Into the Drink

My drunk friends always tell me, “alcohol is a social lubricant.” I always tell them that I want to see what dictionary they are using because the last time I checked, spilling a 40 down the front of your shirt doesn’t facilitate anything. I suppose it removes a barrier between me silently judging you and me sharing a full-throated critique of the hot mess you’ve become after barely sniffing your preferred lube, but I doubt this is what you were going for. So I feel that this is an opportune moment to dispel some of the myths surrounding the greasing qualities of booze.

Alcohol transfers people to a parallel universe, divorced from reality. Like the good people of Lake Woebegone, all the men are strong, all the women are beautiful, and all the STDs are in remission. But once you put the cork back on your Garrison Keillor fantasy land you come crashing back to reality where all the men are unemployed, all the women are fugly, and that itchy burning won’t go away. And the kicker is that no one will ever know just how shameful your walk home the next morning really was because any pictures of your fugly, unemployed one night stand will have been magically deleted from your camera…or if you’re lucky, you’ll have spilled some social lubricant on it and it will be fried.

This raises the broader issue of waste. There are children starving in third world countries and you have gone through three digital cameras in two years because you get all butter fingersy around any drink with vodka and something fruity. And that doesn’t even begin to address the outrages your cell phone has suffered. It’s a wonder no one has picked up one of your lost cell phones and used it to stalk you or send you cancer or something. They totally could because you leave your cell phones everywhere. Heaven help me I cannot understand who you need to be calling at 1 am with a lime ricky in one hand and a ciggy falling out of the other. I guess you could say that alcohol speeds up the process by which you part with your money, but again, I don’t think this was what you had in mind.

Then we have a flotilla of awkward social encounters that will cause you even more angst than the drawer full of Plan Bs in the bathroom. Do you remember going up to that attractive person and waxing philosophical about how super-awesome it is to live rent-free in your parents’ basement and play video games all day? How about the drunken text message to your ex that came out like garbled Morse Code except for the one coherent sentence that you managed to mash into the keypad with your fingers which was “I m drnk…”? It seems that social lubricant only works well at sending you into a shame spiral that you won’t even discover until you wake up the next day with a raging headache and vomit in your hair. You’ll listen to a series of voicemail messages that start out extolling your wicked awesome drunkenness but will steadily deteriorate as friends ask you to call them back when you get up to make sure you lived through the night, and finally, the rehab clinic calls to tell you there’s a van waiting outside.

I raise this issue here not because I care about emotional toll that drinking takes on you; I could not care less about you. Rather, drunkenness is a problem because you are no fun to be around when you’re drunk and I have no interest in babysitting some sloppy disaster at the bar. You are smelly and incoherent and take up a lot more space when you’re sloshed and I am in no mood. If we add up the costs of the externalities you impose when you drink, the total would be enough for Sally Struthers to save an entire village. The bottom line, here, is that it is not polite to get so lubed up that you turn into a puddle of deadweight loss for humanity.