Cheez-Its with Don Draper in Texas

It’s about ten o’clock in the evening and I’m sitting on a bed in a little studio in Austin eating Cheez-Its and watching Mad Men. This is life on the road.

In the old days, I would’ve found an old dive and spent the evening smoking cigarettes and drinking Lone Stars with an occasional cocktail—a cocktail I’m sure you’ve never heard of.

Back in my heyday in corporate, I ran with some real boozehounds. We weren’t degenerate drunks, but we toed the line—so did our bosses, and their bosses too. The culture was so saturated with alcohol you could’ve wrung it out of a towel.

Most of the guys kept a bottle in their desks (very Mad Men), and for reasons unbeknownst to all of us, we had company-paid memberships at a wood-paneled private club that occupied the penthouse of our building—where the bartenders knew us by name and by drink.

Where my colleagues and I spent many a night on the company dime

No sooner had we sat down than our drinks arrived. Nine times out of ten we’d start with a couple of Stellas before graduating to tougher stuff. No one was above boozy lunches either.

Anyway, we met some colleagues from the Northeast who drank what we called Yankee Bourbons. These guys with funny New England accents, who talked incessantly about ice hockey, drank rum and ginger ales while we drank bourbon and Cokes (light on the Coke, if at all). Who knows why, but we started calling them Yankee Bourbons—and they were delicious.

No one south of the Mason-Dixon line knew what this cocktail was—nor would anyone be caught dead ordering it—but we weren’t above it. When we needed a little chaos in the bloodstream, we’d throw back a few Yankee Bourbons at the club.

Had it been a few years ago, I’d be bullshitting with strangers at a local dive tonight, and with any luck, watching the Braves on TBS.

But I’m eating Cheez-Its. And watching Mad Men.

There’s a watering hole nearby that goes by Deep Eddy Cabaret, and it looks like the kind of place I would’ve frequented.

It’s also within walking distance—which means I would’ve made an Irish exit after a few pops and enjoyed a cheap cigar on the walk home.

Truthfully, I miss those days, but I don’t miss the morning after. That’s the problem with booze and aging—at a certain point it becomes intolerable.

I know guys who have built a tolerance for that lifestyle, and at times I’m envious of them. To be able to keep the good times going without repercussions is equal parts art and science—I’m just not one of those guys (trust me, I tried).

The flip side is I’ll wake up early tomorrow, take a dip in Barton Springs, and enjoy a coffee—without feeling like Hunter Thompson after a night in New Orleans.

I don’t miss smelling nicotine on my fingernails or seeing someone jogging at sunrise and feeling envy and regret. I also don’t miss pulling a bunch of high-dollar receipts out of my pocket or those morning showers when you wish you could stand under the showerhead all day. And I really don’t miss that awful feeling of being clinically dehydrated.

But I do miss the mayhem. In the oddest ways, occasionally I do.

If I’m being honest, I miss the good old days of dive bars, cheap laughs, and not giving a damn about anything beyond the here and now. Unfortunately for me, I aged.

So, as I’ve pathetically stated, I’m eating Cheez-Its with Don Draper. And even though tonight is another uneventful night in a never-ending stream of boring nights, I’m playing by the rules: rules that I certainly had no part in creating, but rules that I seem to be living by.

I just wish these Cheez-Its came with a side of bourbon—Yankee Bourbons, to be exact.

*Composed, Edited, and Published in Austin, TX