Civilized Living

I've always been a pro­po­nent of civ­i­lized liv­ing (and I think we are all agreed that cheese is the bedrock upon which civ­i­liza­tion is con­struct­ed) and today, after an unex­treme­ly unciv­i­lized wait at the post office to turn over things that already had postage on them but weighed more than a pound and were only going to two sep­a­rate address­es but were in six sep­a­rate pack­ages (why can't the intern ever grasp the dif­fer­ence between inter­na­tion­al and domes­tic mail? why?), I real­ized I need­ed a good dose of civ­i­lized liv­ing. So I went to lunch at Metro­pole and had a nice sand­wich. More impor­tant­ly, I had a glass of wine with my lunch. Why are we not drink­ing wine or beer or cock­tails at lunch? Because Specialty's doesn't serve them? What has hap­pened to the hey­day of the three-mar­ti­ni lunch? Here's the thing—it real­ly took the edge off, that glass of wine. Civ­i­liza­tion is end­ing (it feels like the entire known world is hurtling towards apoc­a­lypse) and so maybe we ought to be tak­ing advan­tage of as much as the civ­i­lized world can offer us—drinks with lunch, an entire cake of Hum­boldt Fog to our­selves, the con­so­la­tions of High Life.