Everything that follows is true. Names have been changed to protect the guilty.
The first time I ever tried Everclear, I was in college and, according to The Man, far too young to be doing anything of the sort. Some friends of mine were attending a concert in Philly, and decided to show up outrageously drunk. Seeing as this pregaming session took place in my room, I was of course invited to partake in the jubilation.
A messenger bag was produced, held before the eagerly awaiting revelers with reverence and respect. It was set gently down on a bed with a slight sloshing sound. The bag was unzipped, and a large clear bottle of colorless liquid was produced.
“This,” I was told, in a hushed whisper, “is Everclear.”
I don’t recall the exact details pertaining to its procurement, but I do recall that one person in the room had heard of it before. His eyes lit up at the sight, and an expression of worry crossed his face. His features darkened with concern, he asked:
“Can’t that stuff really fuck you up?”
The presenter, our spirit guide for this upcoming journey of the wills answered only with a sly smile. Without a word, shot glasses were produced. As the drinks were poured, a harsh and acrid smell filled the air. At that point, we knew there was no going back. My roommate was literally bouncing up and down with excitement and anticipation, as the rest of us looked on with awe.
Our shaman held a glass in front of us.
“Who’s gonna go first?”
The room was abuzz with a mix of tension and exhilaration. The cup at last fell to Jay, who agreed to put himself in front of the firing squad for the good of our unit. No blindfold was tied around his eyes, and no last cigarette was granted; he simply took the glass to his lips and threw back his head.
The result was immediate. A shock rolled through his system and there occurred a full-body convulsion that started from the neck downward. I believe he may have coughed up some into his nose because he began yelling “Oh God, my nose! It’s in my fucking nose!” A hooting and a hollering was had, as the hapless Jay horked and coughed.
Up next was Aaron who, bracing for the impact he knew was coming, held his nose as he downed the shot. A shudder coursed through his body and his eyes furrowed together so tightly that his eyebrows looked like two caterpillars fighting. “Jeeesus!” was about all he could muster up. There was a slapping of backs, some hi-fives, and wild whooping.
Then, at last, the sword fell at my feet. I picked it up, prepared to throw myself on it – for honor. I held the shot glass to my nose and inhaled once, gently. It smelled like an oil field on fire, but this would not stop me. I had to do this. I had to climb this mountain; not because it was there, but because I didn’t want to be the last one to the top. I slammed the shot.
It felt like liquid fire coursing down my esophagus. It tasted like the smell of a permanent marker. It was magma, coating my stomach, and it was hell. I don’t mean “hell” in such a way as to imply that it was simply a bad experience – no, I have reason to believe that there were small demons in my stomach, jabbing and slicing at my insides. From hell’s stomach, they stabbed at me.
I distinctly remember not coughing, and standing there proud, like a gladiator might stand atop the corpse of a lion. I placed the shot glass down, and looked our pathfinder in the eyes.
“Another.”
I don’t recall much more of that night except for the general impression that I was unkillable. Seeing as two shots of Everclear failed to knock me on my ass, that may have very well been true.
It would be years before I saw the stuff again. I bought it because it seemed an economical decision at the time – one twenty dollar bottle containing three times the alcohol of a regular bottle of vodka. Of course, I remembered my lesson from years ago, and mixed it heavily with soda and juice in an attempt to dilute it. However, the devils that inhabit those glass bottles are not so easily inhibited. I have a dim memory of watching Ant Man on DVD and chewing idly on the rim of a plastic cup. It turned out, to the horror of all involved, that the cup was a quarter inch thick, and I somehow managed to chew a hole straight through it.
I keep a bottle of the it in my liquor cabinet these days, partly because I now know how to mix it properly so that it doesn’t obliterate one’s mind, but mostly because it’s fun to get guests to try it. It may be a distinctly male trait, but it seems only too easy to trick friends into taking a shot of it by telling them how much they don’t want it. Good fun for everyone involved, as long as you’re not the one drinking.
My roommate once successfully used it to clean out a rifle after firing a few rounds off at the range. He said it worked startlingly well. Another roommate quite literally used it to strip the paint off a wall. I’m amazed the stuff is legal to drink.
As for my recommendation, mix a small amount of the stuff with Mountain Dew or any other citrus-y soda and you’ll be fine. Best of luck to anyone out there brave enough to do the dark deed of taking a shot. You’ll need it.
