Honolulu Blue Kool-Aid: 2024-25 playoffs edition

In need of a beach and a few football wins. Recipe below.

You have to read a lot before you can see a recipe. That is a tradition on the internet and I will hold you to it.

Since arriving in Michigan and taking upon the mantle of the 29th head coach of the Detroit Lions , Dan Campbell has been worn by labels placed upon him.

Let’s start with meathead. That one is easy: he’s an Aggie, a brand of college football that means empty heads, red meat, and oil. When he was given interim stewardship of the Miami Dolphins , he was dipping and running Oklahoma drills. When he played for the Cowboys, he starred in a season ticket commercial for the Dallas Cowboys where he went at a horse . Kneecaps, one ass cheek, blah blah blah blah blah.

As this joke wore thin, there came another category to the sorting hat: gambler. Dan Gamble was pushing fourth down calls in ways once unheard of, risking it all for his aggression and violence. Riverboat Ron may have hung it up, but here was the new freak of the archetype, hunched over the Blackjack table hitting on 16.

On Monday following a resounding victory over the Minnesota Vikings —an ass-kicking that earned the Lions the No. 1 seed, a second straight division title and 15 wins, more than any other Detroit squad in 94 years of sordid history—national radio head Colin Cowherd rewarded Campbell with a new title: “unapologetically alpha.”

Alpha is a terribly loaded term in a new internet culture of snake-oil freaks preying on vulnerable males. I’d like to give benefit to believe Cowherd isn’t suggesting Campbell is aspiring to some sort of Andrew Tate wet dream ubermensch—if anything, I’m quite sure of it. Cowherd is old school, devoid of the internet poison that sweeps our cranial spaces.

But in all the talk of masculinity and alpha-ness, there is another way to go. Can masculinity be positive? There is some variation of a tweet I’ve seen, asking if it exists, with quip-responses that it may very well be Dan Campbell.

He is aggressive, he is loud; but as I watch “Hard Knocks ” again, I’m focused on how he teaches, how he elevates, and how he encourages his players. In a league that defines itself by Vince Lombardi, Campbell may be the farthest from.

Lions defensive coordinator Aaron Glenn went on The Pivot and discussed dealing with former Lions safety Tracy Walker, and how Walker had never had a coach quite like him.

“Tell me exactly what your issues are, alright and we can talk about it. Me and Tracy Walker, Tracy came to my house right before training camp. Tracy was sitting there just knocking tape out. And one day he was just quiet, I say ‘what’s wrong?’ He said, ‘coach, I’ve never ever had a chance go to the coach’s house, your wife over there cooking dinner, your daughter’s running around and I’m sitting here watching tape, man. I just, like that just don’t happen.’”

“And I was shocked like, why? Why can’t it happen?”

I know I’m speaking in the confines of professional football, and ultimately this is meant as a preamble to a drink; but why can’t it happen? Why can’t we, as men, define our masculinity in such terms? We build, we nurture, we stand together for all around us. We support this community we build, and we do it not to conquer or dominate or control, but because someone has to do it. Our strength is warmth, not sharp steel. It is community, not a rugged frontiersmanship where everyone else is the savage.

It was there waiting for us all along. We just need to shed the noise. We just need to set down the vicious fangs and remain what is best.

---

There is something about this dread year, 2025 Anno Domini, that is threatening my mood so foul. I can feel it, taste it and I drown in it. All around me, the world is growing full of its own spite.

I am in the midst of the worst wildfires in recent memory in southern California. I’ve been lucky in that I have sat in the middle of it, safe enough from their vicinities. Others in my life are not so lucky. Many more who I have little connection with are in even worse condition; and just because I have no personal connection does not mean my heart cannot bleed for them. The breeze is good this morning, it is a comfortable 65 degrees; those conditions are creating hell in the hills.

This is a great tragedy of our modern world, one piece to a long set of tragedies that have befallen our world that is being sorted into noise—climate disasters, genocide, war, rank corruption and worse—as we find ourselves overwhelmed more and more.

And yet: a time we should reach out to help one another, instead there is just rancor, conspiracy, malice. Political figures are teeing off on the fires to score soundbites, internet jackass detectives are seeking easy targets that happen to align with the villains they’ve painted for their enraged, exhausted audiences who believe some sort of cosmic vengeance is at work in the world. Justice is substituted for judgment, and this is indeed a difference.

And this knock-on effect is grim. Everyone around me seems to be turning feral, and I may be as well. Shoving past lines, cutting people off in traffic, watching a pedestrian collapse on the street and not stopping to help. It’s everywhere. We are atomized beyond belief, fearful of neighbors, to say nothing of strangers who mean absolutely no harm. The most bloodthirsty Jomsviking transported to this present day would die of terrible shock of how we treat travelers and vagabonds and turn them out of doors.

