Tired of Thinking About Drinking
Introduction
THIS IS WHAT I THOUGHT: There isn’t enough to drink.
I should go to the liquor store now. I’m not sure what we have planned for tonight and I won’t want to go out again. One bottle won’t be enough. Two would be cutting it close. There isn’t enough.
I will put our glasses side by side on the counter when I pour the wine each evening. I will line the glasses up to make sure that you don’t get more. There isn’t enough.
And this really happened to me. I was alone in a hotel room, and looked into the mini bar, and saw:
- one tiny Toblerone bar
- one KitKat bar
- one bottle of water
- two tiny cans of beer
- two tiny airplane-sized bottles of red wine
and I thought, I can’t start drinking now, there isn’t enough.
Not enough for what?
To fade out. To be numb.
Because despite what I may have said, I never wanted one glass of wine with dinner. I wanted three glasses. What’s the point in one glass?
And despite what I may have said, I never drank because I liked the taste. I romanticized expensive wines, but they are all basically the same. Alcohol is a vehicle, and I didn’t care which vehicle I used to travel. When the fancy stuff was gone, I was content to drink boxed white. I didn’t let a room-temperature light beer stop me.
I didn’t drink for the taste. I drank to get fuzzy. I wanted to be slightly numb, to take the edge off.
I spent a lot time taking the edge off and then trying to maintain the edge taken off, but I usually ran into problems of sobering up too quickly, or drinking too much. There was no magic formula for edge-off-ness. I tried to find it. I tried having beer before wine, I tried eating first, I tried drinking on a empty stomach. There may have been a four-minute window of edge-off-ness and then I spent the rest of the night trying to find the four-minute window again. Mostly I found the couch, the remote, and pizza delivery.
To hear this as an audio, it’s episode #48 in the free one-minute messages that I do every day, here.
