When life hands you lemons and you forgot your lemonade recipe, what are you expected to do?

Improvisation is the first thing that comes to mind. You know that you need to juice them. Do you go to the appliance store and get a hardcore juicer? Do you use the hand lemon squeezer? How do you make sure you don’t get seeds in the juice that you squeeze out of those suckers? Do you even have enough lemons?

Let’s assume that Life’s handed you a few pounds of them. Enough to make a good three pitchers full of no-recipe, improvised lemonade. A huge three pitchers. Now, you’ve got all that lemon juice out. It took a while, but you did it. You’ve got pruney, sour fingers and teary, citric eyes, but you have enough juice to fill those pitchers. The next step involves getting a large pot and putting it on the stove, filling it with the lemon juice and adding some sugar.

Here’s the hard part: how much sugar do you need to put? Do you add what you think makes sense? Do you add a little and then taste to see if you need to add more? You think that there must be some water involved at some point, to cut back the acidity of the lemon juice, to deconcentrate the concentration of sour. Life shouldn’t be so sour, but its given you lemons, so do you keep your ‘ade on the sour side? Do you stick your tongue out at Life and throw in all the sugar you have on hand? Is sweet the optimal goal? Is a sweet Life a happy Life? Is sweet synonymous with successful? Fulfilling? Special?

Or is sweet too easy? Do you need to keep it less sugared, add just enough to let you taste the goodness, but let the acid bite into your tongue with enough force that you can’t forget there’s always the other side, the less happy-go-lucky side, the side that forces your face to contort into the ugliest of grimaces.

Do you add something else to your lemonade, then? Do you throw in the bourbon you keep in the cupboard over the stovetop? Make it so it has a direct effect on your reality as you see it. Make it so it can tilt your perspective, blur your decisions, overwhelm and perplex your senses. Is this sensory overload lemonade? Are Life’s lemons really only a metaphor? Are they meant to provide lessons, second chances, motivations? Are they road blocks? Are they the inspiration to give in to madness? The bourbon you’ve grabbed sits on the counter and it’s going to stare at you until you decide if you want to be the good lemonade stand or the bad. The bad overcharges and over liquors. The good just wants to quench your thirst.

You can leave the bourbon out of it for the moment. The lemon juice is carefully simmering in the pot on the stove, sugared up with the perfect balance of just enough and not enough. When the sugar is melted and the pot is steaming gently, you turn down the heat. Lemonade isn’t supposed to be hot. Bring the pot off the burner and get your three pitchers ready.

Here’s where you might add that bourbon. Do you? Do you bastardize Life’s lemons? In a sense, yes, you should. Because you never know when Life will hand you more lemons to make lemonade with. You have three pitchers. Nobody ever said one of them couldn’t be blasphemous. You pour the first two pitchers. The sight of their rotund, transparent bellies full of soft yellow liquid is like a cliched ray of sunlight piercing your eyeballs. You can almost taste the lemon warmth. Those pitchers go in the fridge.

The last pitcher is still empty and that bourbon is relentlessly staring at the back of your head. So you realize that there’s no point in denying how much you want to go against Life’s plans. That bourbon is going in. You snatch-grab it and unscrew it and pour it into what’s left in the pot. You know you should taste it, check the bad levels, but then where’s the fun? You pour that third pitcher full and the lemony sunlight colour is noticeably ambered. It’s richer, fuller, and you can tell by looking at it that it holds more secrets than any of Life’s other lemonade.

You take those three pitchers and you put them into the fridge. You’ll know which one is dangerous and which ones are safe.

Life gave you lemons so you could make lemonade.

You certainly did.