From the Archives: alcohol

November 15th, 2009

Café Verführen: Because I Believe

Posted in Reviews by Adrian Mailenna
Still Not A Moist Towelette

Most YaoiCon attendees never visit the third floor of the hotel, unless they have rooms there. I don’t blame them. The con program doesn’t mention the treasure hidden up there. I don’t know whether this is a deliberate snub or one of those complications of printing schedules and hotel management, but it’s a shame either way. The third floor is home to Café Verführen, and I think it’s my favorite event at the con.

Full Disclosure: In the Fan Alley, I wound up exchanging cards with Matta’s real-life alter-ego, and she gave me a button with the Café Verführen logo. I gave her a Tybalt button in return, but take this how you will.

This is a fairly late review, mostly because I kept throwing out my earlier drafts. I don’t like rehashing old reviews, and most of what I said in last year’s writeup still holds true. It seems inadequate, though; there’s something magically captivating about the Café, something hard to pin down and describe. The experience is enchanting, somehow much more than the sum of its parts.

February 27th, 2009

“So I hit him again!”

A seventy-year-old lady in Ohio demonstrates the defensive value of a Bonk on the Head. She was upset about the police taking her pan as evidence, but fortunately Emeril Lagasse has decided to replace it with a whole set.

The Plain Dealer has an interview:

Technically, I suppose, it is two Bonks on the Head.

I think everyone can be a little happier knowing that there are such brave and spirited people in the world.

That is, everyone except the bad guys being bonked on the head. That is okay. Maybe next time they will think twice before being so rude.

Always,
~Catboy =^.^=

March 23rd, 2008

It’s Just the Liquor Talking

Posted in Fiction by Adrian Mailenna

Like most American boys, I had my first taste of alcohol while I was still in high school. My dad gave me a half-glass of wine with dinner. It wasn’t particularly good (I later learned that I just don’t like his taste in wine, but I get ahead of myself), so I shrugged it off and went back to my room. I looked at my bed for a moment, fell over into it, and woke up fourteen hours later.

So… yeah. I’m pretty sensitive to alcohol. I didn’t touch it again for another three and a half years.

Again, like many American boys, I had my second drink (and the first one I actually enjoyed) with my girlfriend. Her name was Jacqueline, my tiny little half-French girl. One way or another she had a little flask of her father’s cognac, some French white wine distilled into its purest essence and aged, longer than both of us put together, until the barrels stained it dark, rich amber. We were sitting in a park when she offered it to me, in one of those shady, private clearings, sealed away from the world, just the two of us watching the light dapple against our skin and clothes, talking about nothing in particular. It was stronger than wine by a long shot, and I felt it at the first swallow, felt myself relax, felt myself go mellow, placid and vulnerable, but it felt right in a way that my father’s wine did not. It was warm and spicy, smooth and sweetly addictive, a small, refined pleasure that slipped inside before I could notice, melting down my throat and coiling its vapors up into the root of my brain, leaving fingerprints across my soul.

Something – well, it didn’t quite click; it really just slid gently and effortlessly into place…

November 17th, 2007

Intoxication

Posted in Fiction by Adrian Mailenna

N.B. The copy of this story in Envy, the YaoiCon 2006 anthology, contains a number of misprints and editorial errors. I am very sorry for the inconvenience.

Yellow-throated songbirds pecked at the bars of their tiny, gold-wire cage, blinded and too fat to fly, searching in vain for the trays of millet and grapes, oats and figs that someone had taken away that morning. A soft mewling startled them, but they soon forgot it, oblivious to the sleek, golden-skinned cat-prince watching them. Tybalt licked his teeth contemplatively, sprawling in the Roman couch beside the cage. He flicked open the top and plucked out the fattest, laughing quietly at its futile squirming. It amused him for a moment, but soon he grew bored again, and he thrust it, head first, into a glass of brandy.

It didn’t take long. The bird drowned in minutes, its struggles against his hand growing weaker and weaker until they stopped altogether.

“That’s cruel, Tybalt, even for you.” Tybalt’s guest, a gentle sylph of a boy, just barely a man, tried to look away, but the beautiful tragedy entranced him, somehow, and he could not.

“Well, I miss her, and their suffering eases my own.” He plucked the bird’s feathers deliberately, one at a time, tossing them back into the cage. “You wouldn’t deny me that, would you, Methyst?”

Methyst buried his face in his hands, running his fingers back through his short, dirty-blonde hair. “Still her, even now… Tybalt… It’s been seven hundred and fifty years.”

“Seven hundred and forty-nine, two hundred eighty-seven days.”

“Even still.”

November 8th, 2007

Lovers Die Together

Posted in Fiction by Adrian Mailenna

The best lovers die together. That’s what they say, right? Lovers die together. It’s the only way to live.
This post contains drunken ravings on a sexual theme. Reader discretion is advised.



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