Now they're saying that even drinking in moderation is bad for you. Define bad.

What's a two drink lush supposed to do?

My (adult) daughters raiding their grandparents’ New York City bar

If you’ve been following the news and even if you haven’t it’s hard to avoid the growing consensus that alcohol is detrimental to your health. And now for the ultimate buzz kill: Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy wants to slap warning labels on liquor bottles stating that even light or moderate alcohol consumption increases the risk of cancer. Suddenly I’m looking forward to the incoming Trump administration. I have little doubt that their Surgeon General nominee will encourage us to drink up.

I’ve always known that vodka and scotch, elements of what I like to think of as a balanced diet, are bad for me. That burning sensation as the intoxicant travels from your mouth down your gullet, electrifies your stomach lining and then assassinates legions of brain cells, is your body trying to tell you that you’ve left your intelligence behind.

But what the recent studies, indicating that earlier studies celebrating moderate alcohol consumption as safe and even healthy are misguided, just plain wrong, questionable science, and even a long-running disinformation campaign on the part of the spirits industry, has forced me to engage in some painful soul-searching.

The result is that I keep returning to a line from Robert Altman’s movie Nashville. At least I think it’s from Nashville even though a keyword search of the script fails to cough it up. Makes no difference. It’s the sentiment that counts — that instantly resonant ring of truth — whether it comes from Nashville or some other movie I saw back in the day.

Character #1 proudly informs character #2 that he or she doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, doesn’t do drugs. Character #2 patiently waits for her to stop boasting and then responds, “So you mean to say that the way you feel when you wake up in the morning is as good as you’re going to feel all day?”

I’m not a problem drinker. I’m a solution drinker. My body may be trying to tell me that my nightly vodka or single malt scotch on the rocks, depending on the season, is poisonous. But my soul disagrees. An alcoholic beverage is my way of cueing my brain that work is done for the day and that it’s time for the party to start; to relax, let down your defenses, get a little silly. The celebration doesn’t last that long. I’m a two-drink lush from approximately six to eight p.m.

I’m not about to brag about my proudly non-addictive personality — I subscribe to Neil Young’s observation in the song The Needle and the Damage Done that there’s “a little part of it in everyone” — but the body that told me to start drinking tells me to stop and I obey it. It also helps that I don’t drink wine. I have nothing against wine. It’s just that, eighty-proof spirits aside, I have the average nine-year-old’s cake-and-candy oriented palate. Wine, to me, tastes like expensive vinegar.

By the time dinner starts my evening is basically over — which probably doesn’t make me much fun as a host — but our guests hardly notice my ostentatious yawning as they cheerfully down one glass of pinot grigio or cabernet sauvignon after another.

It’s them I feel for most. Hard liquor has never tried to disguise its intentions. But wine has always enjoyed a companionable aura. How can something so welcoming be anything but life-affirming? Or beer? There’s a reason these potions have been around for millennia. Nature, in her transcendent wisdom realizing that things don’t always break our way, is offering us a helping hand, a life line.

My father didn’t drink and my mother had one sober glass of red wine with dinner. Yet our walk-in bar was the most exciting room in the house. Decorated with mirrors, mood lights and cubbyholes filled with exotic liqueurs the message it sent was that drinking was fun and certainly nothing to be afraid of. I started with screwdrivers at my mother’s suggestion since the orange juice disguised the taste and sting of vodka, graduated to gin and tonics in college, and finally settled into a career as a hard liquor drinker without any enhancements except for ice; I realized that it was the only way to keep New York City’s criminally inclined bartenders, with their trick glasses, honest. Tropically colored cocktails with accoutrements such as swizzle sticks or paper umbrellas are fun to contemplate but if I feel like taking a vacation I’ll purchase a plane ticket.

I doubt that it was his intention but what the surgeon general’s warning has forced me to do is to review all the great times I’ve had while drinking: feeling like an outlaw in high school while taking swigs from a jug of Almaden. Being initiated into adulthood by those gin and tonics at my art history professor’s home. Dating during my twenties made infinitely less traumatic by a shot or two and a beer chaser. And finally a long career as a middle-aged social drinker.

I’ve had a good life so far and while I’d like to think that’s the result of a confluence of circumstances, and that I’m constitutionally constructed to have fun, liquor has contributed significantly to the decor. So will I heed the surgeon general’s warning? Perhaps on the margins. It’s a small concession but I’ve started drinking out of smaller glasses filled with more ice. The ritual, it turns out, is almost as important as the result.

At home, that is. At restaurants I expect to receive an honest drink. And if I don’t get it I reserve the right to discreetly refill my glass under the table from my traveling flask.