This week’s guest post is brought you by S’mat of whomunculous…

The above was the opening line of a satirical email forward I received a few years ago (remember those?! “You have received this email from your mother’s friend who somehow got a hold of your email and you now have to send it to more people than you know or next time you sneeze your eyes will EXPLODE, Santa will leave a fat steamer in your stocking and the producers of American Pie will release a 4^th installment to the franchise.”) I don’t remember how the rest of it went, but I do remember admiring its obscure revision of the typical denial process. More importantly, it caused me to seriously reflect on my own dependency on the yeast-beast for the first time. 

Turns out that I was a high-functioning alcoholic. I was probably about 23 at the time. 

I say high-functioning but that’s more a description of the environmental context of societal acceptability than any personal prowess of achievement or realization of self-determination. I could hold my liquor, that is operate at what felt like an accelerated and relaxed level of cognitive ability; wake up without experiencing many deleterious effects; didn’t have any immediate physiological differences, like weight gain or sprained ankles; laughed a lot; met relative social ’success’ and so on. But most of this perspective was borne of delusion. In ‘reality’, my scholarly objectives were not being met; I was warding off persistent feelings of worthlessness and self-loathing; I was endangering myself and others through other forms of substance abuse (fairly mild forms considering, but still); wasting time; wasting romantic opportunities… In short, I was lost and in fleeing from the veils of despair it induced wandered even further abroad. 

My Dad tries to convince me that I’m Irish. It’s some kind of post-retirement Irish revivalism that’s going around these days. I’m generally not a big fan of Nationalism, as it seems to supercede responsible assessment of one’s self-identity, but when asked I happily say that I’m Canadian. I passed through a birth canal in London, England, enjoyed the education system there and so stayed until I was about 10, then emigrated to Ontario. Then back to England for a year. Then to Quebec for 10. Now BC. Been living in Canada for a good while now come to think of it, you know, doing stuff: eating pizza, been on the run from Blockbuster’s considerable legal team at least twice, largely ignored hockey, laughed once during an episode of Friends (my ferret was licking my feet) and NOW I’m suddenly Irish?! Sure, my last name translates to “Of the purple face” in Gaelic (which may be a clue that my affinity for alcohol is not simply a genetic aberration) but this mildy pejorative patronymic for the phylogenetic predisposition towards capillary dilation and probable heart disease is hardly a worthy claim to Irishness. 

As a 20-something, I’ve seen alcoholism glorified all my waking life. My dad’s sister practised alcoholism and called it parenting. She has just divorced from her sixth marriage. My ex-girlfriend called it feminism. She got me arrested trying to protect her from a policeman and now I cannot return to Quebec for fear of prosecution. My mum’s brother called it liking football. He was murdered for lighting a cigarette in a non-smoker’s house. One of my best friends calls it the pursuit of spiritual awakening. He does too many drugs. My cousin called it youthfulness. He was a father at 16. So I know it’s in me, and, well, I’m drawn to these people, I enable their behaviour, I support them and ask the same of them in kind. I’m not an innocent, but these examples are not just a case of creative hyperbole: I am these people as they are me, but it’s bigger than us… it’s societally condoned. 

Some nights, on the way home from the pub (oh yes, I still drink, but in the manner that will allow me to go see a Taiko drumming exposition or run 5k the following morn), I take the long way home. The fun-market is littered with effigies of self-destruction. Girls slump on curbs cradling broken cell phones, weeping, shivering and alone. Boys are cut up and dishevelled, looking very ‘bounced’ out of this club or that pool-hall. High school students are indiscriminately grinding with unsavoury looking strangers.  Staggering posses whoop and jeer and piss and meander into the street. And then I try to imagine this same sprawling scene with the lights on, in broad daylight, here in what doubles as the financial district of Victoria… It would look like we’d just suffered a chemical spillage or mutagen attack. It would be ugly, but the truth. 

