In Boozo Veritas # 60 by Teege Braune

Squirrel Babies of Orlando: Part 1

The day began with bloodshed. A small lizard named Bill who had snuck onto our porch seeking shelter from the storm found himself instead in the deadly maw of a nine pound monster in a tuxedo. Jenn grabbed Eury by the scruff, jostled her, but by the time she released Bill from her jaws, Eury had already inflicted a wound of fatally violent severity. Bill wriggled on his back, and we assumed his demise was imminent. The killer, for her part, exhibited not the slightest shred of remorse as she was incarcerated inside the house, but instead chirped out her frustration at being unable to finish the job and devour her victim completely.

This is the face of a homicidal maniac.

Perhaps sacrificing the poor lizard to this fiend would have been the most humane course, but we were determined that Bill should know some kind of peace at the very end of his short life. Momentarily he regained composure, attempted to flee, but ran only a few inches, impaired as he was by his disembowelment. Ending his suffering by stamping him out seemed far too brutal an act, so Jenn merely scooped him up and laid him gently among some overgrown foliage in our front yard. He lay for a moment, breathing quickly, and then crawled slowly into the shadows presumedly to pass into the next world. One more brave, fallen soldier in the fight against Florida’s pervasive and aggressive mosquito onslaught.

“Are we cowards for not putting him out of his misery?” Jenn asked, and I cited Abbot Zerchi’s arguments against euthanasia in Walter M. Miller Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz by way of a defense

Even the passing of one so meek as Bill had me reflecting on the brevity of life. I’d read that the biggest regret shared by those in their final months was not keeping up with friends, as though a lifetime is a collection of people to miss, a cultivation of those from whom circumstances have kept us for one reason or another. In my case: my family in and around Louisville, Kentucky, my high school buddies spread out around the country, my good friend Nat in Seattle whose birthday was over the weekend, Adam all the way across the world in Australia. A few years ago we were nearly inseparable and yet with that distance between us, two years had gone by since I last saw him. Just recently I had a dream in which I found us together again, only to awake and realize just how long it had been.

I was distracted from my melancholy as the animals in our yard were behaving oddly; bats flitted through the air in broad daylight, and a bluejay who had alighted on the porch railing bounced towards me on his back-bent legs, glaring nefariously. Perhaps it was Bill’s death that had agitated them or maybe we were just unused to the incongruities of nature as we’ve only had any yard at all for a short time, having recently moved out of an apartment building in downtown Winter Park. I was vaguely aware in the back of my mind that Jenn had promised me a surprise earlier that morning, but as my yard was becoming the fabled Area X of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy, I almost completely forgot about it. Even the broad elephant ear leaves seemed to encroach with an unnerving familiarity. The off-putting atmosphere culminated just as I was about to leave for a work appointment with the discovery of three baby squirrels, each with a bloody nose, scattered around the porch and the yard, climbing up walls and trees with unsure footing and squealing in a pitch that cut right to the heart strings.

I put off my exit as long as possible while Jenn and I watched from inside and waited for the negligent squirrel parents to return and gather up their fallen babies at the same time keeping an eye out for potential predators not excluding the murderer Eury and her accomplice Riley who sat at the window chirping, howling, and begging us to let them outside so that they could dispatch the innocent creatures. The babies teetered precariously along the fronds of a palm tree, and it became clear that they had been abandoned. No parent would return. Utterly helpless, overly trusting, they suffered slim chances in that wild backyard of ours. Intervention would soon be necessary. As I guiltily ran off for my appointment, Jenn and our neighbor Matt set about gathering the babies for safe keeping, but we had no idea what to do with them next. Jenn and I didn’t know how to raise baby squirrels, and furthermore, it became clear that one of them might be seriously injured. I spent my appointment anxious, glancing continually and apologetically at my phone for updates and as soon as it was over raced back home.