Liberal Christmas has arrived. Now you can pay $113231581797321057 to have an Amazon drone deliver farm-to-table, organic avocados to your doorstep! Edible gentrification has never been more convenient.
For the past decade, Amazon has been steadily feasting on the digital world. On Friday, it took a critical step in subsuming the physical world by launching a bid to acquire upscale grocer Whole Foods for $13.7 billion.
It’s a lump sum of money that could’ve ended world hunger, but don’t act like you haven’t already spent $13.7 billion on asparagus water or quinoa or kale or inmate-made goat cheese (isn’t it supposed to be cage free?) at Whole Foods.
As hyperbolic as this sounds, this has implications for the future of groceries, the entire food industry, and the future of shopping for just about everything.
A straightforward analysis suggests this deal represents a simple confluence of interests. Amazon needs food and urban real estate, and Whole Foods needs help with its recently floundering share prices.
Amazon acquires 456 stores nationwide and a slice of the $750 billion grocery market. Whole Foods stores tend to be seated in prime real-estate locations targeting a higher-end demographic. It could become a significant branding boost for Amazon and a way to increase its physical presence.
In the “brick and click” competition, Walmart is trying to bolster its online influence, while the e-commerce giant is approaching it from the opposite end — expanding into groceries and physical locations, including bookstores, ironically working itself back into the brick-and-mortar business that it’s also disrupting.
Since Amazon was a diminutive startup selling paperback books, CEO Jeff Bezos has kept his sights targeted on the long game. In his first letter to shareholders in 1997, he advised investors to strap in for a bumpy financial ride that could include short-term quarterly losses and risky acquisitions to pan out.
He wrote:
“We will make bold rather than timid investment decisions when we see a sufficient probability of gaining market leadership advantages. Some of these investments will pay off, others will not, and we will have learned another valuable lesson in either case.”
In a more long-term and hypothetical analysis of this deal, the first implication is transforming food into a delivery service. E-commerce is soaring and food-delivery businesses are taking off — fewer shoppers and diners are passing through grocery stores and restaurants, as Americans are ordering more of their produce and meals online. There’s also the “grocerant” trend — a blending of grocery stores and restaurants.
Traffic is flat in the restaurant sector, and digital orders are up 45 percent over the last two years. The online market is projected to grow 15 times faster than the rest of the restaurant business through the end of the decade. “Prepared, ready-to-eat” items purchased outside the home are now 1-in-10 entrees served in American households.
Giving flexibility and power to the consumer, enabling them to procure the goods they want, and having them delivered to their front door sounds like a winning business model.
Fresh foods are the final frontier for Amazon, and have proven a tricky challenge for e-commerce giants. If Amazon is to finally fulfill their existential journey of reaching high-volume growth, getting fresh food to front doors is an essential part of the equation.
The deal gives Amazon a major foothold in that space. Whole Foods gives Amazon a tremendous amount of credibility around the quality of the food and the reputation they have with their customer base.
AmazonFresh is Amazon’s foray into the online grocery business during the last few years, but it hasn’t quite mastered it in the same way it’s mastered books and media.
With Whole Foods, which will continue to operate under its own brand name, an Amazon Prime member subscription may operate like a Costco membership. Perhaps Prime members would get deals on Whole Foods produce, and they could elect to have the fresh vegetables and organic dips delivered to their homes and apartments.
This acquisition is a near $14 billion bet on the future of food coming gift-wrapped and delivered in boxes.
This deal is terrifying for its competitors in part because Amazon’s low-margin business pulls each industry it dominates into a kind of deflationary whirlpool. If Whole Foods follows the Bezos playbook, shoppers can expect prices to fall, and investors will expect sales and revenue to rise. Maybe it can finally shed its long-standing derisive nickname, “Whole Paycheck.”
When news broke, Wall Street reacted with grocery chain carnage, as stocks for Kroger, Costco and Dollar General plummeted — all falling more than six percent within the hour. The merger may even prove more gloomy for Instacart, the grocery-delivery service that’s mired in year two of a five-year contract with Whole Foods.
The second implication is Whole Foods functioning as a distribution hub — and Amazon as a physical retail presence. The real estate value of Whole Foods’ urban and suburban locations are worth so much, and are so strategically integral for Amazon’s delivery business, that even if the grocer stopped selling food altogether, several analysts have said the deal would still prove successful. As Dennis Berman, Wall Street Journal’s financial editor, Tweets:
Amazon did not just buy Whole Foods grocery stores. It bought 431 upper-income, prime-location distribution nodes for everything it does.
