So basically I’m not partying for a good 28 days.
It’s one of those things with a degree of leniency - I mean, sure, maybe I’ll go out for a drink or two with a friend one week. Maybe once a week. Maybe a beer to go with dinner after work. But at the end of the day, it’s not about the alcohol.
It’s about getting wasted. I’ve never known how to drink any other way.
Like my old creative writing tutor wrote in his piece, uncomfortably about his struggles with alcoholism; “One sniff of the barmaid’s apron, and I need to drink myself into a stupor”.
When I was a teenager, we all drank to get drunk. We hadn’t developed the taste for liquors and cocktail niceties - it was cask wine out of the silver bag for us. Because we didn’t care - we wanted the feeling, and we were just that uncomfortable shade of pubescent rebellious. Or maybe you were a preppy little twat sipping cruisers like children for the colour it put in your mouth, or maybe you were some rocker with jack and coke. We were the kind of kids who would take off down to the park in the middle of the day with the goon sack we got some bogan to buy for us. We were the runts hiding fucked under fringes at Flinders Street Station.
Either way, it was never about the social lubrication. It was about drinking to get fucking drunk.
Fast forward to my adult years, and I spent time working in nightclubs drinking vodka lemonades off of hastily-thrown-together drink cards to try and quell the nervousness that came from having to take photos of other drunk people that night. Because I was new and excited by the prospect of being a nightclub photographer, but also way too anxious a person in a variety of social situations to fathom doing it off anything less than three or four standard drinks. So I'd get a little bit drunk - all head spinning and brimming with confidence - until approaching people for a snap became nothing short of a sinch. This would eventually continue, for years and years and years, until the only way I knew how to take party photos was to succumb to party girl status myself.
No-one taught me how to drink alcohol. No-one taught me how to drink in moderation. The only time anyone ever taught me how to look after myself, was at a friends sixteenth birthday, when mother insisted on confiscating two of my four Smirnoff Double Blacks, because she didn’t want me overdoing it. That was my lesson - deprivation over education. It didn’t stop me from drinking everyone else’s booze, though. No, at some point, some kid pulled out an entire bottle of Ouzo from underneath a bed, and we shotted that shit like it was anything less than liquid death down our throats. Until we were screaming into digital cameras, drunkenly snapping out selfies as though we were the coolest kids on the block.
Not because we had any idea what we were doing. But because we just wanted to get drunk. You didn't drink in moderation, because that didn't make you cool. That wasn't 'fun'. We were dumb kids, and that was just the way we did it. Braincells be damned.
Flash forward to me at twenty-two years of age, drinking in moderation seems to come with its own sense of personal accomplishment. Like the fact that you didn’t manage to write yourself off on a Thursday night is somehow worthy of its own reward, kiss-the-mirror type shit. If I go home tipsy, and not staggering down the street, it’s like I don’t know who I am anymore. And I’m laughing, and I'm reflecting on how bullshit that sounds - but realistically speaking, it is, and it shouldn’t be the case. We should all be well-accustomed to two or three beers over the ‘Just another glass, just another bottle— and fucking whoops, there it is’. Cue the stagger and the groaning whisper of another future hangover.
If I can go out for a couple of cheeky wines after work, and make it out of there without so much more than a skip in my step, that’s a magical experience. That’s, like, adulthood. Or so it feels.
But really, getting wasted, and not knowing how to drink any other way, is only half of the problem. It’s the shit you do when you’re wasted that makes all of the melodrama.
I shouldn’t have to explain it, because we all know what it looks like. When you’re wasted, that dude you’ve been drunk-dating with the potato-head and no personality suddenly looks like a gem - he might even look interesting - leading to a slew of hungover confusions and regrets. You don't even really know that person, but you know how much wine you had to drink that night, and boy, it sure stopped you from running screaming into the street over his boring bullshit. When you’re wasted, you can fall out of control in three seconds, and getting between two brawling dudes in a bar seems like a real bright idea, because Drunk You can definitely diffuse the situation. When you're obliterated in the city on a Sunday morning, that proposition for a one-night-stand with a dude (or two, or three) seems like a fucking great idea, and you're all about the sensual frisson, the decadent escape into a strangers' bedroom in the middle of the night.
Until you wake up, no clue where you are, head pounding, eyes bloodied and red, retrieving your far-flung underwear and sneaking out the door, while the bridge troll you accosted lies sleeping in his bed.
"In moderation", they say. "Drinking in moderation". Like anyone has any clue what on earth that means.
When I’m wasted, I do dumb shit. If I’m not fucking with my own head, I’m fucking with my own body. So I’m putting a stop to it for a while. I'm giving moderation a try. Or maybe I’ll go for coffee instead.
Coffee is love. Coffee is life.
End diatribe.