Will Jenn and Teege rescue the baby squirrels and deliver them to safety, or will they all die a bloody and agonizing death?! Tune into In Boozo Veritas next week for the exciting conclusion to Squirrel Babies of Orlando!

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 Teege Braune (episode 72, episode 75, episode 77, episode 90, episode 102) is a writer of literary fiction, horror, essays, and poetry. Recently he has discovered the joys of drinking responsibly. He may or may not be a werewolf.

In Boozo Veritas # 59 by Teege Braune

A Family Sousing in Michigan

Jenn and I flew to Michigan on Thursday for a long weekend that pinnacled at the wedding of my cousin Brian who had asked me to be a groomsman. Jenn had never been to Michigan and I had only been once fifteen years ago. During that trip three of my college buddies and I racked up the mileage making a circle around the state that included Battle Creek, Kalamazoo, Grand Rapids, Flint, Detroit, Ann Arbor, and culminated at MSU in Eat Lansing. We did all this over the course of the week that was our spring break, never staying in one place for more than two nights, smoking cigarettes, guzzling coffee, and eating hamburgers from fast food joints the entire journey. This recent trip, however, was more stationary and somewhat less self-abusive. I have since given up the cigarettes and hamburgers and keep my coffee consumption at moderate levels. Nevertheless, I’ve added the vice of alcohol, something in which we did not much indulge fifteen years ago because we were nineteen and found acquiring it difficult in strange cities.

Like many families, when mine gets together large quantities of alcohol are always consumed. For my mother’s generation, the gender binary is almost universal. My aunts drink wine; my uncles drink Coors Light, and while Bud Light will do in a pinch, Miller Lite, PBR, Yuengling, and everything else that technically qualifies as beer is out of the question. Also, there’s always a bottle of bourbon that no one claims to have brought. Sometimes I am the source of its origin; at other times it is Brian or my brother Nic, and at other occasions, no one knows where it came from, but we drink it anyway because it’s bourbon, and we’re from Louisville. Bourbon calls to us, is in our cultural heritage like a familiar hearth even when we’re far away from home.

Brian was kind enough to book Jenn and me a reservation at a quaint, dreamy bed and breakfast called the Brickhouse at Somerset. From the idyllic garden in the backyard to the antiques collected in every nook and corner to the cats that lazily roamed the corridors, the atmosphere of the Brickhouse created the sensation of time slowed nearly to a crawl. The owner Sandy was more than accommodating when we crawled down the stairs to breakfast a couple hours later than she intended to serve it. She and her partner Ron stayed up late with us listening to Leonard Cohen, and in this charming and relaxed environment, a welcomed contrast from the hectic nature of a wedding, still we were constantly being offered alcohol as Sandy and Ron keep an marvelous collection of fine wines and Michigan’s many craft beers, a nice break from Coors Light. As if to demonstrate that there is more to the world than just bourbon, Ron poured Jenn and I each a glass of a twenty-one year old port-barrel aged Scotch that had me rethinking my prejudice towards Kentucky whiskies.

The wedding itself lay amidst a panorama of sprawling, pristine farmland. My cousin Christina spoke for all of us when she described it as the most picturesque wedding she’d ever been to. As soon as the ceremony had ended my mom and my aunts kept shouting for Christina’s husband David to get them another glass of wine despite the fact the there were servers designated for that very purpose. My mom who had several glasses of wine, which is a lot for her, had grown liberal with the camera, was forcing everyone to stop what they were doing and smile for rigidly posed photographs, which Uncle Lenny routinely photobombed. She would approve of these moments by giving out fist bumps. My sister Abby and cousin Jenny danced their signature moves, mostly a lot of arms flailing. The best man Corbin relieved a legitimate concern shared by many of the guests and gave a toast that was sweet, funny, and not completely inappropriate. Meghan and Brian, the bride and the groom, were beautiful together, and a lot of people cried, but in a good way.

I was sorry to part ways with that crew, especially since I didn’t get to spend that much time with Brian as he was so busy preparing for the wedding. On my way out, I gave him a hug and promised to see him during Thanksgiving. Then I thrust his wedding gift in his hands.

