At some point in the very near future I’m going to have to get my thoughts together and actually put something down in writing about her, and the way I’m trying not to feel.
But not today. Today is about a different relationship. I of course mean alcohol.
I like a drink, like a lot of people. I only go out once or twice a week now, and I don’t drink in the flat, but when I do go out I tend to drink more than I should.
There was definitely a period last year where I was going out four or five times a week and making a lot of less-than-genius-IQ decisions. I was going out, drinking too much and then sending messages I shouldn’t send. It took me a while to figure out that I wasn’t messaging because I was drinking too much, I was drinking too much to give me an excuse for messaging.
A subtle, but important, distinction. If you have to get so drunk that you can ignore the voice inside telling you that she doesn’t want you and you have to leave her alone then maybe you have a problem.
I don’t really have what most people would consider to be ‘friends’. I have colleagues, and reasonably close acquaintances but the majority (and it really is a majority, at least 90, maybe even 95%) of those acquaintances have two common qualities. They’re universally younger than me (by at least ten years, certainly more than three quarters are more than fifteen years younger) and they all work in hospitality. Bar guys, servers, bar backs, hosts (I am however an equal opportunities acquaintance, I may appear age-biased but there’s a general 50/50 line down the middle between male and female).
The thing about knowing ‘industry’ people is that in some respects it’s great (funny stories, comp drinks, never having to wait to order no matter how busy it is, often never even having to order at all because they’ve seen you, passwords to the fast staff-only wifi) but the more trying part of these relationships is that oftentimes their ‘after work beers’ don’t start until one AM or later (they get to lie in, I have to be in work for eight thirty).
It’s not like I have anyone to answer to when I get home, no difficult questions or arguments about what time I got in, and while I’ve woken up in assorted flatshares, houseshares and even a dorm or two I’m generally able to get to the office as expected and do a days work.
I’m fortunate that I don’t get hangovers in the same way most people understand them and am in fact generally pretty effective in the office on those days; I tend to overcompensate but just because I’m high-functioning that doesn’t mean there’s not a potential problem.
My father was a ‘pub’ guy. Four or five nights a week in the local, and usually at least one lunchtime too over the weekend. Eight, nine pints a night regularly. He always maintained that he wasn’t an ‘alcoholic’ because he didn’t drink spirits and as a younger man I accepted his logic however as I got older I began to disagree with it, although it was never a conversation I had with him.
These days I think that even if you only drink one or two nights a week, and even if it’s not a lot, if you get to a point where you feel like you have to drink something to make you feel better then maybe there’s an issue there that you should think about addressing. Maybe that I should think about addressing.
