Complex Numbers

And The First Shall Be Last

PROMPT May 27th

Write about your first _______. (You fill in the blank. Ex: first car, first job, first crush, first week at college, etc)

It's not like I'd never had a taste of an adult beverage before.

My parents operated on the theory that if it's not seen as The Forbidden Fruit, I wouldn't be as tempted to overdo it when it was finally legal to drink it. So they let me have sips here and there, mostly of wine or beer.

That worked out well.

To be fair, it probably would have been worse if they'd completely forbidden it. Or if my first beer hadn't been such a disastrous experience.

Like I said, I knew what beer tasted like, but I count my "first beer" as the one I chose for myself, the first one I didn't get parental permission for, the first one I drank in its entirety as the gods intended.

I was 16, and it was a boat party. The other kids there were around my age. Some had their drivers' licenses, like me. Some did not. The boat's owner made it clear that if we drank, we weren't driving, period, end of story, give him your keys. He was still breaking the law, of course, just by having us there, but he wasn't about to be responsible for drunk kids driving on the roads. I respected that. Still do, actually, though I wouldn't have had the kids on my boat to begin with. If I had a boat. If I knew any kids.

And just to be clear, it was a big boat. I wouldn't call it a yacht; nothing about it was luxurious, but it was a nice roomy houseboat with plenty of places for drunk teens to sleep it off. More to the point, it was too big to sway much in the dinky little waves of the estuary. This is important, because the only thing worse than someone unused to alcohol getting sick, it's someone unused to alcohol getting seasick.

So that's where I had my first beer.

Well, I called it beer at the time. I'm embarrassed to admit that the name on the can was: Red White & Blue.

Kids these days will never know the glory of the RWB. This is probably a good thing. No, this is definitely a good thing. Objectively, there is little difference between RWB and water. But, at 16, what do you care? It's beer. It's illegal. It's edgy. Nowadays, if that piss were still around, one can of it wouldn't even register to me as alcoholic, assuming you could get me to drink it in the first place, which is a really bad assumption.

In any case, they don't make it anymore.  

But after that one can, there I was, hanging off the side of this giant houseboat, emptying the contents of my stomach into the murky waters of the calm estuary.

Yes, I swore off beer after that until I got to college, where peer pressure forced me to drink nearly-as-bad examples of the brewing "art." It wasn't until years later that I discovered the wonders of craft beer.

And yet, every once in a while, I remember that first beer.

It was great.

Oh, hey, some of you were wondering about one of my goals from yesterday: "Maybe write fiction again?" Well, I got to thinking about it a few hours ago, and decided there's no time like the present. So I wrote a story for "The Writer's Cramp - Poetry Week"  [13+]. Here it is:

STATIC

The Trolley Problem  (18+) What's the actual solution? #2251176 by Robert Waltz

No promises that I'll write more anytime soon. But there it is.