“Hell, just open this now while we’re both here,” I said.

He unwrapped the bottle of Michter’s Rye Whiskey Jenn and I had gotten for him.

“Ew, Daddy like,” he said lecherously as he turned the bottle over in his hands.

Airport libations.

We sat with David and Christina on the flight back to Orlando talking about their two children and catching up on family gossip. The scenery from the windows was surreally beautiful: on one side of the aisle the sun set on an ethereal landscape of billowing clouds in a unobtainable paradise streaked with various shades of blue and pink while on the other side lightening lit up the sky as it burst within clouds many feet below us. I used to be a stalwart writer on airplanes, but although I knew I had my blog waiting for me when I got home, I decided to put it off for a few more hours. Christina had given us a free drink ticket, and as I considered what to cash it in for, nothing, neither beer nor wine nor liquor, sounded refreshing. What the hell is wrong with me? I thought. I never turn down free drinks. Was I actually boozed out? I wasn’t even hung over, just really thirsty for actual water. As I was thinking I would be morally obligated to retire this blog dedicated to writing, literature, and drinking, Jenn used the ticket to buy a gin and tonic, of which I drank more than my fair share. Temperance vanquished once again, In Boozo Veritas is yet saved!

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Teege Braune (episode 72, episode 75, episode 77, episode 90, episode 102) is a writer of literary fiction, horror, essays, and poetry. Recently he has discovered the joys of drinking responsibly. He may or may not be a werewolf.

In Boozo Veritas #57 by Teege Braune

RIP Bar-BQ-Bar

I was thinking about doing a piece for Labor Day about William Blake’s idea of the creative process as a form of labor embodied by the tension and perfect balance between inspiration personified by Urthona (i.e. the Holy Spirit) and reason personified by Urizen (i.e. Satan) and their place in connection to Tharma (both the senses and God the creator) and Luvah (representing the heart, love, and Christ), known collectively as the Four Zoas, but then I remembered that Labor Day is meant, ironically enough, to be a day free from labor not a day to voluntarily impose more work on oneself, especially not in the way of a particularly dense and time-consuming blog post. That being said, having worked in the service industry for the past decade, I can’t remember the last time I was actually off work on Labor Day and just so happened not to be scheduled at Redlight Redlight this year. Who really knows when a break like this one will come again?

This past weekend Bar-BQ-Bar, downtown Orlando’s favorite dive bar, meat-market, watering-hole, shut its doors for the final time.

I’ll always have a special place in my heart for its run down, skeezy ambience, and I’m still unsure whether it was designed that way or as old as sin and simply never cleaned. I had even been tempted to assume the missing urinal was a stylistic choice until the night I entered the restroom to find most of the urinals missing. It seemed like a good place for a young, aspiring writer to hang out and collect priceless, debauched experience in order to avoid writing, and yet I can’t claim Bar-BQ-Bar has ever inspired a single word until today.

I first went to Bar-BQ-Bar shortly after moving to Orlando nine years ago. My friends Mike and Kosch were kind enough to take me out since neither of them knew me very well yet. We easily found a booth and Mike bought us round after round of Mickey’s Big Mouths. We struggled with the riddles inside the caps as we drank lazily into the night. Attempting to make out the illegible graffiti scrawled overtop of itself, layer upon layer, along the walls, I wondered at the ur-text that started it all. Written out line by line would the sheer immensity of it rival Infinite Jest, the collected works of Victor Hugo, or the entirety of the western canon? I thought I could become a regular at a chill, little dive like this one. It must have been a Sunday or a Monday night. I was unemployed and never knew what day of the week it was. I’ve never seen Bar-BQ-Bar so relaxed since then.

During a rowdier evening, Bar-BQ-Bar taught me the significance of a decent tip long before I became a bartender myself. One night I waited twenty minutes to order three beers. I stood with my cash out while the bartenders served everyone around me, failed continuously to notice me in that wall of people. When one of them finally filled my order I tipped twice the total of the High Lifes I was buying.

