Gabriella Paiella Makes a Case for the Alcohol-Free Cocktail Hour

The GQ culture writer on being "a fancy bambino who simply must have his bitter little drink every night"

Last night, I sat in front of my computer for about an hour, trying to find a way to explain Gabriella Paiella's writing. I couldn't clinch it. I'm not Gabriella Paiella!

I'll instead turn to examples of her wit and attention to detail from a recent profile of Steve Buscemi: She found that the actor indulges in Turner Classic Movies, specifically the “Noir Alley” programming that airs on weekends, because “it just feels so good to be watching a movie on a Sunday morning.” Miscellaneous items left out on his Park Slope stoop have included a disembodied doll head, a Van Morrison cassette tape, a hat with a fake ponytail attached. Buscemi's famously crooked teeth are, as Paiella put it, "more harmonious in person, save for one prominent exception: a slightly feral snaggletooth, top left, that peeks out when he laughs—which he does reflexively, nervously. Often. It feels like an old friend." Clinched it.

Earlier this month, Paiella published a more personal piece called "The Case for Sober Cocktail Hour.” The following, especially, struck me, as I think about the value (read: pleasure) of doing "nothing" a lot:

"When I stopped drinking, the way I approached my life did a 180: I worked harder, for more hours, woke up before the sun rose to run miles and miles, and was looking at a screen more often than not. The parts of my life that should have been most pleasurable sometimes felt more like killing time between everything else. I had become—I shudder to admit this—productive.

The case for a sober cocktail hour is, ultimately, the case for any cocktail hour: because our culture, by and large, forces us to be productivity obsessed. Taking this time carves out a moment to unwind from the day, to reconnect with others, to be present."

Paiella interviewed me for the piece; then I asked if she was game to turn the tables. Of course she was—and of course, her answers to my questions were witty and full of detail.

You mention that, when you first stopped drinking, you would wake up before sunrise to run "miles and miles." Were you a runner before this time?

Yeah, I picked it up when I was 19 for stress relief and to stay in shape and more or less kept it up over the years. There would be stretches when I wouldn’t run at all but then there were also periods in my twenties when I’d force myself to go out in the morning even after only getting a couple hours of sleep.

After I quit drinking, it became an almost necessary conduit for excess energy and I was more methodical and accountable and trained for a marathon and all that. I’m not “good” at it by any metric, but I’m basically an Olympian compared to my childhood self who would try to go to the nurse’s office every time I had to run the mile in gym class.

Are you still a runner now?

My intuitive answer is that, yes, I still consider myself a runner, but I haven’t been doing much of it lately. My motivation evaporated in the middle of the pandemic, plus, I hate running in a mask.

What I have been doing, though, is taking long-ass walks instead. At first there was some guilt about not keeping up a regular practice, but the reward for being more forgiving is that I’m more plugged in to my environment. It’s almost mind-altering. The city feels unusually verdant. The other day I saw three blue jays clustered together in the park and just stopped to watch them do Bird Stuff for a while and was quietly freaking out that this was all happening ten feet away from me. If I was running, I would’ve completely missed that experience because I would’ve been rushing along.

You wrote, "The parts of my life that should have been most pleasurable sometimes felt more like killing time between everything else." Which parts do you mean?

Socializing. Relaxing. Really anytime I wasn’t directly improving myself or propelling myself forward to meet arbitrary goals or doing something that could be monetized, I would get a creeping feeling that it was a “waste of time.”

To directly connect that to sobriety, a lot of the “fun” parts of my life did objectively become less fun when I stopped drinking. There was a real and ongoing process to discover what I truly enjoyed doing besides getting drunk.

I can still have my moments. I was very lucky to have the week between Christmas and New Year’s off, but by day five I was having a meltdown along the lines of: “Oh my god, vacation is almost over and you haven’t even written your screenplay! You’ve just been reading books in the bath, what the fuck!” Thankfully my group chat talked me down and very kindly told me I was being an idiot.

In what ways have you felt the cultural push to be productive? When did that start being something you saw as...not good (for you or perhaps for any of us)?

I think part of it is a classic first-generation immigrant kid thing where I’ve seen my parents work incredibly hard their whole lives without the space to question whether what they’re doing is fulfilling or not. Then I’ve received the much more insidious messaging targeted to American millennials, especially women, that work should be your passion and the most fulfilling and defining aspect of your life. I may be wrong, but I can’t imagine that messaging is as strong in countries that have mandatory paid vacation time and adequate parental leave and universal healthcare and whatever other aspects of a social safety net enable people to more easily live joyful and balanced lives.

I started to see it as a negative when it took up primary residence in my brain and I realized how much it was tied up with my self-worth—and when the pleasurable and meaningful parts of my life felt like the filler, instead of the other way around.

But, yes, to broaden this: I’m speaking from a professional class perspective where burnout entails working in a volatile industry and staring at my computer and phone too much. It’s not even close to comparable to the kind of productivity forced onto Amazon warehouse employees and farm laborers and home-care workers and all other kinds of essential workers, many of whom have to work multiple jobs to scrape by and whose productivity doesn’t even ensure survival.

Was there a moment when you decided, "I'm going to reinstate happy hour at home”?

There wasn’t a concrete moment, it just started to happen naturally and I remember thinking, “Oh, I’m in a noticeably better mood when I take the time to do this.” It’s also nice because I think that rituals and especially routines are typically associated with some kind of effort or betterment and this is just pure enjoyment. I mentioned “Frasier” in my article because I was watching the series for the first time when this started, so maybe I really was incepted by Frasier’s fancy boy sherry time.

What does your nightly cocktail hour look like?

It’s usually around 7 or so. We keep it pretty simple, and lately it’s been all about stupidly marked-up Sanbitter on ice. (Two things America is missing out on: bidets and Sanbitter.) (Sanbitter please sponsor me.) We shut our computers, leave our phones in another room, and just talk. Sometimes there’s a savory snack involved. Being shut together in the house more than usual this winter, it is crucial to make time between bad screen and good screen.

Did you have any sort of ritualistic cocktail hour when you were drinking?

No, I didn’t, but whenever I missed drinking it would be an almost false nostalgia for exactly that sort of thing: a single glass of wine or a Campari spritz.

What does "being present" look like for you?

I love this question. For me, it means being fully engaged in whatever I’m doing—or not doing—at the moment, with no thought of what’s coming next.

Since I work from home now, I’ll sometimes look over at my dog and think, “what does he even do all day?” And the answer is, more often than not, that he’s just being a dog. The moments when he’s especially being a dog, in my opinion, are the ones where he’ll deliberately plunk himself down in a sunbeam and hang out there for a while. That’s probably when I feel the most present, too: sitting outside on a warm day and remembering that the thing that makes me most happy is as simple as letting myself just be an animal in the sun.

Paying subscribers, look out for your product-focused post later this month! It will include some of Paiella’s favorites.