I drink.

I never do it alone, and you'll never see me drunk.

Like nearly everybody except a drunk, I don't like drunks. And I'm picky about what I drink. Beer is for people who like jokes set in bathrooms, and any waiter can take that tray of fruity little foo-foo drinks with umbrellas in them to the next table.

I like a drink with orange juice in it. Tomato juice is okay, too. And there's nothing quite like a well-salted margarita. But plain old scotch with plain old water is the best drink around. Wine is okay with food if it isn't too sweet, but the histamines in it tear up my sinuses.

All this is to say that I'm tired of living in a dry county, one in which you have to take the scotch out of the closet, then get into the closet with the person you're having a drink with and imbibe.

It's just time to do something different for the restaurants and resorts we have and to attract more of them to the county. Liquor sold by the drink would help do that, help to make the eatery business one in which you could make a living at.

The arguments against liquor are silly ones, carry-overs from the days when Carrie Nation ran around the nation with her hatchet, chopping up kegs of whatever alcohol she found. The stuff, she said, was destroying the moral fabric of the country.

People who thought they were the threads in the moral fabric of the country, went along with the scare. We got prohibition, which turned out to be medicine worse than the disease.

Various religious groups have glommed on to liquor as a liquid form of the devil, but about a shot glass full of that is enough to pull in most antennas.

People who have an understanding of the devil know that he would never get drunk. He's too smart for that. More likely, he will be lurking underneath the spit and polish exterior of the upstanding, fine actor that he is. Getting drunk would blow the devil's cover.

For some reason I've never figured out completely, Kentucky in general has always had a love-hate relationship with liquor. We produce and store tons of it, consume a lot of that, but do a lot of that in hiding.

We tax it to the limit, but nobody ever complains about the tax. Every other tax gets beaten fiercely about the head and ears, but the liquor tax keeps rising.

It's one way, of course, for those so-called conservative politicians to tax and spend. Moonshine got a bad name (richly deserved for the taste) when it tried to get around paying the tax.

The religious aspects of wet or dry go back to the beginnings of the state. Kentucky was being settled at the same time the Great Revival swept up and down the East Coast.

The spill-over of that movement into Kentucky took on about anything it found in this wilderness, and one thing it found was "the demon rum," (which can be made by half cooking the juice from sugar cane instead of keeping the heat on until molasses happens).

As the Great Revival was losing steam, a reporter from a periodical named "The Navigator" was floating up and down the Ohio River. His work was to map the river so that flatboats didn't run aground or crash into an island.

He wrote sketches of towns where he stopped, and said of Louisville: It will be a fine city as soon as it figures out why it's there.

Frustrated by a lot of what it found on the Kentucky shore of the river, "The Navigator" wrote that the state could prosper if its people would collect their wits and turn those tart wild grapes into wine.

These instruction books for flatboat pilots said the wine would sell well along the East Coast and could be shipped to Europe, too. The Navigator understood economics.

There were plenty of grapes that were described this way: Grapevines covering acres of forests. Tracing some of these vines to their roots, Navigator reporters found trunks as thick as a man. They also found boatmen at Louisville and other stops along the river who were hard drinkers, hard fighters, too, but they were also credited as expert sober boatmen. The liquor wasn't connected to the murder and mayhem as we have a tendency to do too quickly today.

None of this is to say that liquor mishandled is okay. It is not, but diet mishandled is just as damaging, boredom mishandled is just as damaging, and any number of other daily behaviors we take for granted mishandled is just as damaging.

Whatever character flaws liquor brings out already were there. Liquor isn't the problem, character is.

And the references to drunkards in the Bible is that they should be avoided. Good advice. Being drunk can cause problems for those trying to stick to the letter of religious doctrine.

It happens first in Genesis, when Noah, having survived a world flood and having started his own vineyard, got drunk on the harvest.

After what he'd been through, I think he could have been forgiven for getting drunk, but the problem was that he fell across his bed in his tent naked as a jaybird.

What to do? Jewish law said no son should see his father naked. They solved the problem by letting a grandson throw a quilt over him.

Paul, in his written sermons to the Corinthians, lumps drunkards in with thieves, fornicators and other types Christians are not to have fellowship with, but I don't see how Christians can work to save these souls without associating with them on some level.

Most of what the Bible says about drinking makes sense. Judges aren't supposed to do it just before a trial and priests aren't supposed to do it before ceremonies at the altar. All that makes sense and can be said in general terms -- all things in moderation.

If handled correctly, allowing liquor by the drink in restaurants serving a given number of people would be unlikely to increase crime.

Accidents might go up, but it would simply be an increase in this county; they wouldn't be happening between here and in the nearest wet counties.

Current penalties for drunk drivers who kill other people on roadways all over the state are sufficient deterrent against the urge to drive while drunk.

It's time to rethink dry county.