Mandarins!

It's that time of the year again; where the gross amounts of food and breakneck gambling and gratuitous drinking will mystify and terrify your senses. For a glimpse: The awkward family moments where you feel like stabbing the strange man who won't stop gibbering in your left ear in his liver-spotted thigh, but you instead smile - oh so brightly - and stab the brittle rump of duck with impunity. And the first glass of brandy flows. And flows.

Truly! what savages we would be without such fine decorum.

An hour later, after the amber drink has run its course, that warm and simperingly fuzzy tipping point starts to cling to the fringes of your mind. Suddenly, sycophantic gibbering takes on a more sophisticated, delectable sheen. Ugliness, the grossly obese, slowly fade into the background and no longer offend. Laughter and conversation flow with angry, torrential rushes. Truly, the poetry of this juxtaposition is like taking a dive in infinite lakes of '91 Moet, having every particle of your body suffused in bubbly sparkle. Tingly, fun, yet mildly perturbing in the most primal of ways.