I don’t know what caused it; we can all have the hypotheses and call them theories but it’s all just maddening all the same and left to gnawing political leans. Maybe it is social media, maybe it is Trump and the rise of odious super-capitalists and hypernormalization, maybe we’ve become so inured to the death and chaos it just stopped mattering. Maybe we’ve just collectively given up and are waiting for everyone who has pissed us off to die. And it was not always this way. Fear ate us slowly, and then all at once.

There’s no need for it, and it takes us to dig into that strength that we are individuals that need be fearful of each other.

We are buckling, and we are buckling bad and yet we do not need to. Fat old Benjamin Franklin had the right of it: you’ll hang together or most assuredly hang separately. These problems we face cannot be solved with essays like this one or pithy tweets or YouTube investigations and most certainly cannot be solved by hiring private firefighters and family bunkers and more and more and more and more personal firearms. You will not survive alone. No one will.

I have soured tremendously on science fiction. We are not going to space. Space is loneliness, distance from one another to the ends of reality. This is, I believe, why there are people like Elon Musk who love this vision—far from this blessed Earth, they will not have to deal with another human.

The good news is we’ll never get there. All we have is this planet.

We’ve got to live together, and right now we are not. I’m tired of it. I’m tired of having to hear about how much we must fear our neighbors, how we must avoid the homeless and that there are predators at every corner. There may be, but hospitality, friendship and the human spirit can never be secondary. That is the masculinity I want.

I refute Nietzsche. God cannot be dead. The divine light must be here, somewhere. Somewhere an ember still lingers, not one of an annihilating fire but of a deep, inherent warmth. Of a hand reaching for another hand.

---

I’ve never really made these recipes about just the recipe. It’s why sometimes I just don’t write one. The kool-aid is a message I have.

And these days, I find it harder to focus, and I say as much each year. I’m getting older, slower and stupider. I’m tired of trying to get ahead, I’m tired of feeling like I have to push myself beyond all manner of productivity to live. In all these agonies, I desire a beach.

Malibu was that place where I used to retreat. Forty minutes up 101 and through the Encina Canyon from the San Fernando Valley, up and down the hills over pleasant brown and greenery, past hidden homes. And then, down upon it: Pacific Coast Highway, sprawling and vast. And then there’s Neptune’s Net, where fish is fried and steamed night and day. Bikers and surfers and all the dregs of the beaches. A tall boy of Ace’s pineapple cider, straight from their fridges. Lunch. Yes.

On to Leo Carrillo, a state beach. Parked along the highway, dragging a chair and a stack of books and notebooks and a bottle of rhum. There is a place upon the rocks where it is flat, or sometimes a secluded nook of beach. The waves crash again and again. I lose time, and it is well lost.

Leo Carrillo’s beach is still there, but its park, the hiking and trails, is burned to shit. Most of Malibu is torched. These are not all rich people, but the last remnants of California’s dreamers. I will miss it.

We hope for better things, and it will rise from the ashes. You know this motto. It’s there in Latin, on the flag of Detroit.

And I hope we can rise it together.

Chris Perfett

The Lions are rising, and it’s time for a new cocktail. This is, by my reckoning, my finest work yet—not a Frankenstein of meandering liquor, but a proper set. I wish I could have met Donn Beach, that sorcerer of drink.

Go Lions.

• 1.5 oz white or lightly aged Barbados rum (Planteray 3 Stars)
• 0.5 oz overproof Demerara rum (Lemon Hart 151)
• 0.5 oz falernum (John D. Taylor)
• 1 oz blue curacao
• 1 oz fresh lemon juice
• 0.75 oz white grapefruit juice
• 0.5 oz cinnamon simple syrup
• A small handful of fresh blueberries, gently crushed by hand

Add all of these ingredients to a cocktail shaker, add ice and shake. Pour over crushed ice and garnish with lemon and more blueberries.

Alternatively, add all ingredients with ice to a blender.

Notes:

One of the most important things I learned in enjoying rum drinks is blending multiple rums into a drink. Rums take on different characteristics of where they are made, and yet when introduced to one another elevate both in turn.

Falernum is a liqueur made of sugarcane and lime juice, and further elevates this very citrus-forward cocktail. If you can’t find a bottle, it’s fine to leave it out or perhaps substitute some lime juice.

I make my cocktail syrups lighter than usual, cutting down on the sugar to about 3/4ths of whatever water I use. I made the cinnamon syrup fresh and so it was not too dark, which helps in retaining this drink’s blue color. That’s the real bastard of making the kool-aid—the shade will not hold if you’re not careful. Add more blue curacao if necessary but you can’t drown it all. If the cinnamon is too much, go to straight simple syrup.

If you are worried about alcohol content, reduce the white rum to 1 oz and use 0.75 oz of a standard proof Demerara rum like Hamilton 86.

The tiki mug is from my own collection I’ve been starting. The tumbler glass you can pick up from Wendell August Forge , a Pennsylvania-based company that makes a great collection of drinkware, holiday ornaments and other metal gifts. They did not pay me for this or reach out at all; my mother hung their ornaments all the time and has repeatedly gifted me Lions medallions. It is precious to me.