“Wow, thanks, man!” she said nodding in approval.

The next time I came up to the bar she jumped over several guys who had been waiting much longer than me to take my order, and while I didn’t continue to tip quite as much, I didn’t have to wait more than a minute for a beer the rest of the evening.

Another night I found myself sitting in a booth with The Detroit Cobras after their show next door at The Social. The drummer bought me shot after shot so the guitar player could hit on my date. We sat in our booth drinking long after the rest of the band had taken the tour bus and abandoned their two associates. Jenna, who I was not actually dating, nevertheless had no romantic interest in the guitar player, a man twice her age, but as a conciliation prize we drove them back to their hotel, the Travel Lodge on Magnolia Ave only two blocks away. We had to walk further to get to her car than they would have to get to their hotel, but the guitar player was persistent and didn’t give up until the very lat moment. In his defense, he was a perfect gentleman when Jenna pulled the car over and announced, “Here we are. Thanks for a lovely evening. You guys enjoy Orlando.”

I went to Bar-BQ-Bar much less after I started bartending and spending almost every night at Redlight Redlight, but still made the occasional jaunt through its seedy doors. One night a water pipe broke at the original Redlight, and we had to close down for the evening while it was being repaired. To this day, it was the only time we’ve had to close for a maintenance emergency, but as water was rapidly filling up the bar, it seemed like an appropriate last ditch necessity. Brent and I were swept along downtown with everyone who had been drinking at our own place to Bar-BQ-Bar where we decided to drink ourselves out of our frustration. After I was good and tipsy a young woman we called the Make Out Bandit began kissing me suddenly. This went on for a while and then she simply stood up and walked away without exchanging any of the niceties one usually goes through in such a situation. When I turned around my friends began to applaud me, so feeling red of faced, I darted off to the bar to order another beer. When I attempted to search for the Make Out Bandit a few minutes later, I found her already kissing someone else, but I was pretty drunk at that point, so I didn’t let it get me down. I remember much later watching her through a hazy cloud of intoxication as she left with another guy altogether.

The truth is these are just a few of the more memorable moments that standout from the stream of blurred together hours I spent inside Bar-BQ-Bar. There was a period in my mid-twenties when I was probably there a couple nights a week. Much of the time was spent wallowing in the banality of excessive alcohol consumption, my drunkenness making me feel like both part of the crowd and somehow outside of it. Bar-BQ-Bar was the hookup joint, and I guess some part of me hoped something like that would happen, but it was never really my style, so I just drank, alone or with friends, and sometimes I ran outside to puke in the middle of Orange Avenue and they wouldn’t let me back in afterwards, and sometimes I kept my shit together, but I always made it back home in one piece.

I didn’t go over there for their last weekend, didn’t feel like taking the night off work, but then everyone else’s stories and pictures gave me a pang of nostalgia, made me wish I had. I have long since misplaced my old photo booth snap shots and pretty much stopped going as our culture shifted from MySpace to Facebook and have no record of myself ever being there at all. The last time I went to Bar-BQ-Bar… Jesus, when was the last time I went to Bar-BQ-Bar?

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 Teege Braune (episode 72, episode 75, episode 77, episode 90, episode 102) is a writer of literary fiction, horror, essays, and poetry. Recently he has discovered the joys of drinking responsibly. He may or may not be a werewolf.

In Boozo Veritas # 54 by Teege Braune

Anthology: Getting Drunk and Reading Stories

Saturday night I participated in a truly unique literary experience: Cole NeSmith’s Creative City Project sponsored Anthology: A Night of Stories and Spirits at Snap! Space.

To a soundtrack of gypsy jazz provided by The Cook Trio, writers Jared Silvia, McKenzie Parker, Keith Kolakowski, and Vanessa Blakeslee (whose debut collection Train Shots was recently released by Orlando-based publisher Burrow Press) and myself took turns reading original work sitting in an easy chair on a stage set up to look like Masterpiece Theater before a wonderfully large and responsive audience.

