It’s Monday morning and I’m fighting a hangover.

Yesterday, I hosted a mini-reunion with two of my best friends from undergrad. They had been roommates for two years and I had lived across the hall from them until rooming with one of them for the final two years. He now lives in Denver, but the other one actually lives in the same town I just moved to over the summer.

It’s funny how life works out like that sometimes.

My new house has a bar, two wine racks, and a beer fridge, so instead of going out, I prefer to just have people come over and I play host/bartender. The only problem is that I served myself more drinks than anyone else. I have trouble with moderation and when something is available to me, I have difficulty not choosing instant gratification. It’s why I mixed myself another drink last night after everyone else had stopped.

It’s not a bad hangover. I’ve had much worse ones within the past year and I didn’t even take anything to combat my headache, but I do have bags under my eyes and haven’t shaved for a few days. I did all the things I normally do on a weekday morning — wake up with my daughter, take her downstairs without letting on that today was any different, turned on Disney Jr., made her warm milk, started the coffee pot, eventually showered and dressed for work — but this was not a typical morning. Not only did I drive a friend to the train station before heading the office, but during the first of several times on the toilet this morning, something felt a bit different. After I finished wiping I looked at the toilet paper in my hand and saw a blood red Rorschach inkblot. I was shitting blood.

The first thought that came to me was a line from a Nas song: “Alcoholic on toilets, I shit blood”

Alcoholic?

Me?

Am I an alcoholic?

I was a lot of fun in college and I had a lot of fun in college. I was very well-known (if not always well-liked), hosted parties, closed down bars, and even cultivated a reputation as someone that was always down for a beer, regardless of the time or day. At the start of senior year, while many of my classmates were ready to move on to their careers and begin making money, I saw nine months of freedom left before I would be yanked into the real world, where expectations and responsibilities would begin and never end.

I vowed that I would enjoy — really enjoy — every single moment of that final year. I had taken a heavy course load as a junior (cough cough 3.9 gpa cough cough), so I could coast as a senior, taking the minimum credits to graduate, including a pass/fail course. When my best friend died in early December of that school year, it only reinforced my sophomoric and juvenile worldview that every day could be your last. I conveniently ignored the fact that she, along with two other childhood friends of mine, had been killed because they had gotten in the car with a heavily intoxicated guy behind the wheel, who also died. I drove home drunk from a bar less than a week later.

Very few people want to get drunk on a Tuesday afternoon in January, but there were five of us (neither of the two from yesterday were in this group) that always did, so we did. This prevented me from sustaining any real romantic relationship or interaction (not that I was looking for one) and led me to be surrounded by my boys that wanted the same thing I did: to play beer pong, do shots, drink heavily, and have a good time. The day before graduation, I was sober in the afternoon for the first time in weeks and I had calculated that I had gotten drunk — not just had a drink — fifty-six days in a row. As I was doing the math, I couldn’t stop my hands from shaking.

I don’t regret a single moment of my senior year and, in fact, I have often daydreamed about reliving it, but I’m not really proud of it and wouldn’t recommend it to anyone else.

I’ve never considered that I was an alcoholic at the time because I never had a physical need to drink — it was a want — and because I had the end date in my head. How can you be an alcoholic if you know you needed to stop on May 12, 2002?

My mother’s father fought in the pacific in World War II, accepted as some of the most brutal and gruesome battles in human history. Like so many of his comrades, he came home and could not escape the horror of remembering what he had seen. The post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in those vets was unparalleled and a large majority of them turned to alcohol, if only just to be able to sleep through the night.

My grandfather was no different.

The story I’ve heard is that he started drinking beer heavily, so much so that he eventually saw a doctor. The doctor told him to stop drinking beer. I’m not sure if he actually took this command literally or if it was a convenient excuse, but he did stop drinking beer. And started drinking whiskey. He would put it in his coffee in the morning.

He died in the kitchen in front of my mom when she was nine years-old.

I would bet my meager life savings that if someone had asked him if he were an alcoholic he would have said no and probably come up with convincing reasons to support his answer.

It’s not just the alcoholism that runs in the family. The rationalization does too.

It’s now early afternoon on Monday and the hangover is subsiding. As you get older, you can still drink the same amount (provided you can stay awake), but the length and power of the hangover gets exponentially worse, so it’s often not worth it.

Not that that stops me.

There’s a sort of romanticism to the art of drinking, like when Don Draper holds a glass just so in his hands, a romanticism that is intensified in the arts, specifically for a writer. There’s this image of the writer hunched over his typewriter, furiously banging the keys while slowing slightly every so often to take another drink or of someone from two centuries ago sitting under a quilt by a fire writing longhand with a quill pen and a heavy glass half full of brown liquid on the table beside him.

This, of course, is ridiculous and was debunked by one of the greatest writers of the past forty years, who himself had the same misguided notions. As Stephen King wrote in his fantastic book On Writing:

“The idea that the creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time…Hemingway and Fitzgerald didn’t drink because they were creative, alienated, or morally weak. They drank because it’s what alkies are wired up to do. Creative people probably do run a greater risk of alcoholism and addiction than those in some other jobs, but so what? We all look pretty much the same when we’re puking in the gutter.”

At his low point, King was not only an alcoholic but also a manic coke head, writing novels while sticking cotton swabs in his nose to stop it from bleeding. Under pressure from his family he detoxed and came out on the other side, warning all of us — and his younger self — about the havoc that such behavior can wreak, but still I have this dream in my head, even going so far as to make sure the glass is visible in a photo with my laptop.

Maybe I’m being hard on myself. After all, I’m successful in my career, I do a ton of things around the house, and I am an absolutely terrific father. But there’s no rule that says you can’t do and be all those things and be addicted to alcohol.

Do I think I’m an alcoholic? No, I do not and the Center for Disease Control would agree with me. I often have only one glass with dinner or one late at night while reading or writing and there are plenty of days that go by when the strongest thing I drink is coffee. Just last week, I went six days in a row without a drink — though the fact that I counted may raise some red flags.

However, I still have those moments like last night when I push it a little too far because I don’t want the night to end, just like I didn’t want college to end. I’m an adult with a family, a career, a couple of mortgages, and a pile of responsibilities, but I don’t want the fun to end.

And I can tell that it could very easily start to affect my life.