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EDIT: EDitted to be less depressing. :D
After my last write up centered around being anti-social and staying in your room instead of doing something silly like hanging out, a lot of people seemed to respond by saying, "alcoholic? wat?" I realize that calling yourself alcoholic is kind of an odd thing to say. most people think it either means you lost your house because you were drinking or lost your kidneys...because you were drinking.
I went through a pretty rough alcohol phase. I wasn't alcoholic, my life being nowhere near as bad as some other addicts have had it, but it was a pretty big part of my day to day basis. I don't know how many of you know what it feels like to make a mistake, do something stupid and be completely unable to remember if you did it when you were drunk or sober, and even worse, not really being able to make a distinction between the two. Drinking like a racehorse doesn't really seem to dull you out. It feels fast. Messy. Your entire life feels like the cameras in Quantum of Solace. You try and remember things and it's literally shaking. Maybe that's just me. None of my friends ever drank as much as me, nowhere near.
It's kind of funny--my parents were always supportive. They let me grow up without any strings attached, rarely sought to control what I did unless it was really out of hand, and from that I drew my own conclusions from things. It probably doesn't help that we were relatively Christian, and at Church all I would hear about from pastors or people was how bad alcohol was. Up until the age of 15 I'd hardly touched alcohol. A beer with my parents once in a great while and I hated the taste, I just did it because, fuck, if people in movies enjoy it I should too.
I visited a friend of mine who lived about eight hours drive from Johannesburg (place I lived at the time, in South Africa). It was two weeks of obscene drinking and my first real exposure to the wonders of beer and its heaven sent taste. I don't know what changed it for me. A steak and mash potatoes washed down with a beer so well. It just quenched thirst. I mean, initially. The first few sips. Then I just started drinking because I wanted to get snotfaced silly.
Every night for two weeks, most of them spent playing drunken World of Warcraft. It was kind of fun. Kind of sad retrospectively. Aaaaanyways. I loved the feeling. After all the bad I'd heard about it, alcohol wasn't so horrible. It made me feel good. Better, in fact. Euphoric. It was a sort of way of getting happy that felt effortless. We could laugh about anything, just plain shooting shit and loving every second. Not caring about the morning or the fact that you were gonna have to go home in a few days, just...fun. We would take our pants of and play WoW. Relax, we had boxers on. My friend somehow managed to get hold of every fucking lumo pair of underwear ever. We ended up falling off cliffs or forgetting to heal. That guild kicked us our tight fast.
It started slow. Really slow. I left his house and didn't drink for a month, but I was thinking about it the whole time. Thanks to loose care for law, I woke up before anyone in family one fine Saturday morning and got a six-pack of Black Label. Not knowing what the fuck I was doing, I drank on the street on my way home, in the early hours of the damn morning, out in the open, underage. No one saw me. I only found out it was illegal a little while ago (see my first blog).
I sat in my room, waited till dark and downed all five. I figured if I spread them out I wouldn't get drunk. The feeling wasn't the same. I felt drunk, but not happy. Just sort of mellow with the taste of beer in my mouth and an uncomfortably full belly. I kept stumbling down my corridor to my bathroom and looking at myself in the mirror, wondering why I looked so much better when I was drunk. It was a pretty shitty night. And wouldn't you know it, I did the same thing the next weekend.
It's the closest I'll ever get to being a drug addict. Two weeks of awesome drunkenness followed by months of trying to find it again. Though it didn't quite happen so fast. I stopped after that. Content.
I noticed that I felt different after I'd been drinking. It didn't matter if I'd given a day for it to wear off, I just felt slower, tired. I wasn't sure if it was alcohol at first but after that last weekend I was ready to quit altogether.
I went a year. Didn't pick up until my clubbing phase started (blog #2). I started drinking socially. Only beer, it was all I'd drink. Another visit eight hours out of Joburg and I was hooked on every hard liquor I could find. Whiskey, vodka, rum, scotch. Everything.
I came back and went a week without whiskey. I tried to remember the taste and all I could feel was fucking condensed milk on my tongue. The details here might get really depressing and if they do I'm sorry, I'll try brighten it up by throwing cock jokes in once in a while.
I bought a bottle of Three Ships -- about $12 bottle. Finished it over two nights. Bought a bottle of Two Keys on the way to a friend's birthday. My friend's weren't big on drinking. Certainly not to the extent I was doing it, so I hid it in his house and took it home with me but kept sipping in between, hoping no one could smell it on my breath (they probably could).