Amazon is trying to become Walmart faster than Walmart can become Amazon. Soon enough, it won’t be merely an online megalith, but also a physical retail powerhouse with dynamic pricing and stocking strategies.
This deal has the makings of wide-scale, far-reaching ramifications to many industries — restaurants, pharmacies and drug stores, maybe even ride-sharing companies. Amazon is taking on a behemoth of a logistics challenge.
In December, Amazon debuted its flagship grocery store in Seattle with with no checkout line. Customers check in at the store’s entrance with an app called Amazon Go, collect their groceries and walk out, all without having to interact with another person. This model has the potential to expand. The deal also places pressure on Amazon to keep developing a smart shopping cart that can charge customers automatically whenever they drop in.
With more of our shopping visits digitally enabled, this will only continue to grow. Increasingly, we’ll be doing everything from home, meaning delivery and pickup systems are ripe for disruption.
AmazonFresh is already experimenting with a “click and collect” system; shoppers buy groceries online, then pick them up in person.
With something like dugs, Amazon, whether intentional or inadvertently, is building the foundation of the logistical infrastructure for an industry that requires specialty pharmacies and a very specialized distribution of medications.
With more brick-and-mortar hubs, they can take on more complex logistical challenges digitally.
This can also change the nature of a retail job. Now, a retail worker will have to be someone who can figure out how to manage these complex systems, not someone who will be checking customers out. The one-dimensional jobs of cashiers, stockers, greeters, and others will soon be relics of a department store’s past.
However, supermarket chains aren’t an easy business — it’s currently being disrupted by meal-kit delivery services — and the concept of a grocery store could be completely reimagined a decade down the road. These stores could evolve and experiment — maybe teaching cooking skills, hold classes, and educate about dieting and nutrition — a whole repurposing of the brick-and-mortar concept.
The third implication is Amazon is becoming a “life bundle,” particularly for affluent Americans. Much like a cable bundle, Amazon could become an annual subscription to a fleet of an array of services that’s fundamentally about the merchandizing of convenience.
Driving to the movies and parking is a pain. Driving to the grocery store, finding parking, seeking out the produce section, waiting in the deli line just after the dimwit who takes an eternity to choose whether they want honey glazed ham or buffalo chicken, and waiting several minutes in line behind register 4 is an annoying inconvenience.
Americans these days are harried, increasingly lacking time to shop, cook, or dine out. An average Friday night could be spent lying on your couch, watching 10 Cloverfield Lane on Prime Video, and hollering to your Amazon daemon, “ALEXA! I need six heirloom tomatoes, extra-virgin olive oil, and a bottle of wine for tonight’s delivery.”
Between Prime and Whole Foods, Amazon may now account for a majority of some urban Millennials’ discretionary spending — a growing, devoted customer base of affluent yuppie Americans. More than half of American households with income over $100,000 are already Prime subscribers, spending over $1,000 a year as wealthy families regularly spend $500 a month on Whole Foods.
Amazon could feasibly expect its richest customers to spend thousands of dollars a year through Amazon. Even as it offers discounts to lower-income Americans, Amazon will continue its full scale assault to penetrate the affluent yuppie market. Whole Foods customers will be urged to sign up for Prime and Prime customers will get enticing deals at Whole Foods.
Amazon is already an Internet goliath, whose products affect nearly every online user.
If you’ve ever received an Amazon package, watched a livestream on Twitch, or checked an actor’s filmography on IMDb, you’ve dealt with the retail giant’s properties directly. If you’ve streamed a movie on Netflix, booked a flight on Expedia, or sent a selfie on Snapchat, you’ve also felt Amazon’s reach via its cloud computing services, now in use by more than 1 million online businesses.
Now that Amazon is taking its first steps offline and into the physical world, at what point do we start talking about anti-trust? Or is this just a platform change?
Amazon and Whole Foods are complimentary businesseses, and this acquisition could be the harbinger into Amazon’s evolution into an infrastructure and logistics company.
Sears rose to prominence as a retail titan last century with its 500-page “Consumer’s Bible,” which popularized the mail-order business. But in the early 1900s, as families moved to the cities, Sears followed, building more than 300 stores between 1925 and 1929 that specialized in the hardware needs of the growing middle class.
Amazon’s strategy continues this pattern, ascending to retail stardom with as a browsable couch product — its website and delivery service during a rapidly digitizing and interconnected world that makes the antics of grocery shopping a fading pastime.
