Prohibition
For reasons of health, I have not been able to drink much alcohol for quite a long time now. It’s sort of ok most of the time, as well, those who know me will know that I am almost always at work or in a state of general exhaustion anyway.
However. every now and again, I do manage to get out and stay up late with friends. I’m lucky enough to know many great and funny people. Sociable, entertaining and smart people who I love to hang out with. Great movers and shakers who can rip up a dance floor as well as any. My friends are also nice when they are drunk. This is pretty important when you are a non-drinker.
As we all know, being drunk can appear in so many forms – mean, violent, tearful, confused, funny, noisy, horny, irritating, sombre – take your pick. I like my friends drunk or sober and they don’t tend to fall into the bad categories.
Tonight (and this morning I guess) I had a think about what it was like when I could drink (there was more dancing) and what it is like now that I cannot. My friends are ace as ever, but on the way home trying to flag down a cab on Oxford St, I see the usual Saturday night show. Girls with their skirts up, guys getting rowdy, people throwing up and walking in the road. It didn’t seem too much like fun.
Drunk strangers are pretty freaky when you are sober and it’s late. You’re not sure if they are friend or foe. Will they hit on you or just hit you? I felt relieved when I got my cab and knew I would not be too drunk to give directions and had my wits about me just in case something threatening did happen.
But in my ears was a turn of phrase that makes me wonder. Someone during the course of the evening questioned whether I was fun, or having fun. I was having fun and I could listen to good friends mess around drunk or sober till the cows come home. But was I no longer fun? I wasn’t shouting or dancing or drinking alcohol. Does this pencil me into the boring collection of people you only want to take out when there’s nothing too exciting going on?
I get in less trouble now I cannot drink that’s for sure. I don’t take the wrong people home, wake up feeling green or break things when I’m on my way to falling into bed. But I also feel less capricious and in some ways less appealing as a fun friend out for night time adventure.
There must be a balance I guess. Maybe the key is more late nights without drinking and getting used to wreaking small havoc in a different way. I guess at least though I can still blog some bollocks, I still talk less of it in the queue for the night bus home.
If you could no longer drink would you feel less appealing socially?
One Response to “Prohibition”
Hi!
“but was I no longer fun?”. Earlier in the Prohibition, it seemed you were a little ambivalent as to what your friend asked you. ie are you having fun? There is a good deal of difference between having fun and being fun, yet they coincide experientially. One cannot but be fun when having fun. Despite your Prohibition Era, I am utterly convinced that you had fun that nite on Oxford St. with your drunk buddies, and, ‘as with dawn the night doth blend’ you could not but have been fun. Perhaps that question had best been reflected onto its author.
At any rate, I am not sure that I have found or am replying to the lady I heard this evening on a BBC Panel at the SxSW Festival in Austin, TX, it being early on the 21st of March, the night of the Great Moon, 2011. If it is you, I can assure you that you are fun, and have a great attitude as well as many talents.
I don’t drink, either, due to an old wives’ tale, and the advice of several physicians, that it interacts with medication. After listening to the panel, I decided to have a drink. My liquor cabinet was quite dusty, and is difficult to access since I moved my office to our basement and have it tucked into a corner…balancing on one foot with my right arm extended to its limit I was able to grasp the slender neck of a bottle. Upon liberating it into the light, the label was all in Japanese, and it brought to mind the friends from the Orient, whom I have always thought of as the Wise Men, though the head of their delegation, and the one I came to like most, was a woman, who had given it to me. Not knowing what it was, I craned my back to replace it and nibbed the short stubby neck of another bottle. “The National Drink of Iceland”, it proclaimed in English, as thoughts of the young lady whom I have long thought of as a daughter flooded my mind. I have always heard that Icelanders have no truk with fools, or don’t suffer them gladly, or something like that, so I put it back despite my affections for it’s donor.
After a nearly acrobatically induced apoplexy, I managed to wring another neck…Cacasa, [with the little curly tail under the second c]. The National drink of Brazil. The wisest, kindest eyes I have ever beheld, gazed again at me, and I saw the slightly rising lines of the beginning of a smile on the face of the head of the post graduate Dept. of Mathematics from the University of Brazil. Born in Jerusalem, a Palestinian Muslim, he has brought me more joy, just sheer joy, in the brief times we have spent together, than I could describe. No, I couldn’t open it. We will drink it together some nite when we are staying under the same roof, somewhere. Nearly exhausted, I managed to replace it into the 17th Century Barrister’s Beadle’s Proof
Signing table, (from Oxford St. in London) which serves as my liquor cabinet.
With all the sense I had in my fingertips, I felt around until they embraced the slender shoulders beneath the long neck of a bottle which had nearly cost me my life, Sljivovica. If you think that Croatian People are crazy in nature, you don’t know Slijivovica. In nature they are brilliant, talented and beautiful. In Sljivovica [yes, there is a little curly thing under the final c ] they are mad. It is twice distilled plum brandy, like Single Malt Scotch, never mixed at its source. It is a warm Baltic afternoon, bottled and stalled in time. The fruit that grew from delicate blossoms in the breezes that blew under the Balkan sun. I knew I had put two of them in there. Tonite [this morning] the first is one quarter gone…back through me into the Elements from whence it came. And I feel marvelous.
While I cannot encourage your use of alcohol, my dear young lady, I can tell you that all the fun you imagine that you used to be, while breaking things on the way to flopping into bed, and more has been distilled and is with you still, in your listening to your friends and priming the pumps of their stories.
I can also tell you that for every old wive’s tale and the glistening advice of physicians, there is an antidote….
Finally, I would love to tell you how the Slivowits nearly cost me my life, but don’t have time or energy, after what it took to get the damn thing out of the cabinet. Perhaps you will come to the States again, if you are who I think you are, and we can make a night of it. Publius Ovidius Naso was entirely correct. In Vino, there is, Veritas. And it has reminded me of many letters I need to write.
If you are in England, you might look up an old friend of mine. He has a hotel, simply called The Spa Hotel, which I imagine is in Kent, and he races Aston Martin cars. I have always called him, affectionately, Sir Christopher Scragg. I made contact with him, after many years, just before the Crash, from which nothing has been recovered.
Stay Fun,
mike