PRESENTLY TENSE

Everywhere you look there's a bar with a big neon “cocktails” sign out front, but I wouldn't order a cocktail in a single one of them. I realize I'm stepping onto Ed Decker's sordid turf here, but he's on the wagon, and, after 10 years of writing about bars, I'm sure he won't mind this brief intrusion of another perspective on watering holes (in most of which I would also not order a glass of water).

Call me picky. Call me a snob. Call me old-fashioned. But the art and culture of the cocktail is dead in this town. Now don't get me wrong: I'm not a whiney Eileen Myles of the spiked beverage, sitting around cursing the San Diego bar darkness. I will meet you at The Ould Sod for a pint, Nunu's for a shot or The Wit's End for a local draft. Just don't expect me to enjoy the sorry mixtures of cheap booze; canned, artificially flavored syrups; and fluorescent mixes that get passed off as cocktails in 99 percent of the joints that tout them.

The margarita, for example-that sophisticated early-20th-century version of a classic daisy cocktail, has somehow over time been bastardized into a preposterous slushie commonly used to dislodge tortilla-chip fragments from the throats of heathens. I wouldn't wash my car with an Old Town margarita.

To prepare a decent margarita at home my way (don't even try to change my mind about this), combine two parts very good blanco tequila like Don Julio or Patron, one part freshly squeezed juice of organic limes and one part Cointreau (no other triple sec will do). Chill your shaker and your cocktail glass and use clean, cracked ice. Shake the ingredients together vigorously until your hands are stuck to the shaker as if you were gripping the armrest of a plane plummeting toward the Earth. Strain the concoction into the glass and enjoy. No salt, no sugar, no crappy mix, no crushed or cubed ice, no blenderization, because there's nothing to hide or dilute.

The two first published mentions of the cocktail in early-1800s magazines remark respectively that it is “excellent for the head” and “renders the heart stout and bold.” Yes, and yes. By the 1860s, the first cocktail guide was published, and many classics like the martini and sazerac were already established winners. The invention of better ice machines helped make the concoctions more widely available.

But during the 1920s, the dark days of prohibition, cocktailing went underground to the speakeasy, and inferior hooch led to substandard cocktails. Ironically, the lousy liquor had to be covered up, and thus the endurance of cocktailing can be partially attributed to that prohibition even more stupid than our current era's ludicrous marijuana prohibition.

The evolution of the maraschino cherry is a perfect microcosm of the grand failure. At the turn of the century, maraschino was an elegant cordial prepared from tart Marascan cherries from the Slovenia/Croatia region.

Maraschino liqueur was a main ingredient in many of the most wonderful cocktails at the turn of the century, and the cherries that were soaked in it, at first a delicacy of royalty, eventually made their way into popular cocktails and onto the tops of sundaes, a delectable confection for Americans to enjoy with their ice cream.

Along came the temperance movement attacking booze-soaked fruit, creating the artificial need for an unboozed preserved cherry, and on their heels new industrial chemistry to fill that artificial need with artificial maraschinos. That 1917 abomination is the same cherryesque object that you know and cannot stomach today-the one that lives forever inside you like a neon tumor.

To this day, sallow, unsmiling men in lab coats prepare these Corvette-colored bullets by torturing inferior cherries in a bath of sulfur dioxide and draining their lifeless husks until every trace of cherriness is gone. The tiny round mummies are then pumped with artificial flavorings, colorings, corn sweeteners and preservatives until they achieve the familiar scariness that lets them survive like the living dead in your fridge, and probably your grandchildren's grandchildren's fridge until some brave future ancestor finally sneaks them into a proper burial at the San Onofre nuclear-waste dump.

Will no bar in this town rise above the casual ruination of cocktails with these little monsters? Don't even get me started on grenadine! (Hint: make your own.)

My dream bar should be a bit like the ideal tavern that the great surrealist filmmaker Luis Bunuel describes fondly in his autobiography. No pool tables. No television. No jukebox. No Pacific Beach douchebags. A long, dark quiet bar, with perhaps just a bit of sunlight through a window. A place you can think. Maybe a piano player works over one of the old songs, Erroll Garner-style. And a calm, respectful bartender who takes his time mixing a drink, who knows the difference between a bottle of Smart & Final Sour Mix and a freshly squeezed lemon. A place you can have a conversation in, with a beautiful woman, of course.

Essayist Amy Wu once wrote about learning from her grandmother to reject the culture of immediate gratification. She found that baking a cake from scratch for your loved ones has rewards that greatly offset the time it takes to prepare it. She is my kindred spirit because she understands that quality produced through effort is a testament of caring.

Our current tasteless way of preparing and consuming cocktails is symptomatic of the disposability and artifice of our entire culture of crap. A cocktail should never have become a mere buzz-delivery system. It is a beautiful, simple delight that sets the stage for a night of civilized intercourse (of various kinds). The cocktail is one of the three greatest American contributions to world culture, along with jazz and the Bill of Rights.

And in celebration of the revival of good, quality endeavors, this evening I am going to prepare and enjoy classic Manhattans with my coworkers on the train as we commute home along the coast, and I will raise a toast to you, reader, for being among those who still bother to read.