Thousands of years ago, the Greeks called him Dionysus, the god of wine, fertility, festivity, madness, song, frenzy, etc (they all go hand in hand), in other words, the god of self destruction and rebirth. He continues to reign in today’s day and age due to people always wanting to listen to music, get drunk, fornicate, and follow the spiral downward if they so choose. Fun times that’ll never go out of style. Speaking of style, I sort of imagine the modern Dionysus resembling one of the hipsters of yesteryear. Super tight jeans, a waxed mustache, suspenders, lots of tattoos, some fancy accouterments around their necks and wrists…A dude who wants to talk daiquiri specs and about his garden he just planted…A vast improvement and strong contrast to the old version where he’s portrayed as a jacked, sullen, long bearded satyr often with grapes and vines dangling in his long hair (sounds uncomfortable).

He’s a party time version of Jesus…Ish…I mean, the comparisons have been already made. His father was Zeus, the main god, the head honcho, and his mom wasn’t around much. In fact, she was a mortal who Zeus nuked with a thunderbolt, the omnipotent method of kicking your baby mama to the curb during pregnancy…The unborn Dionysus was promptly sewn into his father’s thigh for the remainder of his incubation. There’s a few different versions of his birth myth out there but this one seems to be the most common. After he emerged, fed by the femoral arteries of his dad, he was abandoned and left on an island with three nymphs who discarded their own families in order to nurse and raise him. So, yeah, his self destructive impulses make sense as he always wanted to be accepted by a father who neglected him and he instead turned to partying, drugs, and other forms of hedonism as well as becoming a bad influence on others by promoting this lifestyle. Problem is, he’s a god, we are not. So he can party his brains out and the aftershocks aren’t as severe as they are to us.

Anyway, the modern version is close to this. If old Dionysus is still around he probably just calls himself “Dio” for short and laughed his ass off creating trends like the male top knot or “man bun” as it’s often called, and also bringing back such annoying fashion trends as super tight jeans for men, low rise jeans for women, and suspenders for both.

Yeah, these days he’s probably a bartender in Brooklyn who scoffs at vodka and loves himself some pet nat and orange wine. On his days off he keeps himself busy ironing his flannel shirts, designing his next ironic tattoo, and dreaming of the day he’ll be able to afford some super stiff, indigo dyed denim from Japan.