This kind of ties in with the period when I started sticking to myself again, alone, in my room. An album by Bon Iver had just come out, For Emma. Holy shit, the amazingness of listening to that album while drinking--unparalleled. I bought a pipe. It laced with the whiskey really well. It left a burning on your tongue, the whiskey washed it out and it softened the taste a bit. Anyways, pipe, whiskey and albums in hand I would sit in my room, drink to a slumber and play guitar. I didn't feel happy when I was drunk. I don't even know why I did it. It was just routine. I'd go home and drink. I was writing part time which managed to fund a hell of a lot of alcohol. Unless I was completely out I'd only drink whiskey, and I'd often stash the last quarters of a bottle and hide them. Jamesons, Powers, J&B, occasionally vodka and beers. My family and friends knew I was drinking but had no idea how much.
It just went on and on and on. Everyone else noticed before I did and kept trying to talk me out of it. I didn't think it was a problem. Months later, having drank more in a one year period than a lot of weekly drinkers do in ten, I started getting ridiculously sick. I had a cold every week. Whiskey relieved the symptoms. I had a job and to kill the symptoms I got drunk before going in. Fuck, that was an awesome day.
As the alcohol got worse so did my temper. At clubs if someone would give me shit I used to ignore it. Drunk enough, or just starting my buzz, I remember three instances: The first, a dude with one of those Jersey Shore-esque hair styles looked at me and said "You wanna try anything?" I took a long drag on my smoke and tried to imitate Clint Eastwood. "Fuck you talking to?" Never seen someone walk away so fast. Another dude kicked a beer bottle at my friend. "Thanks. Real nice. No, thank you. Thanks a lot. That's real nice." He just looked down and walked away, I felt kind of bad after. Then there was a fight where I got beaten up by eight dudes but I'll save that for another time (it was actually quite funny).
I ran computer maintenance, writing at night. I fucked up a game review on a two-night sleepless stint and sent in the worst review I've ever read. I didn't wanna repeat the game name so I used "our subject" and shit I learned not to do in secondary school. It was kind of funny. I lost that job. Then being AT work drunk, it's not really what you think it'll be. You think you're looser and more social drunk, but that's just because you're in a social setting. If you work drunk you work loosely and...stupidly. I kept stumbling to the bathroom and spacing out. Then I went out ice skating and fell (durp) on my chin and came in the next morning in the same clothes, blood covering my shirt. It was like Fight Club, and because I was drinking all the time I just thought it was cool to do.
Eventually it led me to the pretty horrible realization that I couldn't tell if the mistakes I was making was because I was drunk at the time or because I was too sober. I wasn't sure if there was a difference. They felt the same. I was drinking a bottle and a half of whiskey on a Friday or Saturday night. During the week I wouldn't drink too much, at least I held on to that, but the volume of drinking over the weekend kept me hungover all week and I was losing my shit. Literally and metaphorically. I couldn't find things. I was slow, dull, tired.
It brought me to a similar realization as the gaming. I haven't been drunk in a year. A beer, maybe three, that tops it. Also, protip, if you're gonna drink on your own, you get really lonely. You know how alcohol makes you horny, or more keen for the opposite sex? Same thing if you're on your own. Difference is you're on your own so you feel useless, and getting an erection's really hard, so masturbating isn't a great option.
I'm glad to be off that now. My family and friends were very supportive, and when it got out of hand they all kind of said "handle your shit before we trust you again," and when I did I felt a lot better.
Aaaand gaming drunk can be pretty devastating to your Arena team if you played between 2.2 and up to 3k in WoW. Or ladder. But I stopped drinking around the time SC 2 came out so yippee.
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how big are you to manage a bottle and a half of whiskey in a night? you mean 750 ml?
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On August 30 2011 05:13 rift wrote:
how big are you to manage a bottle and a half of whiskey in a night? you mean 750 ml?
Yeah. I'm not very big. 5.11", about 160lbs. It was more like...building that up for what, a year? Whiskey every weekend and a glass most week-nights?
EDIT:
Reading this again is actually kind of depressing, I might take it down and just post up more of the...I dunno. Funny things that happened.  ((
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Once again, that doesn't sound like a dependency on booze. More like impractical binging where you experimented it in different ways. To be quaint, it could have been a lot worse. You were down that path though.
Alcoholics are far more wreckless with their drinking than that.
Yeah, I much rather hear about the funny nights opposed to such things like this. Interesting read nonetheless.
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On August 30 2011 05:42 StarStruck wrote:
Once again, that doesn't sound like a dependency on booze. More like impractical binging where you experimented it in different ways. To be quaint, it could have been a lot worse. You were down that path though.
Alcoholics are far more wreckless with their drinking than that.
Yeah, I much rather hear about the funny nights opposed to such things like this. Interesting read nonetheless.
