Striking the extra clause

What's up guys.

The Google Gestapo finally reactivated our blog after nearly half a month of downtime. In the general world of computer service intervals for free software, that's not that bad, but when you consider our blog is called "dry month" and oriented to covering the events of one month of not drinking in Hong Kong, that downright sucks. Note to all other bloggers; be extra careful not to mention the words "lesbian" and "alcohol" anywhere near each other; or whatever it was that set this off as being marked a spam blog (and if they hit us again, we're just plain moving to a real hosting site; they would have erred way too far into their manifest of "Doing no evil" for me at that point).

Well, here's the intro I tried to write in the first day. Our livers need a break. In the fast paced easily available always going city of Hong Kong, it's anathema to contemplate a dry month. So the torture begins.

We're a bit further in now, and it has proven to be every bit hard as we figured. But be that as it may, the worst part of making it over the first week seems done. My own highlights:

• The first night, S and I had a free glass of wine at a function; it nearly killed me to refuse it in favor of a water, especially when I was at my weakest (first week!)


• I was with a girl one night at a new bar opening; she needed to run to the restroom for a moment, and handed me her beer to hold for a moment. Sorry, I didn't mean beer. I meant cool elongated glass bottle of Corona, lime sizzling in the golden water, condensation dripping onto my palm as I grasped it's cool hard extents. A few minutes later, I handed it back to her, hand shaking and just a tad beyond the ability to speak.


• Sitting in an all you can eat (and more dangerous) all you can drink sake and beer japanese bar just over the border into mainland, watching friends down bottle after bottle as the ice vestibule inside the sake bottle slowly dissolved to water


• Taking an all day junk trip, the first of the year, over to millionaire's beach, having naught better to play than "one bourbon, one scotch, and one beer" on my guitar before thoroughly depressing myself

but that was all warm up. The real challenge came last night.

As a lot of you already know, I had one exception built in to my dry month, mostly to cover a potential problem. Playing a lot of live music weekly and not wanting to alienate customers that didn't know me that offered me a shot, I allowed myself the loophole that if a stranger (defined from the moment they walked into the cafe that night) bought me a shot, not at the insistence of my friends, myself, or other collusion, and I was on stage performing, I was allowed to drink it. Mostly it was for the expediency of not ticking off customers and not dragging them through a lengthy explanation of what a detox month was (something that doesn't seem to have translated well into this part of the world).

Last night, it happened for the first time.

And I said no.

So I'm saying it now for the record; I'm striking my exception clause. It's a dry month, flat out. No expediency, no loopholes, no complicated terminology to close the gaps. It is what it is.