But the future of its business may include more urban and suburban stores that both hold merchandise for delivery and permit consumers to shop.
It’s funny how the future can look like a familiar reconstruction of the past.
“You can’t really celebrate freedom in America by just going with the Fourth of July”
During the Civil War, Texas joined the Confederacy. When Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation marking the end of slavery, Texan slaveholders were able to keep men and women in bondage for two-and-a-half more years. The Juneteenth festival marks the date when that finally changed and has become a widespread celebration of freedom in the black community.
No, that’s not Tupac — It’s Demetrius Shipp, Jr. playing Tupac in a really bad biopic.
And it sucked. Spoiler alert.
“Man, I gotta be honest…that shit was weak” — Random black guy I overheard while leaving ‘All Eyez On Me’
It hurts me to say it, but yes, the heavily anticipated biopic about arguably the most important hip hop artist of all time was weak. Weak as f*ck to be exact. I won’t apologize for my high expectations of the film either (though by the end of it, I was just hoping I wouldn’t fall asleep) because it had allegedly been in the making since 2011. But more importantly, the film was about Tupac Amaru Shakur. I just knew whoever was contemplating telling Tupac’s story on the big screen wouldn’t dare produce something that didn’t manage to leave audiences moved to tears (and not from boredom).
First, let’s think about who Tupac was. In his short 25 years of life, without a high school degree, Tupac managed to shake the world with his charisma, intensity, vulnerability, and intelligence. He was a complex and intricate walking contradiction who could give you 24 different versions of himself in 24 hours and yet still manage to be genuine in each one. He was — to his core — anything and everything he ever seemed to be. He was a thug who memorized Shakespeare and a feminist accused of rape who often rapped misogynist lyrics. He preached against black-on-black violence and became obsessed and fatally consumed by it. And most importantly, he was one of the strongest and most effective black thought leaders around systemic racism and poverty since the 1960s. His politically charged lyrics are prophetically relevant over two decades after his untimely death.
So, in a sense, I get it. There is a lot of material here. And for the directors and writers, it can seem overwhelming. But instead of taking on the challenge of figuring out how to tell Tupac’s story in a coherent and compelling way, the All Eyez on Me creators punted and decided not to tell a story at all. Instead, they opted to go from disjointed shot to disjointed shot of Tupac’s most iconic moments without giving audiences any insight into who Tupac, the human being, was. They basically said, “Hey guys, look at this actor [Demetrius Shipp, Jr]. Doesn’t he look just like Tupac? Isn’t that cool? Remember this performance and this interview? Or this outfit? Look! We’re recreating this photo you’ve seen a million times. Isn’t that cool?! Give us your money!”
While the acting wasn’t terrible — especially for newcomer Demetrius Shipp Jr. who has an uncanny resemblance to Tupac — the writing didn’t exist. No matter what the actors did, there was no running away from the horrible story line (or lack thereof). There was no character development. All the information in the movie could have been gleaned from the Tupac VH1 Behind the Music episode. At least with that, there were personal accounts and interviews. All Eyez on Me was a visual Wikipedia page — same level of insight but it took 10 times longer to get the information.
And from the concert and backstage party scenes to the “where’s my money, Jerry?”-esq record label scene, it became clear the film was hoping to ride on the cultural coattails of 2015’s Straight Outta Compton. But the major difference is Straight Outta Compton had a continuous story line you could follow and characters you could connect with. If you weren’t near tears when Eazy-E was on his death bed, then we can’t be friends. Because All Eyez on Me lacked this kind of character development — particularly from the man the entire film was about — the only thing I felt when I saw Tupac fatally shot in Las Vegas was, “Thank God, now I can go home and get some sleep. Oh, we still have leftover Chinese food. I think I’ll have some sesame chicken before I go to bed.”
And apparently, I wasn’t the only one. In the last scene, but before the film officially ended, people began to leave the theater. You could feel the disappointment in the air. I had never in my life seen a majority black audience that disengaged with a film. The biggest reaction of the night came from the scene where the actor playing Snoop Dogg mouthed his lines as the actual Snoop Dogg did a voice-over. If that ain’t some Lifetime movie-quality shit, I don’t know what is. We, as an audience, didn’t know if we should laugh or cry. I think I heard a little bit of both.
After watching All Eyez on Me, all I know is this: the opportunity to be the first person to make a compelling film about Tupac is still incredibly daunting and still incredibly available.
