In defense of alcohol

So, it’s hot out there, I’m bored, and if I go to sleep right now I’ll wake up at 2 a.m. feeling like a Victorian ghost with Wi-Fi.

Let’s do this.

Let’s defend something objectively bad. Or, at the very least, very dangerous.

Alcohol.

Alcohol is indefensible as a health product, a decision-making aid, a truth serum, a coping mechanism, a romantic strategy, or a personality upgrade.

It is bad for your body, bad for your reputation, bad for your liver, and historically terrible for text messages sent after midnight.

And yet, a lot of us wouldn’t even be here today if our parents hadn’t, at some point, chugged tequila and briefly mistaken bad judgment for destiny.

Not me, of course.

I was planned.

My parents invoked Thoth, god of knowledge, wisdom, writing, and possibly questionable fertility rituals, and then—

Ta-da.

Here I am.

A miracle of intention.

A footnote in divine paperwork. Obviously.

My relationship with alcohol is similar — and codependent — to my relationship with humanity.

I live through long, difficult, and interesting stages of my life in which I find humanity revolting and seek refuge in my books, my code, and everything blessedly non-human.

I have lived through periods of loneliness so intense I’ve spent days without hearing my own voice, and even longer without hearing another human voice.

And those have been some of the happiest days of my life.

Not peaceful in the Instagram sense.

Not a linen-shirt-by-the-sea kind of peace.

Not even once did someone say with reverence, “eat, pray, love.”

But in those times, I was content. After I discovered dogs? I was happy.

Quiet.

Efficient.

Slightly hostile to visitors.

The kind of silence where nobody asks, “how are you?” because the answer is centered not on a perceived status, but around competence.

Only the very competent can live completely by themselves.

Blessed silence, in which no one offers advice.

Someday or another, I’ll write about advice.

Silence.

It is magnificent.

There’s silence, and there’s alcohol. And, after reading me pontificate about how silence is beautiful and a life without people is a life well lived, I imagine your mind is going fast to “I need alcohol to relate to people.”

But no, personally, I don’t enjoy drinking that much. I can’t, for the life of me, drink by myself, and no amount of vodka will turn a bad company good, nor a bad day, nor a bad love. Trying it can end up costing you your life and everything in it.

Alcohol is no joking matter, which is very bad because, well, it’s one of my pieces and, God, this one is difficult.

But I had to go and tell my friend — the one who asks me to drink tequila in a library, at 1 p.m.; yes, she has issues — “Hey, I’m gonna write one essay in defense of alcohol!”

And here I am.

Fucked.

Alcohol is not exclusively ours. Overripe fruit is the drink of choice of a lot of animals, and they tend to make the same face we do after they hit it: that deep snarling, primitive expression that says, “God damn, this is so bad, it’s great, more poison please!”

And here, we finally find our way to a finished, coherent, and interesting piece:

Have you people ever heard of the drunken monkey theory? Not to be confused with the stoned ape theory. There are a lot of theories around primates and vice, is what I say.

Basically, we can process alcohol because we depended, at some stage of our evolution, on ripe fruit, and that gets fermented easily. So we started tolerating it, but like that friend who thinks there’s something mystical and religious about huskies, we grew to like it.

And that’s where I can find my defense of alcohol: not in the sometimes amusing but often enough tragic effects it has on people when taken to the extreme, but in how we evolved around and with these organisms, and how it got ingrained into our culture in such a way that you can’t fully think about love, marriage, celebration, or death without at least the idea of alcohol becoming present.

Humanity discovered fermentation and then invented a thousand types of glassware to pour it into.

Different types of alcohol are deeply ingrained into their respective cultures, and even in each culture, different types of alcohol are related to different moments of life:

Recent breakup? Whiskey, neat.

About to kill Goldfinger? Martini, shaken, not stirred.

Light celebration? Wine.

Great celebration? Champagne.

You want to set your liver on fire and turn your throat into a monument to regret? Rakia.

Want to sandblast your soul? Vodka.

You want to drink, but no drink drink? Beer.

And you could go deep looking for the reasons each drink fits in its place, what situations, discoveries, and amount of disregard for human life went into its preparation and appropriation, and this is the kind of nerdish endeavor that makes me happy, so maybe later.

While civilization moves forward and the risk of the vice of the previous generation becomes perfectly clear — cue snotty teenager talking about the risks of tobacco while taking a rip from their “strawberry waffles at dawn” flavored vape, enthralled, just as Professor Tolkien was, with Nicotine — we pretend to move away from those vices.

In a way, we do. Drinking heavily and frequently is not acceptable in polite society, and smoking is up there with pushing old ladies into traffic and climbing fast.

But the essence of the vice?

That stays.

We may sanitize it and put USB-C ports on it, but in the end we’re the same drunken monkeys, always looking for the next fix. And hey, in the end it doesn’t matter, because either way we die, so “enjoy your bad habits in moderation” starts to look like really good advice.

And that’s so weird because I still remember my D.A.R.E. training. What was it?

Dedicate All Resources to Excess?

No.

Disregard All Recommendations, Ethanol!

And yes, yes, the question is floating in the air: drinking tequila in a library? Really?

That’s disrespectful both to tequila and libraries.

What can I say?

Oh, yes, this:

Being a non-drinking person in this day and age is perfectly fine. My more, ah, ethanolically talented friends will be shocked to hear that my mother, for example, doesn’t think of me as a drinker, and that by and large I get the “you’re so boring, have a drink” comment more than a shot of vodka.

I find that I enjoy alcohol as a sort of tabletop game: a sublime way of getting mentally closer to the people I’m drinking with and, at the same time, the primitive, high-stakes game of drinking poison without saying something too stupid, puking, or doing stupid things.

It’s like, only the people who can take a lot of alcohol and still behave properly should drink at all.

And in that case, why drink?

Right?

But, adding a bit of what I have learned about alcohol and vice in general, dealing with a multitude of friends from every fly, walk, or crawl of life: anything you depend on, anything that has a hold on you, can be bad.

Everything you start needing to escape can be destructive.

The problem with alcohol is not the drink.

It’s the emotions.

So, my defense of alcohol has failed.

I couldn’t really defend it.

It’s like playing with a venomous snake.

The best you can expect is that it doesn’t bite you.

And this wasn’t a particularly funny read because I tried to joke about being drunk, but I can’t help but think that someone who fought like hell to stop drinking could read this someday, and I don’t want to give a bad example or give echo to bad voices.

In my opinion, alcohol can be defended and really accepted as long as you don’t use it to get yourself or another person to do things they wouldn’t usually do, don’t take advantage of people who are blacking out, take care of the people who drank too much and passed out, and remember the human.

Drinking stories should be fun, not horror.

This ended heavier than I expected.

So, be like the Hobbits, who love beer but never drink to excess and set fire to everything worthy in their lives.

Drink, or don’t, but don’t allow it to be destructive.

Well, no more destructive than it needs to be to be fun.

Right?

And never drink and drive.