I’ve heard that the legions of ancient Egyptian slaves were often ploughed with beer or mead, ostensibly to pacify them, but I believe moreso to encourage the injudicious exposure of the revolutionaries amongst them. I’ve been told by friends of other cultures that North Americans drink very differently from them, their theories are that we defuse the anxiety of eye-contact and close-quartered socialization by placing the lens of a stimulant in between us. An underdeveloped theory I have is that alcohol use now is a vestige of a form of indentured peasantry’s celebration of the land’s bounty (we’re little more than neo-feudal still, so this might not be too far-fetched) and those stereotypes we have of certain “drunken” cultures is a discreet means of delivering the land back to the landless, if only for a few hours. Terence McKenna, famed but eccentric proto-ethnobotanist, speculated that the expansionist materialism (generated of aggressive agricultural colonialism) exhibited by ‘alcohol cults’ displaced the more environmentally conscious and ecologically interdependent ‘mushroom worshippers’. These shamanistic societies were largely hunter-gatherers, who derived their spiritual realm from the powers of psilocybin as found in what we know today as Magic Mushrooms (found most commonly growing in the feces of grazing animals, the migration of which likely determining where the mushroom people lived). With the domination of these people by the warlike and possessive agrarian culture, so did the subjugation of women begin (relegated to such from their positions as equals, if not as leaders) to emphasize martial strategy. Emerging from this particular societal revolution came many of today’s modern religions, and from them, national boundaries, and from those, concurrent debt-slavery. And, of course, the central conveyor throughout all this was the ephemeral intoxication of a bawdy night of drink and moral inculpability.  

Pretty far out, eh? Well, imagine this… how funny would your drunk actions be if you did them sober? Gather your best drunken anecdotes, there’s probably quite a few, and review them again. They likely all involve mistakes. Personally, a significant portion of mine and my acquaintances’ narratives are about drinking, and we tell those stories while drinking. This comprises a strong component of my familial and tribal folklore, isn’t that stupid?! Now imagine 5-8,000 years of such drunken -but apparently excusable-  tales of ‘whoopsies’. Sadly, this is our informal Western legacy. 

Yeah, I drink, but there’s no way I’m solely to blame for that. Right now, I’m still young, lithe, able-bodied and relatively motivated, but if I keep this up, my belief structure will likely ossify, my body will rapidly degenerate and I’ll end up being too infirm to create the corner of the world that I’d like our children to inherit. Sorry, heavy stuff, but that’s the only way I’ve really been able to interpret the description of alcohol as a depressant. 

This revelation about my own uses of the drug could easily have been overlooked… I’ve never received any direct feedback, so sort of had to stumble across the problem. And since I’ve found that the questions have tapped the cask and methods to cope have poured forth:

• I have some non-alcoholic beer in the fridge that I drink instead of that just-one-more beer that I used to have. It never gets finished, as it’s pretty foul stuff, but it interrupts the perceived urgency of consumption, which is positive.
• I don’t ‘drink’ before I’ve eaten.
• I attempt to suspend all emotional re/action until the following morning.
• I will try to assess why it is I’m drinking that day: for fun? To cope? To help me figure something out? To change my mood? To punish myself?
• Alcohol provides a fairly obvious and relatable continuum which can be assessed by degree. How intoxicated are you? And to apply that to other forms of altered states is very helpful… stoned, high, sugar rushing, tired (often overlooked, for example, I’d feel more responsible driving whilst tipsy than whilst tired)… But this is also its danger… In the UK, people start drinking quite early on, but it’s deemed acceptable and fairly harmless, so people familiarize themselves with the state. However, a driver’s license is fairly difficult to get, and generally attained after the child has had some drinking experience. This can be interpreted either way, but I think having a lack of familiarity with the machine would dissuade the drunk from driving moreso than the other way round “Oh, I’ve been driving 5 years already, this might even be fun…”
• I try to see the system/industry running around and through us: it creates revenue, jobs, social bonds, disease, license for police presence, inventive late-night snacks, other means of ‘exploring’ the urban fabric and so on.

These regulatory methods don’t always meet with success, but they do help moderate the personal concerns and reintroduce ‘holism’ to ‘alcoholism’. Why is it that we never quite speak of such a brazenly destructive social habit? Cause we’re all guilty of collusion? Because it’s such a complicated phenomenon? Because it’s as close to each of us as the cornea is to our vision, not really noticeable until is gets scratched? Alcohol is almost a Buddhist koan -”a nonsensical or paradoxical question to a student for which an answer is demanded, the stress of meditation on the question often being illuminating” [dictionary.com]- except this student feels further from illumination each time he meditates on the riddle.  

What do you think of the drink?

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 6th, 2008 at 1:15 am and is filed under altered states, guest posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.