I've been drinking on occasion over the past year+ since I split with Malaya, or since she split with me, to be more accurate, and since I'm slightly lubricated at the moment, it seems like a good idea to blog about it. And since all ideas hatched while drunk are good ones, you're in for a treat.
Actually, I'm not drunk. I can tell fairly easily, since I've gotten into the semi-habit of sending the IG emails when I drink, and by now I can accurately calibrate my blood alcohol content by my writing, or at least by my typing, since when I'm buzzed I stop caring enough to fix typos, to capitalize properly, to worry about sentence structure, etc. I don't know how I type when I'm really drunk since I don't type then; I stumble around and annoy people, or have non-orgasmic sex, or (and then) lie down and fall asleep.
Well, I have to add a caveat to that one too. I've only been really drunk 3 or 4x in my life, and on those occasions I was hardly able to remain upright, much less type. The drunkest I've been in the past year was when I had a couple of shots in short order, and that was enough to send me reeling into bed, a strategic location from which I engaged in semi-coherent conversation with Malaya (there was no drunk dialing; she called me) and several less-coherent day dreams involving the IG, nudity, and exotic produce. I bring this up only to point out that I was quite wrecked, while still far below
the legal limit, at least when calculating (2 drinks) x (my body weight). I'm a lightweight since I
don't didn't used to do it often enough to build up any resistance. I still lack that, but I'm a bit less featherweight than I was 18 months ago, when a single bottle of Heineken, with food, was enough to make me slightly loopy.
Anyway, my point was that when I'm buzzed, my typing goes to hell. I know I'm making typos, and even if I didn't, Thunderbird helpfully underlines the words in red, a visual tip hard to mistake even with the assistance of Absolut. I just do not care enough to backspace and fix them. I've noticed a similar thing in physical behavior, since in that condition I get very rough with things. I'll kick a chair turn it around or a door to open it, and I have to restrain myself from just dropping dishes into the sink, or throwing down glasses, etc. It's not that I want to break things, I just get impatient and careless and it seems like too much trouble to exercise the motor skills and caution required to not break them. Fortunately, I'm almost always home alone when I'm in this state, so I don't find out how I'd behave in public or while interacting with others. Especially other drunks, who I tend to hate even when sober. I'd probably find out just how well all these martial arts I've been studying work, and then I'd find out what it's like to spend the night in jail on a drunk and disorderly and/or assault charge, and while that might provide some nice blog material, assuming I could type with broken knuckles, it wouldn't do a lot of good for me in other respects.
Amusingly, the IG enjoys my drunken emails. She says I'm more honest in them, which I want to dispute. Not that I don't believe her report, but I don't think I'm more honest since I'm honest in all of my emails to her. I'm not sure what adjectives would fit best, but I think something along the lines of "unrestrained" or "unguarded" or "pathetically-sentimental and slobberingly-horny" would sum it up fairly well. Flux's id runneth free when unleashed by fermented beverages.
Another trait of my drunken emails, and perhaps of my drunken mind in general, is that I go very non sequitur. I jump from subject to subject fairly quickly, without trying to tie the whole body of the email/essay together. And to demonstrate that point... Why do people get drunk on beer? How do people get drunk on beer? I've come to enjoy the taste of the stuff, more or less, but it's goddamned expensive, and it's high in calories, and it's so inefficient. You can get a huge bottle of good liquor at CostCo for like, $20. I've got a 1.75liter bottle of Absolut in my pantry right now to prove that point. One shot of that is way more incapacitating than a beer, and it doesn't have 170 calories or take ten minutes to drink or cause constant bathroom breaks. I get bored sitting around drinking beverages, and I get bored drinking the same beverage. I enjoy Dr. Pepper, beer, OJ, sparkling cider, and various other liquids, but a glass or two of each, in a given day, is more than enough. The only liquid I drink more of than that is water, which I down by the gallon, even on the rare day when I don't engage in 90+ minutes of fairly vigorous physical exertion. And since water doesn't have any taste and is calorie neutral, it hardly counts.
Besides, if you're going to drink to get drunk, man-up and fucking drink. Don't nibble around the issue, like one of those bottle blonde tanorexics who works at Hooters but throws a lingering look of longing at the strip club when she'd driving to work in the stupid orange jogging shorts she's wearing over nude pantyhose. Hit a shot, or a mixed drink at least, and be done with it.
Another thing I don't understand is how writers drink and produce good stuff. It's a cliche, writers drinking, and it's common in other fields; how many songs did Eminem and others gifted with wider noses and more melanin, write about needing pot and pills and booze to free up their muses? I can see that working for rap, since there's no requirement that one use proper sentence structure, or spelling, or thematic consistency. In fact, most of those features would be positive drawbacks to the genre. For writing though, I don't know how Hemingway or Hitchens or others turn out good work while buzzed. I can imagine doing some brain storming, since as I admitted several paragraphs ago, my liquored mind is freed to jump from topic to topic. This is to the detriment of coherent emails or blog posts, and ruinous to fiction writing, but it could potentially be useful for coming up with novel (both meanings) ideas.
Problems with that. 1) Ideas initiated while drunk seem brilliant at the time, and seldom make any sense when reviewed afterwards, in the cold light of day. 2) Even if there are better, or at least different, the other side effects of being buzzed make it unlikely that those ideas will be recorded in any sort of coherent fashion. 3) Even if you do come up with some decent ideas and they still make sense the next day, the writing used to present them will be so dodgy that you'll take longer to fix it up than you would have to write it sober in the first place. 4) You might get too used to it, or come to need it, and then you're a fucking alcoholic and doomed.
Furthermore, and mostly related to point 2 -- even if the drunken mind is capable of slowing down long enough to include some context and explanation, that will only help the sober mind understand where the idea came from; it won't make the idea any more useful or viable to non-drunks, which is, I suppose, point 1. It's like those wacky memories of dream fragments you have when you wake up. They often seem brilliant and visionary right then, while you're still half asleep. If you remember then later in the day, they're hallucinogenic bullshit and you wonder WTF you were thinking while dreaming, and especially what you were thinking when you woke up and imagined that bit about the pirates having sex in the museum on the giant oragami crane was a meaningful metaphor about the state of political discourse in eighteenth century Great Britain.
In conclusion, I'd like to add that a double shot of vodka stirred into a Peach Pleasure Jamba Juice is one of the great rewards you can give yourself for surviving a hot, pre-summer day, and that if such gustatory pleasures are the price you pay for not having a girlfriend or advancing your career one iota in the last 6 months, it was probably worth it anyway.
Also, I'd like to point out that my drunken writing almost always grows maudlin and self pitying at some point, and I'm happy to say that I avoided that malady in this installment... at least until right near the end.
Labels: drinking
