Why I Miss Drinking

I don't feel like an alcoholic, yet occasional evidence always piles up. Where others have balance impervious to disturbance, the quarter of us with seesaws for minds exist with a segment of the brain that's a feculent carcass of disturbance. The mentally unbalanced have id that rages. Whatever lies there unsaid comes to fruition when not monitored with continual vigilance, and even when monitored, the wolf only needs slight provocation to turn round and feast. Sometimes an animal needs to defend himself, but it doesn't change that a beast is still a beast.

Like so many nerds of the particularly bookish type, I tend to view myself as born in the wrong time and place; a 19th century gentleman more comfortable among hard copy books and old music than people, who conducts himself person-to-person with a kind of courtliness even I find a little absurd. But like so many in the 19th century, all it takes is a little sherry or Schlitz to crumble the cultivated facade. I examine my behavior when I'm drunk, and even if I know there are many worse, it's an ignominious record. Amid the thousand hours of fun, the most rewarding conversations of my life and the confidence to speak in foreign languages: there's friendship ending fights and god knows how many fights ended near there, packs of cigarettes smoked, dozens of spontaneous 3000 calorie meals, two pullovers by police, a car accident, and obnoxious behavior around women - yes, with incidents of crepitude. There are plenty of people who consume more alcohol than I who never think of themselves as alcoholics, but if I keep drinking the way others take for granted, I'm not going to last very long.

I stopped drinking three years ago when I realized I no longer trusted my conduct. I began drinking again two years ago after a breakup and stopped when I realized the drinking would make me eat myself into a heart attack. I began again at a party two weeks ago, right before a long vacation started and I thought I'd earned the right after the pandemic and could control it just as well as I ever did before.... Whether a bender or not, three hours in came an explosive friendship ending fight by text, the drinking didn't let up until I came home. In the meantime, I was utterly depressed during the day, utterly elated by night; or at least utterly elated when I wasn't crying in bars without inhibition. As I cried I literally saw people point to me and say 'Wow, he just doesn't care...' Thirty minutes later in the same bar I was regaling Brooklyn punk musicians with tales of escapades in the Baltimore music scene: drinking with Dan Deacon and flirting backstage with Jenn Wasner from Wye Oak (I was drunk...).

The bars in New York are so not what they used to be. Many of them seem around a quarter their former capacity, and the prices are prohibitively expensive just to stay open. Yet the stats don't lie: binge drinking has increased 21% since the pandemic began. there will be 8000 more alcohol related deaths since the pandemic began, 18,700 more cases of liver failure, 1,100 more cases of liver cancer by 2040. There is 13% less driving since March 2020, yet there are 23% more carcrash fatalities; we can't pretend alcohol is not the main factor in those crashes. This is clearly drinking done alone. We were already #1 in the first world's binge drinking - a sign that we've been the most dysfunctional of all first world countries. We're now drinking as though we're not in the first world - these are Russian numbers, and like Russia, the rest of the first world views us with a snobby contempt that is both undeserved and entirely deserved. Abuse of all those substances that lead to worse lives is up: alcohol, hard drugs, nicotine, preservatives, and sugar. Statistics don't lie, the more unhealthy stuff you consume, the harder it is to have a stable quality of life.

One of those car crash fatalities was the dad of another former close friend, one of the closest I've ever had. I guarantee eith absolute security that the drunk driver was not him (it took me a few hours to realize the implication of that statement without that qualifier and oh my god I meant that he was victim of a driver in an 18 wheeler, not a perpetrator) And in yet another of the bizarre moments of my life when connections seem extra-human, he died on the same day as Bubbie, while her mother will struggle life long from the same accident to recover her brain function. I was certainly not drinking twelve years ago on the day our fight happened, but the fight certainly happened during another heavy partying period when my state of mind yo-yo'd with the moon.

Whether delusional or not, I have always prided myself as being the funniest person in any room. I'm obviously not better looking than most of you, and I may not be smarter, but I'm more articulate, and I'm funnier than you (fuck you too...). So if you're the kind of person with unplaced rage, humor is clearly the best possible use and it can bond you to people who otherwise would never take notice. It can even make physically beautiful people think that a short guy who was nearly 100 pounds overweight with unmistakably bizarre facial tics is worth hanging out with extensively. This guy was, in every sense, the court jester, permitted to say things nobody else was because he had funnier, more interesting things to say than the much better looking people the rest all went home with. They'd even let me get away with making fun of them and yelling at them for the various ways I thought they were stupid. One of my college roommates was the son of a general, and post-college I was regularly drinking in DC bars paid for by the largesse of the federal government. At one bar we were such regulars that the bartender simply comped us for more than a year. I was truly insane those years, my obsessional nature hearing voices and seeing magic signs in every room and streetcorner, making every decision for me and telling me that if I countermanded the voices, all the divine wrath of the world would come crashing upon me. But I covered it up relatively well by painting myself as a mere extreme neurotic, and when it came time to perform my one-man shows for friends, whiskey usually did the bulk of the work.

