This one’s a little piece of drinking history for you young kids out there. Back in the day (early 2000s) there was a little tv show called Insomniac. It ran four seasons. The premise? Comedian Dave Attell would travel from city to city for his comedy shows, perform, and then go enjoy the night life each city had to offer. The episodes aired late at night, usually when people returned home trashed from bars, so, somewhat entertaining for a few cheap yuks. Each episode was about drinking and Attell would often get pretty trashed, a new television concept at the time that paved the way for many others and spawned many copycats.

Attell is one of the new school greats of comedy.

Anyway, Attell had this hilarious bit about how over drinking and blacking out was akin to time travel. This is a clip from one of his Comedy Central half hour specials from 1999 where most of his material was about drinking and just being a general miscreant and degenerate. A little dated and a younger version of his material, but still great stuff. The time travel bit is a couple of minutes in.

That little bit of comedic sub-genius stuck with me for, well, forever. Much later on, after some time traveling of my own, I somehow ended up as the GM of a failing business in Dorchester, MA. Yup. Just blinked and I was there. Part of my early 30s series of massive failures spawned by depression and laziness I guess but hey, also a learning experience because how else can you look at these things? You can’t change them so you may as well accept it all and move on.

Anyway, myself and the bartender were doing “R&D” for a new cocktail menu and I discovered St. Germain elderflower liquor for the first time. It was a relatively new product to the market at the time and hadn’t yet received the moniker “bartender’s ketchup.” A sprinkle of this, some blood orange juice, whiskey, and I think some type of flavored soda. Oh boy yeah. This was still in the free pour days. The cocktail revolution had yet to land at Ashmont Station and Tavolo Ristorante.

Oh god, the place was so slow that we would all take turns walking up the street to the Ashmont Grill to hammer down a pint and then come back, sometimes more than twice a night. Yeah, that slow. I took the job because I started as a server and would come home with twenty bucks in my pocket after a long shift. Do the math, that’s one table. Yeah, getting ready to go to work, yada yada, driving in, finding parking, all to serve one table in a night. When they asked me if I wanted to be the GM and I accepted, as these things usually find their way into my lap, out of pure desperation. The price for my time and soul? $1,000 a week. Not bad for those days when I had no kid, no car, no real responsibilities save my two dogs, Bruce and Clyde.

The day after the R&D session, we named the cocktail Time Travel because something had happened to both me and the bartender after swilling down too many of our creations. Yes, if you hadn’t guessed, some time traveling of our own. I mostly biked around Boston in those days, even close to winter, and I sort of woke up at one point, on my bike, frozen as hell, going the opposite way from my house down Dorchester Avenue. Yeah, the stretch of beach was on my right side and I wondered where the hell I had ended up. I had to stop and recalibrate for a moment, then turn around, shivering, suddenly straight sober from the cold, and haul ass back to my place miles and miles away in Jamaica Plain. My only thought was of my dogs, that I had to get back to them and if I died, run over like a stray cat by some crazed drunk, they would shit in the house.

The whole point of this? Not sure. There’s a lesson contained somewhere within this tale of misspent youth. Maybe for the youngans to read and shake their heads at. Who the hell knows? Anyway, I had nothing else to write about today and for whatever reason thought a lot about that cocktail, my first, and how I would do it today. For one, the original Bloodsport from back in February of 2019 was a homage to the Time Travel, so I guess I’ve already paid that debt, but I was also thinking about elderflower liquor and how it’s fallen out of favor a bit. Five years ago it was all the rage. I guess it got overdone.

A brand new Time Travel. Not sure what it would be. I’ve been working on something with orange, and making it seasonally relevant and clever with some noyaux which we have gallons of after stone fruit season. We’ll see how it turns out.