My friend Stevie mentioned today that he needs a new liver. I do as well, along with a raft of other organs that don’t come stock with furry little bears, so I thought I’d check the Internet to see what our chances are.

Research makes me thirsty, so I asked my mum to buy some tequila while she was out picking the five-year-old up from school. She said (in addition to “no”) that my site was becoming a big misadventure and that our family is lucky I have so little influence, otherwise we’d be getting hate mail.

I told her about the afternoon’s research angle: cultivating replacement organs for people who desperately need them. It seemed to me that the whole subject area really suggested José Cuervo.

She said, repetitively, that she was going to shitcan my whole enterprise if I made fun of people with incurably degenerated livers.

I said I was figuring out how to fix people with bum livers, and even if I didn’t learn how, the 13 healing skulls I learned about after drinking a bottle of CRYSTAL HEAD VODKA would be convening about a year from now to heal everybody. Ergo, my research was just for fun, just like all longevity research. Why strive to prolong our lives when the Apocalypse is just a year away or so?

But as soon as a subject of discussion becomes a little technical, my parents tune out. I really had a jones for CUERVO GOLD. There’s something so appealing about its artificial golden-amber color and slight wood-ash aroma. People disparage this tequila for being a mainstream market bully, and it probably is, but it makes the most bad-ass margarita ever. Why is that?

Well, it’s honestly not very good tequila. So you don’t feel guilty throwing copious amounts of it into your blender and pureeing the hell out of it. There’s nothing delicate about it that’s going to get ruined by throwing limes, strawberries and any other random things into it. If it were more of a subtle sipper you’d feel profligate for camouflaging such precious liquid underneath a fruit orgy. But it’s definitely not subtle.

So CUERVO GOLD is great for margaritas because it’s not a sipping tequila, but you have to use it for something because you can’t have it burning a hole in your liquor cabinet, and margarita mix hides it admirably. The other excellent use for CUERVO GOLD is the body shot—again, because that by definition involves all sorts of other distracting flavors and sensations that render the actual taste of the product relatively unnoticeable.

If you have margaritas and body shots constantly for many years, you will probably need a new liver. That’s okay, because scientists are making a lot of progress. They can take a donated liver that nobody’s using any more, bathe it in detergent to remove its own cells, then use what remains as a scaffold to seed a patient’s own cells, grow it a while, take out the patient’s malfunctioning liver and stuff the new one in. Voila!

This is a great reason to drink more CUERVO. The first sip is overwhelmingly fragrant, with a petroleum mouthfeel—an impression that recedes to secondary status as the agave elixir burns the throat. This is one of my very favorite forms of liquid pollution.

So what chance do Stevie and I stand of getting new livers? No one from Wake Forest University, where they’ve taken testing to the animal stage, was available to take my call, so I asked my mum. She said any doctor considering implanting a patient with a new liver would screen that patient to make sure he/she didn’t plan to poison it with alcohol. Snap!

So I guess that’s that. Stevie and I will have to get out our haloes and practice looking angelic if we want to be candidates for new livers. I know he can do it. As for me, my mum says I’m fucked sure to be rejected for a liver, but she’ll sew me a new one full of lentils if needed.