We could use a drink. How about you?

LATE AFTERNOON. Cocktail hour. Whisky-tinted light canting in through the windows. Dust motes. The whole bit. You could have a beer. But that’s just taking something out of the fridge. Have you ever been impressed by a person who took something out of the fridge? Maybe if the something was a cheesecake. And the person was a dog.

No. You’re going to have a cocktail, because our ancestors invented cocktail hour to give much-needed structure to what is otherwise an inconsiderate march of unregulated, haphazard moments. Friend in from out of town? Make a set of sidecars in a punch bowl. Lay- offs at work? Make a stiff martini that you can stir yogi-like until your thoughts dissolve into vague wisps of horror and indignation.

I’m not saying you should structure your life around cocktails, or that you have to drink martinis. This isn’t the 1920s. All I’m saying is it feels good to be the kind of person who can create order out of pandemonium – who can calculate precisely the amount of alcohol, or sweetness, or bitterness a moment demands. People revere a person who can do this. They can focus on arranging their own precarious sanity into a shape appropriate for public consumption, because you are taking care of the drinks. How do you think bartenders came to be the heroes of movies?

People will start to ask you to do it. What can I make with all this? They’ll ask, spreading their hands. And you’ll go in and take their pieces and compose something beautiful. You will create a scaffold around which the next several hours can wrap themselves like a clematis vine. And then you’ll do whatever comes next. I trust you’ll know what that is.