Holding My Liquor

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[I am so confused after all these months of living between UK keyboard machines at work and my US laptop, I no longer can even remember where the quote key is supposed to be and where the proper place for the @ sign is. My fingers just automatically try both combinations. This whole complicated shift-pinky-delete-shift-2 routine happens without me even thinking about it. Truly, I am an international man.]

Briefly, a quick reference point for my peculiar relationship with alcohol.

When people bandy about the phrase ‘pleasantly buzzed’, I understand that they mean they are happier, or their mood has been lifted from the alcohol, but I have never been there myself. For whatever reasons, I do not get the mood-altering effects from booze.

Though I do not get any good emotional effects, I am subject to the physical effects of alcohol. My hand-eye coordination decreases, the world is perceived as more fluid and curvier, and I become careful in my speech to guard against careless mispronunciations.

When I am drinking, it is as if I can feel the words forming in the back of my head, and I walk them out of my mouth to make sure they arrive okay. The more drunk I get, the further back, spatially, the words form, till eventually I am tracking them from about a foot behind my head, walking them from way back there all the way through my head and out into the world.

I do not perceive much change in cognitive function while drinking. I make the same decisions and process through the same thoughts as I would otherwise. Except for once where it took me twice to realize that I was backwards when I was converting zero Celsius as thirty-two below Fahrenheit. That was just stupid. Also, I am learning to take more advantage of the shared social consensus that alcohol makes permissible a less strict observance of everyday inhibitions.

Drunkenness is divided for me into clear stages:

1st stage of drunkenness: 1-3 drinks (all assuming fairly rapid consumption). No real difference at all. Only the first hints of the curving of the world. I would still happily lace up my skates for an evening of ice hockey.

2nd stage of drunkenness: 3-5 drinks. Noticeable but negligible effect. More a novelty than anything else. When moving, I perceive the first softening of edges. Hard angles are overlaid by the curves you make to navigate them. But we could definitely still go play tennis or chess or go cycling.

3rd stage of drunkenness: 6-n drinks. Substantial physical effects. Tracking words carefully from inception through execution. Locomotion becomes a much more conscious effort as it is uncertain how much my automatic reflexes are still to be trusted to avoid minor impacts. But we could definitely still... talk. Or play that thumb-wrestling game.

4th stage of drunkenness: n+1 drinks. I did not think there was a fourth stage for me. But then at a family reunion in California a few years ago, I started drinking around 4pm, before dinner, and drank steadily through till about 2am. Not intentioned at all, just being social and not paying attention, and that was the form that social interaction around me was taking. It was just natural to have a drink in your hand.

At the end of the night, I remember that I was talking to my cousin K~, but I do not recall a single thing we discussed in the last couple of hours. Right before we said goodnight, we swung by the clubhouse and shot a game of pool, and I was horrified to discover that I could hold the cue ball or the target ball in my head, but not both at the same time, and definitely could not picture the line of the shot. It was terrible, it was like shooting blind.

For the first time ever, alcohol made me throw up, about twenty minutes before bed. 4th stage. Who would have known? It has never happened again, so I do not know what the consumption threshold is for the 4th stage.

The next morning was also the closest thing I have ever had to a hangover. I felt entirely fine. No more tired than the late night and loss of sleep would account for. No headache, no stomach ache, no weird feelings or aches or anything. But, inexplicably, for the first four hours of the day, I had to throw up every twenty minutes. Like a little clock in my otherwise perfectly fine body. Twenty minutes pass by, time to go dry heave, then fine for twenty more minutes. It was very weird.

So, that is me. Next time I say, ‘I was well into the second stage by the time we went to the theatre...’, you will know exactly what I mean.

[I just read the most darling thing ever. A young lady was saying that she and her boyfriend had talked about their differences. She was x and y and z, and he was b and c and d. She was apples, he was oranges, and so forth. And then at the end, 'well, at least we talked through our differences.' So easily off the hook. I want to live in that world.]