Lest we writers imagine that the packed house was brought by the allure of our brilliant work alone, signature, craft cocktails designed by Matt of The Courtesy Bar were also served. Five cocktails to be exact, one for each story.

It probably comes as no surprise that I, a drunken writer who keeps a weekly blog called In Boozo Veritas about literature and alcohol, would consider having a cocktail based on a story I wrote one of the pinnacles of my career. My weird story about prop comedian Carrot Top fighting reptosapien-hummanoid monsters in Winter Park’s Kraft Azalea Garden inspired an equally unusual beverage that combined chai-infused Bacardi with simple syrup, lime, and carrot juice. While I would never have thought to mix these ingredients together myself or order the concoction in a bar, this just goes to show why I’m no mixologist. The delightfully off-center, bright orange elixir partnered perfectly with a tale about a man with bright orange hair who is addicted to drinking lizard blood.

Across the board, Matt did an excellent job taking cues from both odd details and a story’s overarching atmosphere to create drinks as rich in layers and subtleties as the literature from which they were derived. I found it a personal treat enjoying his mixture of scotch, lemon juice, lavender-infused simple syrup, Peychaud’s bitters, and darjeeling tea while listening to my good friend Jared Silvia read his story “Thursday.”

Having read this story in Burrow Press’s first collection Fragmentation long before I even knew Jared, it was my introduction to the work of someone who has become one of my favorite local writers. Jared’s story, narrated by a ponderous drifter whose adventure finds him indulging in his penchants for sunscreen, cheap wine, and the dirty, after-work smell of a Russian bartender, is equal parts funny, sad, and wonderfully resistant to easy interpretation.

Each of the stories contained an air of the mysterious and an open-ended quality that lent itself to the heavy consumption of top shelf spirits. As the Creative City Project scheduled two shows back to back (both of them sold out), by the time everything wrapped up around midnight the writers and our significant others were ten stories and ten cocktails deep, and quite frankly swimming in it. Some of us sobered up by stumbling up Mills Avenue towards Tako Cheena and then jumping right back into that pool of self abuse by finishing the night at Lil Indies where they were serving some very fine cocktails of their own and playing a fantastic set of soul and funk. As always an otherwise classy evening devolved into a foggy night of rowdy debauchery. The events that followed are worthy of their own lurid tale, one that would most likely inspire its own signature cocktail containing what? Bourbon, beer, horse radish, dog food, and Edy’s slow churned French silk ice cream perhaps? But that is a subject for another blog post and another reading, one that will hopefully never see the light of day. In the meantime, Cole has proven that the City Creative Project is an organization to keep your eye on. I for one am eager and excited to see what amazing events he hosts in the weeks and months to come.

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 Teege Braune (episode 72, episode 75, episode 77, episode 90, episode 102) is a writer of literary fiction, horror, essays, and poetry. Recently he has discovered the joys of drinking responsibly. He may or may not be a werewolf.

In Boozo Veritas # 53 by Teege Braune

Year One

This week, Tuesday, August fifth to be exact, marks the first birthday of In Boozo Veritas. Like most one year olds, In Boozo Veritas is not aware that this is its birthday. No one thought that it would survive this long. When John King first asked me to write this weekly blog he had no idea that I was a habitual procrastinator who never had a penchant for commitment. Well, I’ve been working for the same bar for seven years and somehow I’ve convinced an incredibly intelligent and beautiful woman to agree to marry me, so perhaps I do not give myself enough credit. Like any long term commitment, this blog has taught me several things about myself. For starters, I’ve become aware that my pathological procrastination is not only a bad habit, it also my modus operandi. Attempting to think about a subject for my blog before Sunday morning is a mostly a useless endeavor. Even if I come up with a topic that I like, I won’t be able to think of anything I want to say about it. It really doesn’t matter how bored, busy, or preoccupied I am. On those rare occasions in which a subject seems too obvious to be avoided, Ernest Hemingway’s birthday for example,

