A certain pall of despair has descended over Glibs and, really, society as a whole.  Even the tinpot authoritarians whose glee at finally getting to put the boot in are really just compensating for a variety of despair at their empty, meaningless lives.

Sure, our institutions are decayed, social cohesion is fraying, the economy is propped up temporarily with fiat money.  We can all recite the reasons for pessimism about the future in the near and mid term (the long term beyond, say, a generation, is unknowable, in my opinion).

But for a bunch of contrarians, we sure are following the herd.  Let’s not do that.

To kickstart your attitude adjustment, a cocktail!

Blood Orange Old Fashioned

3 oz. rye (as ever, the Casa Dean deploys barrel-aged Bulleit)

1 ½ oz. blood orange juice

1/3 oz. maple syrup

3 – 6 dashes orange bitters

You know the drill – add to your shaker (with ice), shake 10 – 15 seconds, pour over rocks.  Garnish with that slice of blood orange you remembered to take before you juiced the blood oranges.

The blood oranges aren’t as sweet as regular oranges, leaving some room for the maple syrup, and the juice has a wonderful deep red color.  Experiment with the proportions until you find a balance you like.  We’ve been dialing back sweetness in our cocktails; as we eat less sugar in our daily diet, we have more sensitivity to sweetness?  Less of a taste for sweetness?  A powerful craving for sugary goodness?  Whatever.  Our current recipes for the cocktails I’ve posted here have changed so that they are less sweet.

We’ve started adding a pinch of salt to our cocktails – it seems to help round out and combine the flavors.  We’re using this, originally a gift from Bro Dean – it’s a very mild finishing salt, which should be familiar to those of you who are acquainted with Salt Fat Acid Heat.  Its probably a terrible abuse of this salt to put it in cocktails, but, again, whatever.

So, what else to do to get your mind right?  Well, stop paying attention to the news.  The only thing you can learn from the news is what people who hate you want you to believe.  Stop looking at social media, a transmission channel for the lowest common denominator of humanity.  These are both excellent ways to fill your mind with things you can’t do anything about anyway.  Who needs that?

Now, I have to say that Glibs is also a transmission channel for news and social media, so I’m planning to cut back a little on the healthy chunk of my day that I spend here.  *waits for applause to die down*  I just think I need a little different balance in my day.

At this point, I thought about adding something about how the social/political scene isn’t as bad as it looks, and anyway you can’t do anything about it.  But that sort of defeats the purpose of this post, so screw it.

So, having made room in your head (and day), what to do with it?  Beats me – you need to do you.  The key is, what can you control and thus, change.  Here’s what I have been doing:

Exercise.  Mrs. Dean is an expert fitness coach, and designs a short workout for me every week.  She has been kitting out a home gym in our garage, and I have a half hour now before I leave for work, so for the first time in probably decades, I am getting regular exercise (and feeling it).  My mornings are highly structured, and I’d like to bump that to 45 minutes.

Booze and Sleep.  I need less booze, and more sleep.  I’d like to cut back to around half my current nightcap, and get to bed a half hour earlier, aiming to get my average actual sleep up to 7 hours.  I have a heart monitor gizmo (the Whoop strap) that measures actual sleep, which is less time than you think, since even if you don’t remember it, you are awake for some period every night.

Reading.  Like, actual books.  For me, still mostly fiction.  I’m going to read something, and if its not books, it will be the internet.  What Are We Reading has been a godsend.

Chores.  This sounds counterintuitive, but I always have a backlog of stuff I’d like to get done, and  getting it done lifts my spirits.  A neat garage, a passel of sharpened knives, landscaping that is watered, fertilized and doing well, whatever jiggles your handle – these are all Good Things.  Its easy to let things slide when you are in the dumps.  So don’t let it slide – it’s a way to get out of the dumps.

Walk in Beauty.  This is a concept that I heard ages ago, supposedly a Navajo thing but who knows, that resonated with me.  Basically, it says to open your eyes and realize you are surrounded by beauty.  I suspect this would be a real challenge for me if I lived in an urban center, but I live on the edge of the high desert, so its not hard at all.  The sky, the ever-changing light on the mountains, the semi-wild landscape . . . that’s easy enough where I live.  But nobody said it had to be natural beauty.  Broaden this with the “spark joy” idea to catch little things (just today, I chuckled at my neighbor walking her two Dobermans – one had apparently been a Bad Dog and was getting The Talk, and the whole thing was just comical).

Bottom line:  Your spirits are yours.  Lift them however you can.  Terrible people making each other miserable (which is pretty much what our politics are) don’t need to get you down.