Since the dawn of time, good taste, literary traditions and the pathology of the most common psychological conditions require for a girl like me to spend at least three consecutive days in a state of depression after having decided to change the biological father of her unborn children with another one (who can at least play belote!). And here I am now – wallowing on the sofa all day long, wearing sweaty shorts, a bra that has seen better days, and a pair of the ugliest pink clogs decorated with the harrowing greeting “Hello Kitty”. I am crying and drinking. In this particular case, the drinking fulfills the classical function of being simultaneously a barbiturate, a personal shrink, and your best friend, who may be deaf-mute, but at least supports you one hundred percent whenever you find yourself indisposed or chased by a vicious creditor. Apart from that particular case, however, drinking happens to be an entirely different planet. A planet on which we live – me, The Little Prince (with The Big Bottle), and Baron Munchhausen (who, as you may probably know, after falling drunk in the mire, was perfectly capable of pulling himself and the horse beneath him out of the water by his own hair.
Let me tell you about the drunkenness of people like me. And when I say “people like me”, I mean people you’d never suspect of getting themselves hammered every other evening, because on the outside, they are small, loveable and have the looks of someone who lives only on Norwegian glacier water and broccoli. There is no particular reason for our type of drunkenness – it is not addictive by default and cannot be categorized as a pathological medical condition that should be treated. Instead, it is drunkenness for the sake of its own. A form of l’art pour l’art.[1]
Fortunately, my job is of the kind that does not interfere with my drinking habits. I teach at the university and my academic standing makes it possible for me to work only 15 to 16 hours per week. And we are talking academic, not astronomic hours, which means that, all in all, my weekly work load does not exceed 730 minutes! As you can imagine, a person with that kind of work load has at one’s disposal a lot of free minutes and hours, and even days to engage oneself in whatever one’s true vocation is. For some it’s gardening, for others – sex after getting high, for another solid group – it’s binging and purging, and for us…for my people and me – it’s a bottle of white wine on the balcony.
The strange thing is that I am not a fan of drinking with friends. With enemies either.
I don’t drink on full stomach.
I don’t drink while eating soup.
Sometimes I dream alcohol is not damaging at all to the liver. And also, that consuming alcohol never leads to getting drunk, the result of which is that you feel like shit the next morning (a condition also known as hangover). Being slightly intoxicated though is good, even healthy, especially if you consume alcoholic beverages with recreational and/or prophylactic purpose. But the type of intoxication which results in flashing your tits to all the strangers in a bar cannot be good.
I like it when I find myself in another city, let’s say Paris (to be true to the cliché), and sit folded in two at a tiny table, squeezed between two other tiny tables in some bistro with a classical tourist-friendly panoramic view. I usually let the sulky waiter to choose the wine for me. I say, “C’est à vous a decide, monsieur!”, and he usually brings me Chablis. And he picks exactly that wine because a glass of it costs 8 to 10 Euro and not because of my incredibly authentic sounding French, or that I have the word connoisseur tattooed on my forehead. Then, I sip my expensive Chablis while observing through the lethargic veil of my myopic eyes the Japanese tourists with their miniature feet in 3-dollar-worth flip-flops, dragging in their even more miniature white-gloved hands bags of Chanel and Dior.
Also, I like drinking and reading a book (or something else, for example, a linguistic article, in which I highlight the important passages). This, however, often turns into a highly challenging occupation for my abilities, because at some point, I’d catch myself only drinking, and not reading. And I need to start from the beginning. In case this turns into a routine, I try to uplift my spirit by telling myself that actually it is not a good idea to have my attention distracted by two simultaneous activities. At this point, I can feel your eagerness to ask the perfectly logical question whether I am drinking while writing this piece. The answer is simple and I regret to bring this to your knowledge, but the truth is that all writing should be done while being moderately to highly intoxicated, and the editing – when totally sober. Hemingway said it. Not “the people”. The thing is that Hemingway forgot to mention that the two activities complement one another only in case one is a genius writer and both writing and drinking are as natural to you as breathing.
Of course, it is quite possible that if you happen to write and get wasted at the same time, huge chips of your broken sub-consciousness come to the surface, unwanted and feared, and which, in the morning after, when you reread the text, scare you to the extend you will be willing to be hospitalized. Actually, you get so shocked by the things you have written that you may even end begging someone close to you to restrain you from any social contacts until you are declared safe for all the people around, also for the possible pets, and for yourself, of course.
I am not particularly a fan of the drinking-and-driving combination. That’s because I consider myself a very conscientious citizen and I think that everybody who violates the traffic ordinance should die. I am not a driver myself. It’s not that I am afraid I’d die because of my own damnation. I just missed the chance back then when I was still not that dedicated to my hobby. And now it’s too late. Besides, it’s too engaging – you have to always know in advance whether you are driving later or not, which greatly impoverishes the spontaneity of the moment when you decide to have a drink at, let’s say, three in the afternoon.
This last sentence made me glance at the lower right corner of the screen and what a nice surprise! – it is almost three in the afternoon! The temperatures outside are already summerish and the first drink is cunningly beckoning me with its devilish curaçао-flavored finger to come and wet-kiss it. And later…Will see what happens later. I mean, the day is still young. Probably by the end of the evening I will cheat on the first one with some other drinks. I know myself.
[1] Or art for art’s sake expresses a philosophy that the intrinsic value of art, and the only “true” art, is divorced from any didactic , moral, or utilitarian function. Such works are sometimes described as “complete in trhemselves”, a concept that has been expanded to embrace “inner-directed” or “self-motivated” human beings.
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