or William S. Burroughs’s, I still find myself agonizing over my approach, the way in, so to speak, until the very last minute. More than once I’ve slinked off to bed on Sunday night defeated, believing this to be the week that I simply couldn’t get it together and form five hundred or so words into some kind of cohesive thought, description, or argument. My Aha! moment usually comes before dawn. I awake suddenly from quickly fading dreams drenched in sweat, the entire damn blog throbbing in my restless brain. I want desperately to put it out of my mind for a few more hours, roll over, and go back to sleep, but this proves impossible. Peace will not come until I’ve completed my task. I’ve written most of my best blogs  this way. I won’t tell you which ones. You decide which of my blogs are your favorites, and then assume those are the blogs I wrote as the sun arose on any given Monday morning.

There are exceptions, of course. As Lewis Hyde, author of The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, has taught us, “An essential portion of any artist’s labor is not creation so much as invocation. Part of the work cannot be made, it must be received; and we cannot have this gift except, perhaps, by supplication, by courting, by creating within ourselves that ‘begging bowl’ to which the gift is drawn.”  The artist may prepare a room for inspiration, but it is folly to expect lightening to strike simply because one is standing with an extended rod in a thunder storm. At my worst, I’ve emailed John my blog entry at five pm on Monday afternoon seventeen hours past my deadline. Fortunately, he is always kind in these moments. We are both aware, in the back of our minds, that the only real consequence that would befall us were I too miss a week would be the shattering of my own ego, but what a delicate ego it is, and how shiny. It would be a shame to see an object of such lovely craftsmanship come to such a swift and tragic demise.

On those even rarer occasions in which I’m ahead of the curve, I employ a process I call Playing Hemingway. The way I heard it, and I’ve never been able to verify this story through reputable sources, was that Hemingway, who would have preferred to drink rather than write, knew that the latter justified the former. Taking this justification very literally, he wouldn’t allow himself to have his first drink until he finished a page, his second drink until he finished two more pages, and so on. It is unlikely that he always played by his own rules if he in fact used this process at all. Is he who keeps an ace up his sleeve while playing solitaire a wise man or a fool? I too have cheated at this game no one but myself has compelled me to play, though when I do so, it is only I who suffer. Writing while drunk is one thing, but I find I can never begin writing while drunk. Something about that initial momentum, those first couple of sentences, requires sobriety. Perhaps benzedrine would do the trick, but this isn’t the Beat Generation, is it? What generation is this anyway?

Truth be told, I’m not really sure what John had in mind when he asked me to write In Boozo Veritas, a name he chose and I have since come to adore. His only instructions were that I write something about drinking and literature. As a loose guide, I have used this topic to write everything from memoir, to journalism, to critical essay, to satire, to dadaist prose poem. Once or twice I’ve dispensed with drinking and literature altogether. If John’s instructions had been more rigid, I might never have gotten anything accomplished at all. In general, I’ve simply let the muse take me, late to the party though she usually is. Another thing I’ve discovered about myself is this: that I think about drinking more than I actually indulge in it. This wasn’t always the case. Entire months out of my twenties are blurry, half-remember bouts of consumption and debauchery, but I’m older now, and even though I still think of myself as a lush, I’ve grown temperate in my thirties. Okay, temperate may be overstating it, and my membership in the Prohibition Party is merely ironic. Maybe I’ll be drunk by the time I finish this blog. Maybe I’m drunk as you read these very words.

With a little luck and a tad more commitment, I’ll keep In Boozo Veritas going for another year and who knows, if John will have me, another year after that.

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 Teege Braune (episode 72, episode 75, episode 77, episode 90, episode 102) is a writer of literary fiction, horror, essays, and poetry. Recently he has discovered the joys of drinking responsibly. He may or may not be a werewolf.