Professor Yeti

Alcohol and I are at a crossroads. Is it going to remain a significant part of my life, or not? All signs point to yes, but I find myself frankly unsatisfied with what drinking is doing to me these days. At twenty-five I find that I drink socially between one and three nights a week and have attained enough knowledge of beer culture to write about it in vaguely insightful terms to a general audience. But really, do I enjoy drinking most every time I do it? Not at all. Come to think of it, I never have. But it is only lately that my awareness of this has asserted itself, and caused my faith in drink to be shaken. Rightly so, too: my faith in drinking is a textbook example of bad faith, for I have just as many negative drinking experiences as positive ones, if not more, as the following table will illustrate:

If I were a hunter, and 48% of the time I went out hunting I either shot myself or fell from a tree, would I keep hunting? You’d think not. Then again, if I lived in caribou country, I just might, because it would be a required social custom. And, let’s face it, for unmarried twenty-somethings who aren’t religious, all the world is a hunting ground for the vodka tonic moose. More often than not it is social custom that drives my drinking, but it’s never just that. There is always the hope that maybe drinks will lead to a celebratory and ridiculous situation wherein I do something with my fellow man or (more often) woman that I would never do otherwise. I drink because I have the sorts of friends best met in bars (who doesn’t?), and because it is stupid to order O’Douls, and on the off chance that it will create a memory.

But there is still the problem of the drinking percentages table, which reveals that drinking’s more or less like going to a casino: you’re happy to come out even. The chief difference here is that it’s not as fun to lose your wits as it is to lose your money. And when I can feel myself losing my wits after a beer and a half, it infuriates me that I’ve come to a place to socialize, and then spent money on some funny water that makes me bad at talking. I can socialize plenty well when I’m sober, so I just need to get better at the whole drinking angle or give it up altogether. Thus I have decided to try to become more aware, and ultimately more in control, of the effects of what I am ingesting. I aim to help the beer help me, and get drunk like a proper scientist.

This is not the first time I have tried to get better at drinking by drinking smarter and involving pseudoscience. During my senior year at Carleton College I had a couple of ideal drinking nights in the same term. Each time the sauce gave me a terrific, rushing buzz which sent me jubilantly pinballing all over campus, laughing and tripping over some things and talking a great deal in a rapid but fluent manner. Both nights were caused by a healthy dose of cheap beer administered very quickly. The first time I inhaled half a pitcher from a local bar, the second was touched off by the Power Hour (1 oz. shot beer / min. x 60 min.). I wondered if I’d lit upon the Golden Ratio of Desirable Tipsiness. Was it really 1:1? That seemed too easy. It worked much better than the more aggressive ratio of 1:5:30 (one shot every five minutes for thirty minutes). I tried that one very scientifically one evening before heading down to a party on Mai Fete island, and ended up overshooting the desirable middle-ground of tipsiness completely. I went from stone sober to uselessly drunk without even dragging my feet a little along the way. Two or three glasses of wine at the rate of one every ten minutes has sometimes done me well — it’s a classier variant of the rapid beer influx. Though gulping down 30 or 45 ounces of beer at the rate of one a minute and then cooling off for awhile is still a pretty promising start to an evening, it was never a panacea. Alas, then as now, to the horrible, unscientific inconvenience of everyone, how well or poorly a body gets drunk is also effected by mood.

Having resumed the practice of metaphorically drinking whiskey out of test tubes in 10 mL measures the past few weeks, I haven’t been able to improve on the numbers I came up with in college. In fact, I’ve only gleaned one real useful realization from mulling over the highs and lows of my drinking history. That is: nearly every single one of my best drinking experiences has involved a break in action, followed by a second wind. Everyone knows that if you drink, and you don’t know when to quit, things are sooner or later going to end up in a bad way. But to make “know when to stop” into a golden rule is an all too easy and not very sympathetic answer, because it’s neglectful of the fact that it really is quite hard to do that. Never mind that tipsy people rarely make for good self-deniers, even people who want to stop drinking feel that they can’t. They think that if they switch to water, they’ll get persecuted by their friends for doing so. Even among halfway intelligent people, drinking culture is all about conscious stupidity and reinforcing a cycle of doing the wrong thing. Therefore, you can’t ever admit that you’ve had enough beer, so what do you do? You have to make sure your evening has natural breaks built into it, or else fool people into thinking that you’re still drinking when you’ve quit. One approach I came up with while regulating my intake over recent weekends was to order whiskey and coke in separate glasses. This also turned out to be a good way to give myself that break — I could quit drinking surreptitiously whenever I wanted. I’d just let the half-full whiskey glass sit there at some point in the evening. I still felt compelled to drink something, of course — the oral fixation involved in ritual drinking has got to be as bad as that of smoking. Though water wasn’t the answer (I’d give myself away if I kept going over to the water cooler every ten minutes), the existence of the glass of Coke allowed me to keep playing along and get my break at the same time. (Note: This strategy only works when you have a waiter who is good enough to keep an eye on all your assorted glassware and keep bringing you more free Coke. It probably helps to have a Sonicare, too.) Even better are natural breaks: 20-40 minute lapses while walking to a different place in the neighborhood or taking a cross-town cab help you refocus and catch that second wind from which nearly all great drinking bouts are born.

As for the rest of my research, I can’t say I produced any groundbreaking new theorems. At best, I became more aware of the influence of secondary factors (mood, company, goals, etc.), and am able to accept that the measurable facets of drinking hold less sway than the unmeasurable. Case in point: this past weekend, I had more drinks than science would deem wise on Friday, yet felt very pleasantly in the swing of things. On Saturday, I followed the formula carefully, yet felt thick-headed. Why? I’d guess that it was because on Friday, I was drinking fast among fast drinking people, just to keep pace. On Saturday I drank myself slightly ahead of slow-drinking people in a relaxed and conversational atmosphere where my formula of speed was a bit out of place. It would seem that it’s better to drink at the speed of traffic, and looking over my most memorable past experiences, this has usually been the case. As long as I feel that I’m drinking in intimacy with other people — on their frequency, as it were — things will generally go well. But if I try to push it, or am too timid to ante up and go along with fast drinkers, things usually go awry. I’ve found that you can’t really make a mellow evening hyped, and vice versa. Better just to raise your glass to the spirit of the evening, however decrepit or tedious the spirit may appear, and have a little faith. For, much like prayer, drinking is a sacred act, and, much like prayer, it most often gets no results. Still, when the chapel bells ring out for happy hour every Friday, I know they toll for me. As long as it involves the blood and the body, and spontaneous private confessions, it’ll be hard to say no.

Chris Leslie-Hynan first felt drunk on Evans Hill, behind The Cave in September of 1998.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 17th, 2005 at 11:43 am and is filed under Columns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.