From my great-uncle William Warmkessel’s journal, one very hot day in August 1928.

Olsen accosted me outside my office and informed me with steady voice and calm countenance that so great was the heat this afternoon that a dog had spontaneously burst into flame in the middle of Broad Street. I knew immediately that he had been drinking, because Olsen is capable of maintaining a steady voice and calm countenance only when thoroughly intoxicated. Ignoring his state I inquired what breed of dog, and he replied that it had been a coonhound: whereupon I determined that Olsen was not only a drunk but a liar, because no self-respecting hound dog would emerge on such a day from the shadow of his master’s porch.

But I cannot blame Olsen, for either the drinking or the lies. No self-respecting hound dog would don a suit of any cloth or weight and trudge the mile or more to his office to inspect rolls for the upcoming fall term, either, and those of us doomed to civilzation must comfort ourselves as best we can. Besides, Olsen is my only source of decent whiskey in these foul times. This double drought — no rain and Prohibition — surely is God’s curse upon the land. For what He has cursed us I haven’t yet conclusively determined, although I suspect it to have been the Wilson presidency. At least in His infinite mercy (as the Rev. Fenstermacher back in Oley would say) He has provided us with bathtubs and the homemade stills of mountain men. And Cyrus Olsen’s lower desk drawer. Hope remains.

My great-uncle William Warmkessel returns from the grave to apologize to my readers and the Muses for my lack of creative output.

I woke this morning with hopes for the day, but the afternoon skittered away like mice, and with daylight waning I find myself scrabbling at the disappearing tails of the hours. It is typical of me to burn the butt-end of the useful day penning unread complaints of wasted time in my diary, but these long evenings of latter May are too pleasant to spend shut in an upper room laboring at a book which despite its pretense to respectability will draw no more readers than these lonely pages.

It is no wonder the South lost the Civil War — I hasten to note that more than a few of my neighbors and colleagues would dispute here that the South lost the war at all, but I believe the historical record to be firmly in support of my thesis. I repeat, then, that it is no wonder the South lost the war: The region damns the industry of its inhabitants with too many luscious days such as today when work seems not only uncalled for but indeed irresponsible. Read on

Another excerpt from my great-uncle William Warmkessel’s journals, this time on the subject of vodka.

At Olsen’s last evening we sampled a new libation which he obtained on his recent expedition to Russia. Olsen traveled there with a group of fellow professors from Northern universities who wished to learn first-hand about this new Soviet system. What we hear in this country about the Soviet Union, he spent much of the evening telling me, is hogwash. Hogwash is my term; his exact phrasing, heard as it was after several glasses of hospitality, escapes me for the moment — “as faithful to fact as a sonnet emanating from a sow’s ass,” he may have said — but the thrust of his remarks was that the essential nobility of the common man never saw such glorious expression as in the new Russia.

But I fear I am inadequately capturing the raving tone and rancid detail of his discourse; he delivered at great length an intensely flowery monologue whose stream was at intervals replenished by tributaries of unpotable philosophy. One wishes one could inconspicuously jot notes in such situations, the better to ensure the accuracy of one’s memoirs — as in faculty meetings, but inconspicuity of any sort is impossible when seated around the drawing-room fire with but one or a few colleagues. One finds it difficult enough to maintain the properly attentive countenance in such situations, let alone actually to remember what is being said. One can only nod and hum appreciably and hope for the best.

But I digress, more than a sober man ought even when speaking only to himself. —I shall return to the evening’s true subject, which was alcohol. Read on

After spending the past month fighting sinus headaches and hosing the pine pollen off my car I found yesterday that I could nearly breathe again, and I was reminded of this passage from my great-great-uncle William Warmkessel’s 1938 A Sojourn in Carolina, in which he complains about the cruelties of spring and longs for a drink.

The first warm days of late February and early March bring a hope to one’s heart not felt since before the Yule. One sees in one’s mind’s eye the blooming of dogwood and rhododendron, the bursting of lily and tulip, the greening of meadow and forest. If one has been a little too much at the bourbon, one sees also the first of the wood nymphs, returned from wherever wood nymphs winter, cavorting near-naked in the grass (and one winces, perhaps, at the thought of hookworm). But in the weeks that follow the optimism of warm-weather fantasy is crushed beneath the jackboot of cold biology. Not only alcoholic wood nymphs but every living thing pursues the proliferation of its genus with grimly Darwinian purpose. Stately trees which ought to conduct their affairs with the dignity to which one is accustomed from oaks and pines old enough to have sired one’s grandfather instead spray their seed with a licentiousness that would have shamed even wanton Onan. All the world wears their ochre filth, and their careless pollution infects the nostrils and inflames the sinuses with such throbbing vigor that one can barely recall one’s own surname, let alone contemplate the glory that is otherwise Spring. Only as April wanes does the microscopic assault recede and the delights of the season return unabated by mucus and sneezing to one’s mind.

In the meantime, if the season’s filmy leavings are to leave one feeling hung over despite any unhappy tendency to abstinence, one may as well throw tolerance to the winds and indulge. For Spring also brings mint, and mint means juleps, and I mean to spend the remainder of this balmy afternoon sampling Kentucky’s finest mash and ensuring by empirical research that the front-porch hammock is quite fit for summer. One must salvage from such grim times what pleasure one can.