeling, but when you watch them at home it’s you shaking the camera scream singing over the performer. If you’ve fought your way to the front, you’ll feel community in your shared rapture. “I love them!” people will say, out loud, to no one.
The religious component here, to me, is obvious. The feeling of a great concert can be, at best, one of rapture. A larger-than-life figure delivers you from your misery, notwithstanding that they created the conditions for it — classic God vibes. If you really love them, the sight of them will feel surreal – you’ve listened to that voice in recording, and now here it is, around you, coming from a body, right there. Artists play with this all the time, casting themselves in messianic roles (see: John Lennon, Kanye West’s “Sunday Service”).
I think a concert is a great example of this dynamic, but it’s far from the only one. Deliverance from pain is a feature of a great many leisure experiences: the view at the end of a hike; working out; waiting to get seated at a restaurant; travel; sex; having a picnic. You could think bigger too: love, having a child. What’s going on with this? Why is fun always packaged in discomfort? The simplest explanation, I think, is that life is full of discomfort; things that aren’t uncomfortable are by far the exception, so any moment of pleasure will necessarily be surrounded by discomfort. That’s true, unfortunately (SUCH a bummer about how life is full of pain), but it also can’t be the whole story. People seek out discomfort far too frequently for it to not have meaning, opting to climb the proverbial or literal mountain instead of driving the proverbial or literal Toyota. Pain is more than incidental; it’s inherent to the pleasure, inseparable from it. Maybe it’s because it’s ubiquitous that we’ve had to imbue it with meaning and purpose and pleasure, but meaning and purpose and pleasure it has.
That meaning and pleasure take different forms. Sometimes there’s a pleasure in putting ourselves through uncomfortable situations to prove that we can take it. Managing danger creates a feeling of safety and competence. I like biking and walking long distances because it makes me feel like if, god forbid I had to, I could. My great grandfather survived the Armenian genocide (congrats), a death march from Constantinople to Palestine, so it sort of feels like I better practice just in case. I imagine what total transit infrastructure breakdown would look like, and being able to bike 60 miles (maybe to pick up medicine for a friend? to outrun political violence?) feels like a useful skill. This is maybe a component of BDSM as well, which people say can help people overcome sexual trauma by reenacting violence in a controlled and safe environment.
There’s probably also, more simply, a delayed gratification logic at play – that the pain makes the pleasure more extreme, shooting it through with relief. I feel this at concerts, sometimes: after waiting so long, it’s hard to separate the excitement at the concert starting with the relief of not having to indeterminately wait for the concert to start. How much of the pleasure of working out comes from the relief of being done with the painful part?
This kind of structure feels religious to me as well, though I can’t really speak to traditions other than the Abrahamic one. There’s part of us, I believe, that feels like we don’t deserve pleasure without pain, that the experience of pure pleasure without punishment would make us uncomfortable and uneasy – so when the pain inevitably comes we celebrate it, and if it doesn’t come we manufacture it, so that it won’t come later in the form of a more severe cosmic punishment.
The problem with this relationship to pain is that discomfort we think we can control can really quickly become tragic. I’ve been thinking and reading a lot about the crowd crush at the Travis Scott concert, and about other crowd crushes across history (this New Yorker article is great, as is the Wikipedia for crowd crushes), which occur at mass gatherings like sports matches, concerts, and, notably, religious festivals – venues where you might expect some discomfort in exchange for ecstasy, but where you don’t expect that discomfort to be mortal. It’s a unique type of tragedy, one where a delicate balance of pain-for-pleasure tips just too slightly far in the wrong direction — one that includes all drinking deaths (though hazing deaths in particular strike me as quintessential examples), sports accidents, and random roller coaster decapitations.
That’s not to write off any experience with built in displeasure; indeed, that’s, like, most of them. Still, I’ve found pleasure in seeing this trade-off for what it is and rejecting it when I so choose. It’s a marker of aging, maybe, tolerating less physical discomfort for uncertain pleasure. I’m more willing than ever now to stand in the back of concerts, letting the kids fight it out for prime viewing. My nights getting actually drunk are fewer and farther between, only doing so deliberately, especially as the recent sufferer of my first ever multi-day hangover — a painful, horrible experience that ruined my week, worth it nonetheless for the fun I had in bringing it about.
Quick Thanks
I just wanted to take a moment to thank three people: 1) Haley Nahman, whose fabulous newsletter Maybe Baby I subscribe to and read every week, who had a really helpful conversation with me over coffee about how make a newsletter sustainable and useful and worth reading. Thank you Haley!!!! 2) Anand, my boyfriend, who read a draft of this essay and gave me super helpful notes even though he is studying for finals in his first semester at law school. Thank you Anand!!!!!!!!!! 3) The reader!!!! If you read any part of this I’m really grateful. Thank you!!!! I love you as much as my boyfriend and Haley.
This was great :) Thank you charlie!