What do you think people thought of the first idiot who drank fermented potato juice, got hammered, and proceeded to piss in the town well?

I’m pretty sure they stopped thinking about him after they drove him out of town.

Alcohol is a curious thing. Before water became a socially and medically required drink, and prior to the popularity of tea, everyone drank beer. Beer beer beer. Or wine. Or mead. Or other drinks depending upon your geographic location…but the point is, everyone drank. Even children drank some (although now we find this appalling, it IS historical fact, so get over it).

It seems to me that the drinking world went to pot with the advent of the industrialized age and the popularity and ease of production of two things: gin and rum. Women sold their children for gin. Men signed up for two years ‘afore the mast for naught but the promise of a drop or two of grog a day.

Alcohol has been used to render people unconscious (see conscription, or possibly Shanghai’d) for somewhat dodgy maritime purposes, legal or otherwise. Alcohol has, I’m quite sure, been used throughout history to get girls too drunk to say no, or too drunk to realize what was going on. It was used extensively medically prior to the discoveries (if you will) of morphia and whatever that stuff is you inhale and was very popular during the Civil War and now they use on TV to knock people out? You know what I’m talking about. The name just…eludes me. It’s been used to seal a deal (toast a wedding), christen a ship, christen a child, celebrate a victory, celebrate an anniversary…Posh Spice even used champagne to celebrate the birth of her children, immediately following the blessed event.

We drink to make us funny, to relax, to make us “loosen up”, to make us more appealing to the opposite sex, or worst of all, because we want to.

People have asked me quite frequently why I don’t drink. I’ve given you a whole host of historical reasons, now I’ll give you the personal ones.

Nature v Nurture

First, my entire family is probably genetically predisposed toward alcohol dependency and (not to mince words, for those of the family that read) depression of several varieties. I noticed at an early age that at the first signs of stress, folks would reach for a drink. I’ve no problem with a drink to take the edge off; I have a problem with four. The problem with this particular double whammy is that one behavior ALWAYS leads to the other. Alcohol is a depressant; it messes with the serotonin in your brain. If you suffer from depression, you have a serotonin problem. Why would you deliberately imbibe something that makes you make LESS serotonin, and gets rid of what little you have? It doesn’t make sense to me. So you drink, you feel a bit better, and then when you come off your drinking high you feel ten times worse, and for days. Is that worth the price of a few moments of drunken euphoria? It isn’t for me.

My second issue is with how people act when they are drunk. The stupidest excuse I have ever heard for drunken behavior is “well, people say things when they are drunk that they really mean and wouldn’t say when they are sober”. Some people do, true, and some people go so off their heads you shouldn’t trust anything that comes out of their mouth, even if they tell you the sky is blue. I have heard some of the ugliest, most pointless, meaningless and hurtful diatribes issue from the mouths of people who were drunks, who didn’t even have the sense to be remorseful the next day…because they’d no idea what they said. Just because you are drinking doesn’t give you an excuse to emotionally tilt at someone else’s windmills. Shut your mouth, and go sleep it off. Or at least have the sense to apologize for whatever you said/did the night before. Other people tend to just become emotionally mean. I actually think of Britney telling her kids, when she’d been reportedly drinking, that they were a mistake. Thankfully, those kids aren’t old enough to comprehend her words, but….everyone else is. We’ve all had a sister or brother or spouse or cousin who has gotten drunk and proceeded to blame us for every sin under the sun. If you’ve been there, you know it sucks.

Lastly, I don’t care for what it does to my body. I can generally have A drink and be fine. A drink – glass of wine, pint of cider, a beer. More than that, and I’m likely to have a migraine. The last time I drank a bottle of wine, and I had eaten, and I drank plenty of water – I had a migraine, and threw up several times, and felt terrible for several days. It made me crankier than normal So what’s the point? Why do something that makes me feel horrid? It doesn’t make sex any better. It doesn’t make me any more socially confident, or friendlier. It does nothing. I’m always conscious of the price I pay.

Now you know.