09/21/2020 Snippet, THE THING IN MY HIP FLASK.

Grinding on through!

“Please, David,” I said. “I’m not a fool. I’ve had toxicology reports done. There’s nothing in there you wouldn’t expect from a normal brewing process. No heavy metals, no alkaloids. Why, the goo is even mildly antibacterial. Not enough to be worth pursuing, but still. BSB is perfectly safe.” I sipped my now non-alcoholic drink. “In moderation.”

“And what about the people who get hooked?” David looked extremely upset at this point, but not precisely worrisome. More like on an edge I hadn’t expected. “You ever notice how the demand isn’t tapering off? We’re not expanding our customer base.”

“Our customers include buyers in bulk for resale,” I said, squashing resolutely a twinge of alarm (I had noticed how the demand remained high). “They’re the ones finding new customers, not us, and they’re welcome to. I wouldn’t care to sell directly to some of those people.”

An understatement, that. This entire part of New England seemed to attract some extremely odd individuals, and I had recently made the acquaintance of far too many of them. The alarming thing was, many of them seemed to like me on sight. Not in any particularly tawdry way, although there was offers for that, too, sometimes with a remarkable directness. But they would welcome my presence, under circumstances where I would have expected toleration at best. This would have been more refreshing, if only most of my new acquaintances were not so subtly repellant in their forms and manner.