I had far too many close friends in those years - my late 20s. No romantic relationships, not a one, but as many as 50 intimate friends at a time and at any given point seemed to be fighting with half of them, the resentments engendered by their semi-functional lives overwhelming me with very real rage. Whether they knew just how insane I was until I lost my temper, I knew, and that most people would find it much easier than I to find work and love was the cause of rage unslakeable. In a life with many candidates, it was perhaps both the most enjoyable and the most agonizing period of my life. It seemed that half my life was spent in public telling funny stories, and half spent in private howling like a wounded animal.

Shortly before the pandemic, I tried something I wonder if I'd ever tried before. Partying while sober. Oh my god it was torture. I'm a person of words and notes, not of the people. You try your best to keep the anxiety under control and play the same role you once did with boozy effortlessness, but every moment was an agony of anxiety as all the boozy feuds of the past played through my head and the noise of my brain wondered which of them would be the next to turn.

Over the pandemic I discovered what I'd known all along. Every word in public is a dread-fueled performance, a performance I now prefer to keep to essays. When left to my own devices, I am introvert in extreme; the terror of each interaction disappearing within the confines of a piece of music or book, or when writing words on a screen-lain page that recounts the long, strange history of my life.

And yet, I miss drinking so. Not the drinking itself, but the interaction that comes from it. I miss the drunken conversations where two people stripped of inhibition's varnish arrive at speaking of permanent things. I miss when beautiful women touch you on the elbow when you make them laugh, and take you spontaneously into a one-armed embrace after you give them the ear and validation they've always wanted from their boyfriend. And I so miss the explosive drunken laughter and the sense (at least in my memory) that the center of everyone's night was my funny lines and stories.

And for one night in New York, I got to relive it, and so thrilling it was. I don't remember their names, we did not exchange contact info, but it was a night fit for the best of my DC years. It was the same night I broke down crying in a New York bar - a bar touted by New York Magazine as a bar virtually guaranteed to get anybody laid... so much for that. After a pickmeup from talking to a bunch of musicians, I left that place good and soused, feeling as though I could not possibly take in another drop.

But then I saw a bunch of people talking outside another bar to each other in suits. I figured this was a bar of young Republicans, and could not possibly pass up the opportunity to create memories where I could take in what truly goes on in the tragically ludicrous heads of an educated Republican in 2022.

It was nothing of the sort. It was a Brooklyn wedding having taken place a hundred feet away, the wife American, the husband an Irish ex-pat living in Berlin. I sat down at the only available seat at the bar, and for the first time at a bar in years, found myself on a stool next to a beautiful, intelligent, and very flirtatious woman. I don't recall her name, but she is Filipino, mostly long hair but the side of her head shaved. She lives in Berlin, the daughter of a career high-level diplomat who is now, I believe, an eminent member of the Congress of the Philippines and one of the leaders of the anti-Duterte resistance; she's a published poet whose favorite poets are Baudelaire and Marianne Moore, who spoke at very least English, German, Norwegian, Swedish, French, and Tagalog. Merely to talk to her was to feel as though I was somehow in the front seat of history with someone whose future was unlimited and would be remembered with some kind of posterity. With her I told a funny story or two of my week in Berlin, quoted my very little memory of Baudelaire in French, and got to speak German for the first time in god knows how many years, most of the words not coming to me that used to be relatively easy (or at least seemed easy when I was drunk and probably riddled with a thousand errors).

Then I met her dude, an Irishman living in Berlin who has not been to the US since he lived in Chicago for two months in 2009. I can't recall most of the details of our conversation, nor his name, but it was a whirlwind of permanent things; history, philosophy, politics, and the future, which seems so much more ominous than the early Obama years when I was at my drunkest. Like any good European of our time, he was a socialist, but no Corbyn or Melanchon-like fanatic. For all our problems, he loves America dearly, and his fondest wish for us was that we realize, as I readily agreed, that the time for passive electioneering resistance is over. I recall vividly him saying that America has answered the call to defend the world so many times before, and honorably answered it as no other country has, and now America is called to defend the world as never before: to defend the rest of the world from ourselves.

When it came time to go home, I had no charge left on my phone and no idea what direction I was going. Somebody in the bar, maybe part of the wedding maybe not, called an uber for me, no questions asked, and simply paid the charge for me to go back to my hotel.

This is the cameraderie of drunks I forever miss, and will forever call to me, even if I remain sober for the next fifty years.