Alcohol abuse. It’s not just for “lads” you know. It’s also for would be tortured artist types who like to think there a sort of latter day Jack Kerouac. I put myself firmly in the latter category. Although, I’m also willing to entertain I may also be terminally self-involved or frankly just a bit of an obnoxious tosser with barely functioning social skills.
I have previously been of the view that alcohol was an enabler of sorts. I felt that it could make me cooler, braver, funnier, sexier, more interesting and hell, probably taller and better at football as well. Is any of this true? I don’t know, I can’t remember much these days to be honest with you.
When I first started going to music festivals I realized something rather strange happened. After a couple of days of near constant boozing a kind of mid-level drunkenness became an acclimatized new normal of sorts. Now, if any of you out there have, like me, noticed that University has caused a certain hardening of the system against the effects of alcohol, perhaps a similar thing is occurring? Maybe we are all drunk almost all of the time, and we just don’t notice, it would certainly explain a hell of a lot.
Of course, even if that were true, many of us would still find ourselves in the position of being fully drunk in a situation which does not require it. After all, any old schmuck can get splatto on a night out, but what of the final frontier, doing normal, fairly banal day to day activities with half a bottle of Captain Morgan’s happily coursing through your bloodstream, that’s a whole different box of porcupines isn’t it?
Now I’m a man who more or less exists on the boundaries of social convention as it is, spending far too many 6ams watching Netflix or periodically going for a smoke around Derwent College, so I have a few anecdotes in this regard, here are my findings… Being drunk at a societal by-election: excellent (landslide victory, thank you very much), being drunk and doing your ironing: utterly, utterly disastrous. As a general piece of advice, I would also suggest not getting your taxi driver to stop outside the library bridge at 2am, climb the embankment, shimmy up a drainpipe, go into the library, find some poor man in a corner of JB Morrell and ask him what he’s reading, whilst drunk either.
Ultimately I suppose what all this comes down to is that alcohol is the ultimate experimental variable. It’s an ever exciting punchline to the age old question of “what would happen if…” as in “what would happen if we went to a lecture, drunk?” or “What would happen if you throw a potato at me and I hit it with this frying pan, drunk?” It provides a certain sort of spice to life, and ultimately that’s partially what University is for, getting the chance to act out all those bizarre ideas you have. For many people, alcohol is a key player in this, and who am I to say otherwise. Just don’t try and do your ironing, I’m serious about that one.