About fifty years ago I had one-room lab for some experiments up at the University and the guy in the one-room lab next to me was doing some biological research. About four o'clock every day we'd get together and yak, and of course he had carboys of absolute alcohol (100% alcohol, 200 proof) in his lab for drying the biological goo on his microscope slides. It is not the same as the brand-named "Absolut," no "e," Vodka
Absolute alcohol has a good affinity for water, because it will do what it can to get to about 95% alcohol, 5% water (as opposed to 100% alcohol, 0% water) but isn't corrosive to biological stuff. So it's frequently used in bio labs for drying specimens without destroying them.
I didn't have to wonder too long about why he had so much absolute just for drying a couple of slides.
"Want a drink?" he asked, after our first two days of chatting.
"Sure, why not," I said, expecting him to pull a couple of bottles of beer out of the fridge.
But no. He took two 500 ml beakers off the shelf, opened the fridge, took out a jug of orange juice, and not-quite-filled the beakers with OJ and cubes, also out of the 'fridge.
Then he reached up to the carboy and topped them off with absolute.
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls. Those "technical" screwdrivers had some cotton-pickin' kick!
See, pouring a jigger of 40- or 60-proof whiskey into a highball is a wee bit different from a jigger of absolute, and he eyeballed what must have been a double-Texas jigger into the beakers --he was from San Antonio.
Getting home from the lab was an experience every night, but I never got stopped.
As a footnote, I quit drinking totally a couple of years after that when I finally figured out that I couldn't drink booze as fast as Seagram's could distill it. I started up again for a couple of years around my divorce, but quit again pretty soon after the divorce was finalized and I started to live again.
I had seen too many folks go down the tubes gradually from drinking, and more importantly than that, I saw how insidious drinking could be with some people, getting worse and worse, and I thought I saw some signs of that possibility in myself. I never got into trouble with it, though, so my two separate decisions to quit were not forced on me.
So I guess for some it's a sin. For others it ain't. But I quit before I had to find out whether or not it was a sin for me.
Terry, 230RN
