What's he on about now?

In case the articles, essays and opinions throughtout this site just weren't enough for you, here's my online diary (a.k.a. 'blog'). It's as close as you'll come to the inside of my head, so don't say I didn't warn you
(and remember, you can always e-mail me if you love or loathe anything you're about to read)...


   Monday, December 09, 2002

LUSH LIFE

Public drunkenness...destruction of property...
is this what we think of when we think of the Irish?
-- legendary news anchorman Kent Brockman

A shame to my race is what I am. Two work Christmas parties -- one last night, one two Mondays ago -- and I drank badly at both. Badly, as in not well. If an ability to drink is like working a muscle, then I'm still putting on my gym shoes. While everyone last night got truly hammered, I cautiously accepted a pair of shooters while buying a single pint of Kilkenny (mmm, Kilkenny...). I could tell that I was viewed with suspicion. "Oh," their eyes seemed to say, "he's one of those non-drinkers." I felt -- as I often have before -- like Frasier Crane at Cheers.

What the record store gang last night didn't realize is that my caution was well-earned: at the pub Christmas party two weeks ago, the hooch flowed like water and, in chugging along with a hard-drinkin' crowd, I ended up hugging a toilet bowl at midnight with my pants around my ankles.

Not my finest hour.

I felt like I was 19 again, back when I hung out in Hamilton with an athletic high-school boy whose motto was, "Drinking kills brain cells...but only the weak ones!" At least once a week, we'd get shredded with alcohol, stumble back to his place, pass out and nurse each other's hangovers the next day. His parents thought I was a bad influence, which I thought was hilarious since I was merely trying to keep up with their son's secret ability to pound the drinks back like a trucker with two days off. Fortunately, my liver was spared when -- terrified that I might be falling in love with him -- I shakingly told him that I was gay and he never looked me in the eye again. I considered him like a brother to me but he knew the score better than I did and got out of harm's way.

Hard drinking never seemed quite as much fun after that -- even in university -- and, these days, I find that I do better without. In the same way a repressed "nice guy" finds his inner bastard when he drinks, alcohol and drugs bring out all the suppressed qualities in myself I dislike -- passivity, dullness, paranoia and clumsiness. Oh yeah, and usually the contents of my stomach, too. While I'm oddly grateful to have experienced the nastiness of a "Cement Mixer" (Baileys and lime cordial, congealed in the mouth), I think I'll have an iced tea now, thanks.