yogyakarta drift

For those of you that know me, no wind, rain, or Muslim country can keep me from my personal water of life. This verve salve that I am referring to is, of course, none other than the distilled thunderclap of Jimmy Beam.

Club Caesar, in this case was in a shuttered and predictably asian shopping palace; nothing gets you in the mood to club like driving out to the airport, into a below ground parking garage, and poking around for an elevator. Once engaged it opened onto a tube of neon lights at the end of which an unmanned metal detector guarded the club. Every person in my party set it off, but, as is the case at most airports in Indonesia, this proves scant reason to disrupt the flow of the line.
Perhaps owing to the abusive strobe (never have I felt so thankful at not being a small Japanese schoolchild—thanks, mom and dad) the bottle appeared before me on the black onyx pedestal masquerading as a table. I knew its boxy frame in an instant, and when I checked for the indispensably obliging signature (after all, by none other), I knew this was the genuine object, as pure as the dew on a Kentucky mare’s haunches.

I have never seen Jim Beam come to your table in a box, but I imagine my companions had never seen someone so enthusiastically dram it, and not yet interred by three inches of life-snuffing cola-colored earth to boot.

The house band—drummer, bassist, lead, and somewhere around four vocalists—entertained with medleys of hip hop covers from a stage worthy of prince at the super bowl while young dancers tentatively stalking the chrome pole placed in the midst of a grassland of glowing opaque plastic. An English girl hopped up on stage and gave it a decent twice over, most likely further confirming the ‘all western women are prostitutes’ stereotype held here, but she disappeared with a grizzled octogenarian, most likely to be plied with descriptions of ‘charming and picturesque’ East Millinockett.