Some background: I was raised in church. I can remember when I was 18 thinking that I never wanted to be the kind of person who had to drink in order to have fun. My father drank on occasion, never enough to give me the impression alcohol could ruin a person’s life. I just had this churchy sort of feeling that self-fulfillment was correlated with abstention. So somehow I avoided the activity until I turned 21.

I’m not entirely certain what changed with my thinking that led me to begin experimenting with alcohol. Maybe something about my college experiences and the feeling that things are never as cut and dry as they seem. Maybe I needed to get out more. Maybe I wanted to be a more interesting person. I realized there was a world I didn’t have access to if I kept from drinking. As the writer and biographer of famous literary drunks Olivia Lange puts it, the drink provides access to “the more difficult regions of human experience and knowledge.” So, I dove in. Well, maybe more like a belly-flop. Beer! Wine! Whiskey! It was as if a new me emerged, more powerful, more in-tuned, more…fun. I can remember in that first year thinking of how I felt like I missed out on so much because I was sober through my teenage years. I loved the taste. I loved the way it made me feel. And most crucially, I loved the experiences. Then I got to grad school. I lived alone for 9 months. I dabbled in all kinds of craft beers while reading and writing papers. I spent a lot of time with people who spent a lot of time drinking. I wrote half my thesis on wine. I learned about Wild Turkey and how to fake sobriety. My classmates and I did trivia nights at the Pasand Lounge like it was our job. The joy of social drinking came into full form. I learned how to speak intelligently three gins deep. I learned how to drink in the midst of so much. And so much happened as a result.

Drinking continued to clarify itself as my twenties rolled on. Life ebbed, life flowed, life stopped, life started, and drinking was the deep tradition that returned me back to the most crucial aspects of myself. For a Catholic, the crucifix is their return, their reminder. For me, the taste of liquor returns me to the nights, the people, the things said, the moments of grandeur. Drink is my locale of truth, in that I can’t resist myself (in a Kierkegaardian sense) when I’m around it.

So wherein lies the rub? Well, for me, it has to do with a particular way of existing. Alcohol isn’t so much a social lubricant for me as it is simply a lubricant. It’s a way of accessing and channeling certain intellectual and creative energies. Drinking is my own personal culture, with traditions, rituals, beliefs, and a code of laws to obey. I am a savory person. I enjoy the harshness of whiskey, the tannins of wine, and the hops of beer. They keep me in touch with the bitter edge of life. The Greeks had this word entheos — where we get our word enthusiasm from — and it meant to be possessed by a god or filled with the spirit. It was used in reference to Dionysian festivals, where much drinking took place. The apostle Paul referenced this tradition when he said “don’t be drunk with wine but be filled with God’s spirit.” In a sense, he was saying, choose your spirit. This is in a way similar to Baudelaire’s suggestion, “one should always be drunk. That’s all that matters… But with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you choose. But get drunk.” Alcoholism is thus the inordinate preference of one kind of spirit over another. The rub is that I enjoy many things. Poetry and virtue, food and socializing, golf and music, night walks and day dreaming, a well designed website. But do I enjoy a fine cocktail too much? I am too enthused by the whole thing? May be. So I wonder: what drives my affection? Why I am so beholden to ethyl?

I enjoy drink because it’s grounded. It takes me to small and simple things. The awkward and unexpected kindness of a stranger. Things said imperfectly in weird moments. The rationale(s) for doing rare peculiar things in odd places. The transcendent ideas, from out of nowhere, that rush into your head like bolts of zig-zagged lightning only to be outdone by eyes locking eyes from across the room. Drinking gets my head out of the clouds and into the spaces and parameters of wood, brick, concrete, and metal buildings where real people live. It humiliates me and floors me, all in the same instance I feel exalted. Drinking puts me at home in the world.

I often wonder, what fun can be had without drink? What kind of real, sustained, transformative fun can be had? Sure, a teetotaler can have fun. But not the same kind. It’s a thinner fun. It’s more like the concept of fun is fun, but they don’t have real fun. Now, I’m not saying that I don’t have fun when I’m not drinking. What I am saying is that the memory of the fun I’ve had while drinking makes other kinds of fun better. This is because I know what I’m capable of, and I know what I’ve seen, and everything from the past rests on the present as a kind of reminder about what should and shouldn’t continue. And this all rests upon a feeling about a bigger picture: Drinking is a way of engaging with the world. No doubt it is a coping mechanism, but who isn’t coping? Life is rough. There’s a lot to it. We all have our outlets, our muses, our ventures and misadventures. Drinking presents us with the opportunity to see more of the world, and as it really is, rather than as we wish it to be.

After all, the world is wide and vibrant and we weren’t born with everything we need. Rather, the world has it, in it, and it gives it to us when we ask for it. Grape. Barley. Agave. Sugarcane. Corn. Even the cassava root, if you’re creative enough. We have oxygen. We have hydrogen. They mix. And then we mix them some more with other things. The world appears bored, tired, untouched. Humans arrive, our hands go to the ground. The world comes alive. Our alchemy-influence has made this boring thing magical. Our hearts ferment as do the sugars.

But maybe the magic is already there, we just need the tools to discover it. Remember Bukowski’s words: “If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen.” It isn’t really the drink we are concerned with, but why we’re coming to it. Why do we pick up a hammer? To nail something. Why do we lift a guitar? To play a song. So then, why do we lift a glass of wine? Well it depends. It depends on the 99% of everything else life is comprised of. Alcoholism is then simply moving that final 1% too far into the realm of everything else. An alcoholic is the technical term we use to describe someone who can’t make it through 100% of the night without craving the taste of liquor in spite of the fact that the craving is what gives the night it’s raison d’être.

So, I think I’m an alcoholic, but only because we have the term. I think most great things can destroy us. Beauty, for instance, should be illegal if we were strictly careful people. But we’re not. And so, I remain in this slightly awkward position wherein I know that this powerful thing cannot sustain me, yet I need it in order to survive. Even if I were to never have another drink, I’d still be a lush, simply because everything is in reference to those darn dopamine receptors I’ve ran through on so many occasions. What has been done can never be undone. I am an alcoholic because not drinking is hard, not impossible, but hard. I am an alcoholic because I get angry if I don’t get a full 3-second pour. I am an alcoholic because I’m more interesting when I drink. I am an alcoholic because I have rules and regulations when I drink-and-play, my favorite of which is to “find manageable parts.” I am an alcoholic because I’ve fallen in love too many times under the influence. I am an alcoholic because I can drink hard, wake up the next morning bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and do it all over again the next night. I am an alcoholic because I like trial and error. I am an alcoholic because I do it better than others. I am an alcoholic because I have a local bar where I’m known by name, they know my drinks, and they’ve seen me do all sorts of silly things. I’m an alcoholic because I know the difference between drinking to forget and drinking to remember. I’m an alcoholic because the craving puts gravity into everything:

“Imagine a Carthage sown with salt, and all the sowers gone, and the seeds lain however long in the earth, till there rose finally in vegetable profusion leaves and trees of rime and brine. What flowering would there be in such a garden? Light would force each salt calyx to open in prisms, and to fruit heavily with bright globes of water — peaches and grapes are little more than that, and where the world was salt there would be greater need of slaking. For need can blossom into all the compensations it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing — the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one’s hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again.” —Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

(Lastly, I am an alcoholic because I can be, and it hasn’t ruined too much yet. And this is where all the fear is.)