Yeah. If it ruined my life or something I would've called it that, but I think that would've taken more than a year. Just...stupidness.
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Agreed, don't worry. I've been down that road too. Glad to have great friends where hey, we don't have to drink or to drugs to have fun anymore, ha ha ha! 
Did wonders for my health. I'll still have the odd drink from time to time, but hell I've really cut down by a ton. In fact, I cannot remember the last time I had a drink.
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On August 30 2011 05:42 StarStruck wrote:
Once again, that doesn't sound like a dependency on booze. More like impractical binging where you experimented it in different ways. To be quaint, it could have been a lot worse. You were down that path though.
Alcoholics are far more wreckless with their drinking than that.
Yeah, I much rather hear about the funny nights opposed to such things like this. Interesting read nonetheless.
You know I've always wanted to know about the life of a condescending asshole. Why don't you write a blog about it.
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On August 30 2011 05:47 StarStruck wrote:Agreed, don't worry. I've been down that road too. Glad to have great friends where hey, we don't have to drink or to drugs to have fun anymore, ha ha ha! Did wonders for my health. I'll still have the odd drink from time to time, but hell I've really cut down by a ton. In fact, I cannot remember the last time I had a drink.
I've actually been feeling a lot better without alcohol. Haven't had a drink in a couple months aside from maybe one or two, but god damn, I'm thinking clearly again. Or, clearer. It's also nice when your friends don't drink. Things don't go wrong, really.
On August 30 2011 05:48 Rainmaker5 wrote:Show nested quote +On August 30 2011 05:42 StarStruck wrote:
Once again, that doesn't sound like a dependency on booze. More like impractical binging where you experimented it in different ways. To be quaint, it could have been a lot worse. You were down that path though.
Alcoholics are far more wreckless with their drinking than that.
Yeah, I much rather hear about the funny nights opposed to such things like this. Interesting read nonetheless. You know I've always wanted to know about the life of a condescending asshole. Why don't you write a blog about it.
Lol, that's kind of funny.
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Hey - at least you decreased your chances of the #1 killer in western countries - heart disease
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And this is why anti-marijuana propaganda makes me mad.
I smoked a LOT of weed every day for ~6 years straight, and did just fine. I made friends, I didn't make an ass of myself, I remember everything, I graduated from college with a 3.4. I went to my programming internship high 2/3rds of the days and was invited back for a fulltime position.
Pot never made me do shit half as stupid as the things I've done while I was drunk. While drunk, I've fucked myself up in all kinds of ways, hooked up with girls that I never should have touched, broken and lost my possessions...
Yet alcohol is legal and marijuana is not.
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On August 30 2011 05:48 Rainmaker5 wrote:Show nested quote +On August 30 2011 05:42 StarStruck wrote:
Once again, that doesn't sound like a dependency on booze. More like impractical binging where you experimented it in different ways. To be quaint, it could have been a lot worse. You were down that path though.
Alcoholics are far more wreckless with their drinking than that.
Yeah, I much rather hear about the funny nights opposed to such things like this. Interesting read nonetheless. You know I've always wanted to know about the life of a condescending asshole. Why don't you write a blog about it.
Your cool.
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I can't resist topping this.
On August 30 2011 05:54 StarStruck wrote:Show nested quote +On August 30 2011 05:48 Rainmaker5 wrote:On August 30 2011 05:42 StarStruck wrote:
Once again, that doesn't sound like a dependency on booze. More like impractical binging where you experimented it in different ways. To be quaint, it could have been a lot worse. You were down that path though.
Alcoholics are far more wreckless with their drinking than that.
Yeah, I much rather hear about the funny nights opposed to such things like this. Interesting read nonetheless. You know I've always wanted to know about the life of a condescending asshole. Why don't you write a blog about it. Your cool.
You're cool.
:D
To move past any dickery I hope the OP can be blessed and overcome any problems they might encounter.
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I can one up you:
Everyone's cool.
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Lol, <3 StarStruck. Lots of love going around. I'm doing well right now btw (@ Percutio). I was doing okay when I was drinking. Just unhappy. Now I love life, because I'm awesome.
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EDIT: deleted, i was taking too much time (: loved the blog though!
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Good to hear things turned out good for you!
Mmmm turns out I'm not alone. For me it was broken relationship and general bad road in live which got me to drinking. Maybe not as heavy as you, but I couldn't be without the slight rush you get from alcohol. It made me feel calmer,.forget about the crap........ And as you pointed out lonely.
