Today I saw a print in a shop window. It was the outline of a whiskey jug, with words written on the side: "sad, happy, horny, sad." The words were stacked on the bottle, and it was about one quarter full, right before the treacherous fall back into sadness that drunkenness makes inevitable.
For me, it was the first time to see this truth acknowledged so openly. As a society, we have a nearly devotional respect for alcohol. It's a fixture at nearly every gathering, it's consumed in great quantities, and it's thought to be the cure for what ails us. Yet this last part is nothing but a myth. We all know no amount of beers can cure any problems. We're all sharply aware of the way an intoxicated person acts and the buffoonery that results. Yet we keep going around drinking our beers and expecting, somehow, that a "good buzz" will some how, this time, fix everything. Yet it enhances our malaise and strips us of our ability to deal with our problems rationally. Worse, it robs us of time better used some other way.
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.
So the question is, why have we locked ourselves in this pattern? Why do we continue to spend our whole weekend getting drunk? Why do we pretend that alcohol has magical properties it will never possess? Really, why are we so dishonest with ourselves about booze, and why can no one talk about this? Our tacit refusal to recognize the obvious is hurting us all, at least in my small, art-school corner of the world.
But still, I will raise my glass with all my friends tonight at another meaningless house party. What else can I do?
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