Highway to the Dead Zone

Halloween came and went, the veil between worlds is returning to its usual opacity. That’s just fine by most people, I mean many of us wish to know that there is more out there, and something that happens after death, and that’s about as much of the ‘dead’ as we like around us. We like to hear that Grandma and Pappy are happy together on a cloud somewhere, or that they’re watching out for us. That’s why ‘spirit boards’ are still on sale nearly everywhere board games are sold. We light candles as kids, we accuse each other of moving the widget, we get spooked, or nothing happens, and either way we put the board back in the closet (or the fireplace, or the trash).

Depending on the tradition one is working through, rum is pretty popular as an offering for spirits of the crossroads and the underworld. Back in my college days I dabbled with a spirit or two that seemed to enjoy it.. well since I was a complete newbie with no actual teacher in the systems I was messing with it was probably just the rum in my system making me think I was in touch with anything at all. These days I tend to let the dead lie, besides.. you never really know who is on the other end of that planchette.

In honor of the (just ended!) Mercury retrograde I rewatched a few movies from my childhood. While “Killer Klowns from Outer Space” probably doesn’t have much to add to this subject, “The Dead Zone” does, at least in an oblique way. Besides, I can’t resist an opportunity to reference Christopher Walken. The “dead zone” in the title of the movie, based on the Stephen King novel of the same name, refers to the blind spot in our perception, and for those of us who try and scry a little knowledge from the misty void that is a very real thing. I am actually glad that is the case. A pre-written, already known world (while very possibly the case) is a bit depressing to me. So here’s to the fog on the road, even if we don’t always know where we’re going.

Now on to the drink. Naturally I had to enjoy a ‘Dead Zone”, the ‘barrel cocktail’ on the current Bootlegger Tiki (Palm Springs, CA) menu. Both for the name and the warning of ‘One max per customer!’, and also since it was created by my coworker at Truss and Twine, Jesse.

He was a little tight-lipped about the exact ingredients but disclosed that it was a variation on a Zombie (also appropriate for this time of year) and that it had baking spices, a little citrus, and three over-proof rums- including the delicious and deadly OFTD from Plantation! It definitely drinks like a Zombie, but with more complexity in the spice profile and also from the richness of the OFTD. I can say that I certainly wasn’t clairvoyant before I drank it, but I was definitely in the ‘dead zone’ afterwards. Just make sure to leave the car at home, nobody wants to be in the actual dead zone.