So is this doomed to be a crushingly dull week of blogging? (I mean, you know, moreso than usual.) Perhaps. But while my personal take on Tuesdays may be boring as well, at least it will be boring on its own merits and not because it’s just like everyone else’s Tuesday.
Tuesday will always and forever in my mind be inseparable from tequila. This is because I spent most of The College Years getting together with some friends every Tuesday night to drink tequila (and eat cheese fries and drink beer and generally act the roustabout). We’re closing in on a decade and a half since The College Years ended, and yet the association refuses to yield.
I know that drinking tales (especially along the lines of “this one time I got SO DRUNK …”) have limited appeal to anyone who’s made it past the age of, oh, 22 or so. And saying “I drank a lot in college,” while true enough, once again gets us back into Monday-type territory of the predictably banal. But nevertheless, maybe I can coax just a little noteworthiness out of the whole mess.
I always feel compelled to start by pointing out that I went to a smaller college in a sleepy little town where the after-dark options were limited. Cable television was only available in student center lounges, and the nascent interwebs were accessible only via the computer labs. We were at the apex of experimental ages and on our own for the first time, and 25% of us could purchase the goods available at the Alcoholic Beverage Control store with money the other 75% of us kicked in. I’m pretty sure back in 1993 a bottle of Two Fingers tequila ran about $7.95. So, why tequila? Because we were bored and it was cheap thrills.
But why Tuesday? According to apocryphal legends that were passed down to me, it was because a group of girls decided to celebrate the campus-wide Alcohol Awareness Week by getting together to drink different beverages every night, following an alliterative theme: Martini Monday, Tequila Tuesday, Whiskey Wednesday, etc. Tequila Tuesday was such a hit that it survived week after week. And the girls invited more friends to join in, who carried on the tradition even after the founders graduated, and invited yet more younger friends, year after year after year. Over time a remarkable amount of formalization settled in, first and foremost being that Tuesday was the night and the night should always be Tuesday, world without end. (Second being that the number of shots to be consumed was two and the name Two Tequila Tuesday more or less stuck like it was meant to be.)
Most of the campus population that was inclined to drink at all did so on Friday and Saturday nights (with a sizable contingent lured to the Sunday night specials available at the lone over-21-only bar). Some people with forgiving schedules or more voracious appetites for drunkenness might get an early start by going out on Thursday night. Extremely dedicated enthusiasts (or the terminally stressed) could even conceivably tie one on as Humpday crested before the slippery slope toward the weekend. But who in their right mind would go out drinking on a Tuesday night, and not just out for one beer but specifically for two shots of a notoriously ass-kicking distillation followed by as much beer as seemed like a good idea after downing said two shots (which, it probably goes without saying, is more than one beer)? Not many people, we found, as TTT frequently had the bar to ourselves once we made it that far. And that was just as we liked it. It made us feel decadent and iconoclastic and rebellious and all of those other things that college-age adolescents yearn for so desperately. In hindsight it reveals itself as fairly tame and silly, but at the time, it had a certain seductive appeal.
Mockingbirds and Sunrises and Brave Bulls were for amateurs, we were inclined to believe, despite the fact (or more likely due to the fact) that tequila’s reputation for being punishing to drink on its own is wholly well-deserved. The rituals we cultivated, of gathering at a specific time (ten ‘til ten on Tuesday nights) but always in a different place (from the garden of the College President’s residence to the ceramic arts studio, from the Board of Visitors meeting room to the physics labs, one of our number always managed to have a plan if not an actual key to get us basically anywhere) and always to down two shots of a specific brand of Tequila after reciting scripture (the marketing copy on the back of the bottle, which eventually was changed by the distribution company but by then we had our version memorized) and singing songs (“Ruby Tuesday” of course), all of that grew out of something that was already highly ritualized. The cutting of limes, the salting of the backs of hands, the lick-slam-suck choreography, the test of manliness inherent in not overreacting to the scathing effects of Agave spirits, those are all actions and images that are practically encoded at the collective consciousness level.
So given all the self-referencing and self-reinforcing patterns inherent in TTT, it’s no surprise that it embedded itself so deeply into my consciousness. (Wormed its way in, you might say, or I might given my weakness for puns.) But above and beyond all of that, Tuesdays in college were nights spent with some of my very best friends. And because I also can’t shake the scoldingly schoolmarmish messages that we were bombarded with back then, from the people who would bring forth Alcohol Awareness Week as a frightfest highlighting the evils of drinking, I rush to add that I don’t mean my very best drinking buddies. I don’t mean that because I spent all my free time in bars (and English majors have a LOT of free time) that the only people I formed emotional bonds with were functioning borderline alcoholics. Through various hooks and crooks, the people I would have spent time hanging out with and becoming friends with under any circumstances were the same people who were invited to carry the TTT torch. We spent tons of time together at various times and in various conditions, some chemically altered, many not. It would have been satisfying to Stick It To The Man by drinking in public while underage accompanied by people I didn’t care for; but as it happened, I got that satisfaction while reveling in the company. I’m still friends with those people today, even while the demands of the real world and adult life therein have precluded the possibility of getting early-mid-week wasted until 2 in the morning with them.
But still. The feeling of Tuesday nights stays with me, the feeling of freedom from expectations. You don’t have to go to bed early every schoolnight. You don’t have to get your kicks from officially sanctioned outlets. You don’t have to do exactly what everyone else is doing, even if that only manifests in doing the same thing in your own slightly different way. Circumstances have changed for me such that the opportunity for Tequila Tuesdays is vanishingly rare, not to mention Time having had its way with me to the point where I’m not sure I could absorb the masochism of it the way I did when I was 19 anyway. But I try to keep the spirit of the thing alive, which means if you’re going to ask me to break routine, do things a little differently, even a little crazily – Tuesday is a good day to ask.
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