The past couple of months have been a drag, which you may have suspected after my account of our trip to Germany in December broke off mid-trip. For that I can only say that the wifi in the Motel One chain is weird and unreliable, and it was cold.

Then the holidays, and more cold, and so much crap being sprayed about by whatever fan we as a society have been cursed with that I couldn’t see sinking myself even further into nonaction (and not the good kind) by ranting about it here, plus all kinds of paralysis over on my Lichtenbergian blog due to the impending possibility of a world premiere for William Blake’s Inn, and soon you’re talking about real stagnation here.

So I am now going to raise myself out of my torpor by talking about an amusing kind of failure, a backlog of cocktails.

Some background: I subscribe to several emails from websites like liquor.com and diffordsguide.com which send me recipes nearly every day. I’ll go and look them over, and if I think one might appeal to me, I copy the recipe into a word processing document that is always open on my desktop. When the page is full, I print it out and start experimenting.

That’s the theory. The reality? See this photo?

On the right, my bar book. On the left, twenty-one pages of cocktails that have built up over the past year or so. Either I don’t get around to making them, or I’ve run out of a key ingredient or there’s some syrup or tincture you have to make first… You get the idea.

How bad is it?

On those twenty-one pages there are 189 cocktails.

Of those 189 cocktails, I have approved 26 of them and eliminated 14, i.e., I have tried 40. That means that I have made only 21% of the cocktails that I claimed to be interested in.

I hereby commit to doing better.