What’s almost as good as good times and beer? Reading Fred Clark on C.S. Lewis on good times and beer. And I can’t find it at the moment, but I’m positive that there’s a scene somewhere in the Narnia books where Bacchus and a bunch of tipsy maenads liberate all the nice girls from boarding school, and help them get rid of some of their unnecessary clothes.

Booze and intoxication in general should be fertile material for spiritual fantasy authors, but I can’t think of a lot of examples. Tim Powers’s Earthquake Weather is a good one. Powers is a Catholic and a non-drinker, and his earlier great book Last Call is partly about Dionysus-as-Death in a bad way, but in Earthquake Weather—which is partly about California wine, and Dionysus-as-Death in a good way—he did a startling job of bringing together themes of sacrifice and release and duty and whoopee. A very pagan Christian book, or vice versa, in a way that probably would’ve freaked Lewis out a bit during his lifetime but that I bet he’s cool with now.

Anyway, this all fits well with the theme of last weekend for me. Two friends had birthdays, and a whole passel of good folks drove me around Napa to wineries (much like the movie Sideways without any of the angst), and I spent a lot of time altered by the fruits of the earth and/or by good company. And now there’s a puppy on the floor who can get high on tug-of-war. Cheers.