Why We Drink
The people who consider twelve drinks a year ‘regular’ aren’t paying attention
You get older and you drink more because you have more reasons to drink, an accumulated mass of sorrows and victories pressing up against your door like angry leaves someone forgot to rake. This Wall Street Journal story from last week indicates twelve drinks a year makes a “regular” drinker, which is so laughably out of touch with the way people interact with alcohol that it should be spelled “laffably.” The article concludes that it gets harder to drink when you get older due to physiological changes; but in reality it gets easier because it becomes unavoidable.
You get older and occasions that call for the hoisting of glasses to mouths pile on. We drink when we find out a friend’s parent has cancer, we drink when our own parents are diagnosed, we drink on the anniversary of the day they died, lifting up a glass of their favorite cocktail (a 7&7 in my dad’s case) in a morbid toast.
You look at Facebook and see your friends from high school and their far-away lives and you drink. Because they look happier than you, or because they’re surely miserable, stuck in the same old New Jersey town with too many kids. One of my best buddies from high school robbed a bank two weeks ago; and when a friend texted me the news, I ordered another drink to process it, or forget it.
We drink after work because it seems like we should be happier at our jobs. They look like they have the same DNA as our dreams but somehow the traits we counted on skipped a generation. We drink instead of sitting at our laptops writing up freelance pitches; we drink because we think it will spur the creative engines but then we drink too much and find an easy, sloppy excuse for why we didn’t create anything.
We go to work mixers with our bosses and drink too much because the booze is free, then we fall asleep on the train later; we drink the following night because our hungover day at work was a fluorescent-lit circle of hell. We drink at 5 PM, when the winter darkness swoops in too early like a big ugly drape and we don’t know what else to do until it’s summer again. We drink on the beach in the summer because we made it through yet another awful winter.
We pop a bottle of wine and a few beers when interviewing potential new roommates, to see which of them can skitter most in tune along the social skin of our apartment; we pour ourselves another drink afterward when discussing the options once we realize that no one fits quite right and we’ve got to keep this painful search process going.
We drink because you got dumped by that one girl you thought you might actually have feelings for, and order another because you can’t fathom starting from scratch again, not at this age, because you thought no one could live this long and still not figure out how to have a relationship.
Birthdays come along and they’re invariably at bars or in booze-filled apartments and they pile up so fast because we’re in New York City, where Venn diagrams of intersecting social circles threaten to sever our heads like rogue pieces of sheet metal. We drink on thirtieth birthdays because it feels like a milestone, we drink on thirty-first birthdays because people feel depressed about aging, we have that extra whiskey late into the night to convince our friends and ourselves that age is just an arbitrary measure of time; that you should stand up to it with your middle finger sticking out, proud of your Peter Pan lifestyle; that here, we are in bars at irresponsible hours of the morning, in the pulsating core of an urban experiment, while the rest of America sleeps comfortable and bored in their beds, sober as gluten-free nuns.
You gather in a cheap bar for Friday happy hour at the end of that terrible week in April, the one that’s apparently going to be psychically scarred forever with horrors like the Columbine shootings, the BP oil spill and now the Boston marathon bombing. You pound beers thinking about how shitty of a week it’s been and you can’t possibly watch the news any more. Then they catch one of the bombers and the waitress buys you all shots, so you drink some more.
You get even older and the terrible sadness that comes with having so many life chapters behind you makes you wonder how many nights of drinking you actually have left.
You think of the people lost, and the people to come; you think of cancer going on a drunk driving bender through your circle of friends, leaving piles of parents scattered on the side, never getting prosecuted for the hit and run; you think of deadlines, of whether you wasted your twenties, of how parts of New York City after Sandy and how they still look visibly bruised now, of gun violence and how every president is a disappointment. You think of how so many of your supposedly adult friends still can’t afford to see a doctor, so you take them to the bar and give them the whiskey cure and hope it works.
And with that, I’m going to have twelve drinks tonight. Today has been a rough year.