Since half a year I'm improving though, cut down drinking weekdays and usually a tiny bit in the weekend. Sometimes relapse a bit though and just down a bottle of absolut vodka. Small steps right
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Someone's got another story about "alcohilism", this one is far better tough.
![[image loading]](http://supershopsite.com/product_image/Music/leaving-las-vegas-soundtrack.jpg)
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On August 30 2011 05:53 Uranium wrote:
And this is why anti-marijuana propaganda makes me mad.
I smoked a LOT of weed every day for ~6 years straight, and did just fine. I made friends, I didn't make an ass of myself, I remember everything, I graduated from college with a 3.4. I went to my programming internship high 2/3rds of the days and was invited back for a fulltime position.
Pot never made me do shit half as stupid as the things I've done while I was drunk. While drunk, I've fucked myself up in all kinds of ways, hooked up with girls that I never should have touched, broken and lost my possessions...
Yet alcohol is legal and marijuana is not.
lol its funny cuz i did kinda the same thing, spent almost 8 years smoking pot everyday, and dont regret a thing. But everytime i drink i feel stupid, tired, lazy, more anti social than if i was smoking. I feel no pain for anyone who drinks to much lol i mean, it makes you completely into a different person, and you WILL make stupid decisions. The only reason i dont smoke or drink anymore is well, smoking that much did hurt my lungs, so im taking a break, and drinking is just silly to me, sure on a friday night, get drunk, pass out, remember nothing, then go back to normal life. But drinking everyday, and being in a haze all the time, is terrible. id rather be sober all day than drunk all day, if you got problems, instead of drinking them away, maybe, you know, fix the problems? confront them? something useful. But i guess i can say, a shot or two of whiskey before bed isnt bad, just cause i have a hell of a hard time sleeping sometimes lol.
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On August 30 2011 06:16 rebuffering wrote:Show nested quote +On August 30 2011 05:53 Uranium wrote:
And this is why anti-marijuana propaganda makes me mad.
I smoked a LOT of weed every day for ~6 years straight, and did just fine. I made friends, I didn't make an ass of myself, I remember everything, I graduated from college with a 3.4. I went to my programming internship high 2/3rds of the days and was invited back for a fulltime position.
Pot never made me do shit half as stupid as the things I've done while I was drunk. While drunk, I've fucked myself up in all kinds of ways, hooked up with girls that I never should have touched, broken and lost my possessions...
Yet alcohol is legal and marijuana is not. lol its funny cuz i did kinda the same thing, spent almost 8 years smoking pot everyday, and dont regret a thing. But everytime i drink i feel stupid, tired, lazy, more anti social than if i was smoking. I feel no pain for anyone who drinks to much lol i mean, it makes you completely into a different person, and you WILL make stupid decisions. The only reason i dont smoke or drink anymore is well, smoking that much did hurt my lungs, so im taking a break, and drinking is just silly to me, sure on a friday night, get drunk, pass out, remember nothing, then go back to normal life. But drinking everyday, and being in a haze all the time, is terrible. id rather be sober all day than drunk all day, if you got problems, instead of drinking them away, maybe, you know, fix the problems? confront them? something useful. But i guess i can say, a shot or two of whiskey before bed isnt bad, just cause i have a hell of a hard time sleeping sometimes lol.
I'm pretty sure marijuana is less physically harmful than alcohol, but I've never tried it. I'm not pro either of them, I think you're better off finding your own path and doing what works. No one could've TOLD me alcohol would've been so depressing, I had to figure it out myself, and I expect the same for anyone else in anything else.
For the last year or so I hardly drink, no drugs, no cigarettes, no pipe and I feel better. To be honest though that's an entirely personal thing.
On August 30 2011 06:14 Mithriel wrote:
Good to hear things turned out good for you!
Mmmm turns out I'm not alone. For me it was broken relationship and general bad road in live which got me to drinking. Maybe not as heavy as you, but I couldn't be without the slight rush you get from alcohol. It made me feel calmer,.forget about the crap........ And as you pointed out lonely.
Since half a year I'm improving though, cut down drinking weekdays and usually a tiny bit in the weekend. Sometimes relapse a bit though and just down a bottle of absolut vodka. Small steps right
Yeah, like I said I don't think anyone could've swayed me either direction. Having support helped a lot but it's just something you have to arrive at -- that said I wasn't badly alcoholic and maybe that's a lot worse, but for you I think just take it one step at a time, try not drinking when you go out and as your alcohol tolerance dips you might just wanna stop. That kind of finished it for me as well -- I was off for a few months, tried drinking again and got wasted on five beers. Haven't gone past three since.
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break down break through man. you are fortunate you got to go through the gladiator training and came out alive. most people wouldnt choose to stop.
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EPT