I forget who it was that shouted something about a “gas leak”, but the next thing I knew the fire alarm was ringing and I was being shuffled out the building by a herd of stampeding accountants. As I was flushed out of the building, I noticed several people staring intently at their phones. They all looked angry. One young woman actually shouted with frustration.
They’re trying to call the police, but they don’t know how.
I realized that I didn’t know how either. This concerned me enough to make me stop running, until an elbow connected with my ribs and pain washed up my right side. The guy next to me gave me a half hearted “sorry” and continued hustling out the building. I decided to stop blocking the corridor and, rubbing my ribcage, jogged outside.
The air was crisp and there was a light breeze blowing. It was just past noon in the middle of April and the skies were a vibrant blue, dotted with a few clouds. I could see other buildings emptying onto their respective lawns and parking lots, and caught glimpses of worried looking faces in every direction.
Fulton & Co., the accounting firm I worked for, didn’t have a front lawn for us to gather on, but it did have a large parking lot behind the building. Employees were being funneled out the front doors and directed to the back of the building, as if this were a regular fire drill. By the time I reached the back, more people were staring at their phones in confusion.
Some people were fiddling with the numbers on their phone’s lock screens. Most could unlock their phones through pure muscle memory, but some of the older crowd were having trouble. An old lady I’d passed by in the hallway a few times was a few feet to my left, breathing very heavily and struggling with her phone’s touch screen. She was breathing heavily; I think she was trying not to cry.
Ed Fulton, the owner of Fulton & Co., finally emerged from the building. He raised his hands in a useless plaintive gesture as over 80 people began shouting questions. I tried my best to make out what he was saying but all I could hear was something about fire crew being “on their way”, and arriving “any moment now”.
I was tired of being pushed by crowds and shoved around, so I started wandering towards the edge of the parking lot. I took out my phone and gave myself a mental pat on the back for putting a non-numerical password on it. I didn’t take much pleasure in it.
I lucked out. I could have been any one of those people behind me, but I lucked out.
I unlocked my phone and took a look at social media, and my worst fears were confirmed: everyone I know was ranting about the numbers. Some people were calling it “numbergate”, other people were blaming the government, and my uncle Jay was calling it a “reptilian conspiracy”. One of my college friends just posted series of numbers to Facebook. I imagined him mashing the keys senselessly, not understanding, and it depressed me. I locked the phone, and walked back over to the building.
No one was asking questions anymore. There were a lot of people sitting on the asphalt, or leaning on their car. Ed Fulton was nowhere to be seen; probably, he had scampered off to some panic room in his mansion. I didn’t know whether he had a mansion or not, I just liked to imagine him locked behind metal and concrete and hiding in a corner.
“So, you think this is it, Dan?” Bryan’s voice shook that mental image out of my head.
“The end of the world! Bible shit, revelations, and all that!”
I pulled a wry smile. “Hell no, Bry. And I know for a fact you don’t believe it either. You’re the most militant atheist I’ve ever met.”
He grinned and gave a single laugh that sounded more like a cough. A few moments went by and the smiles faded from our faces.
“So, if it’s not some biblical thing, what do you think it is?” I asked.
“Fuck if I know. Maybe some kind of secret Chinese mind ray that messes with our heads. Maybe aliens.” He scrunched up his face and thought for a few more moments.
“Fuck.” he declared.
“Fuck.” I agreed.
It was at that moment that Ed Fulton showed up again.
“Everybody,” he shouted with his hands cupped to his mouth, “listen up. Everybody gets the day off, fully paid. I’m sure we’ll be up and running at full strength tomorrow! So, just go home. We’re just going to go home.”
I couldn’t help but notice the lack of confidence in his voice, or the way his head slouched forward after he was done talking. Not that Ed was a confident guy to begin with; his indecision had been running the company into the ground since his father died – long before I was ever signed on. Ed quietly stepped back into the building and closed the doors behind him. Some people followed, going to grab their laptops or phones or whatever else they might have left on their desk. All I ever brought to work was my phone, so I waved to Bryan and headed for my car. I thought about it – a day without work didn’t sound bad. Maybe this whole thing would blow over, and tomorrow everyone would wake up fresh and chipper, ready to… to what? Do math? Calculate? I didn’t know.
Just don’t think about it. Ed’s right, this will blow over real soon.
Failing to convince myself, I started the engine and pulled out into the street. It wasn’t until I hit the freeway when I realized how much trouble I was in.
