missed this year’s Nerve Christmas party. It was a total drag, because I’d been asking Santa for a big Nerve party ever since I’d joined the staff six months prior. And because I knew it would be my last chance to get good and drunk with a staff I really liked as a member of that staff. Oh, and I like free alcohol. Do I really have to sell you on why I wanted to go to the Nerve Christmas party? When you work for a sex magazine, you don’t skip the parties. Right? Right.

But I missed the party, because I had been in New Orleans for five days, getting no sleep, and at a happy hour beforehand, I started falling asleep at the table. So I went home instead of heading to Soho, where my officemates were already littering our ninth floor office with empties and bad behavior.

I was disappointed in myself. But you know what really got to me? They drank absinthe.

Somehow, Lucid absinthe became one of the party’s sponsors, and so the absinthe was flowing--which just sounds dangerous, really. The next morning, when I showed up chipper and well-rested and tried to coax embarrassing stories out of my droopy-lidded coworkers, all they said was, “Umm, I think I drank absinthe last night.”

Weird. And not fair!

I wanted to drink absinthe, dammit. And so I decided to write a story about absinthe, now legal and enjoying quite a resurgence, for Salon. Read it with a sugar cube, if preferred.