The Cu Dhub

These are not tasting notes.
These are Notes from the Underground.

This dram is a profundity made manifest: it is a liquid form of the argument that there is an irrational pleasure in pain and suffering. And by “pleasure” I don’t mean that we enjoyed it at all. The “pleasure” here is knowing that pain and suffering is necessary to being happy. I’d rather have a toothache and have my liver hurt. But I can assure you, I will never drink enough of this whisky for it to even wake my liver up from a daydream. The tannins overwhelm like crippling ennui. There are aromas of a wet dog, appropriately enough, and of a rotting pine cone stuffed into a sewage pipe I can’t bother to get up off of the sofa to dislodge. These run alongside the smell of mushrooms scraped off a burnt pizza by someone with the vapid industriousness I have transcended or perhaps descended below.

The mouth, like life around me, is thin and sour. Has it gone off? Or is it I who has gone off? Or is this a black and red tea steeped with heavy molasses by Sisyphus himself (of course, he never gets to drink it hot). I find myself lying next to Sherry. Bad Sherry. Overweaning, narcissistic Sherry. I consider arguing with her until she understands just how bad and ultimately doomed she is. But instead I find my tastebuds making their break, Shawshank Redemption-style.

The finish evaporates quickly and mercifully. Only the sinister glow remains, like the red eyes of Cerberus in the pitch dark–but you’re heading out of the underworld (or underground) to return to the light that is just about anything else by comparison.

 

Rating:
On the scale of underground denizens–
The Cu Dhub is the turnip–Yes, it’s that bad. It may in fact be necessary to help one appreciate good things, but even then, it’s a cruel joke from whatever deity set things up that way.