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While everyone reacts differently to alcohol, this is written from various things I observed during my freshman year of college.

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My fiancé heard me crying. He slid his fingers under the door and I laid my fingers on top of his. I cried, unmoored in an eddy of heft and woe, perfumed by a fragrant sorrow only some of us ever smell. Silly how a depression can make a person so needlessly poetic.

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Nothing gives you a craving for a drink like sitting in the emergency room lounge waiting for a friend’s admission to the detox center.

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The first step to having a summer worthy of the femme Fitzgerald is to have endless free time because you never know when you will need to make an appearance at a backyard soiree or skip town for a three-day bender.

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Opinionated and abrasive, you go out of your way to make sure your worldviews conflict with everyone else’s. If you do happen to agree with a point someone else makes, you will find some minute detail to disagree on. For some reason you hate vodka with a passion, but you do realize gin is essentially juniper-flavored vodka, right?

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For 30 years, give or take, booze has been a great teacher and me, I’ve been its less than reluctant pupil (although I’ve not always been open to its pedagogy). Here are some things I’ve learned over the years.

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What I was doing was creating a horizontal species — not a genus of any one species of booze but a palate, a flavor profile, that runs across the different verticals. Music and film, of course, use this horizontal mood mapping: if you like this music, you’ll like this other music that’s dark, drone, and contemplative.