Alcohol

A story about judgement

For the past few months I haven’t been drinking very much, more circumstantial than anything, and along the way I’ve begun noticing an odd thing within myself and my friends . . . judgement. Seeing that it’s now January—Dry January, for some—a few days post the overrated reverie of NYE, it seems like a good time to talk a little bit about booze.

Now, I started drinking around freshman year of high school, initially engaging in the classics: skimming shots from random bottles in the liquor cabinet, pilfering an assortment of beers from the fridge, and occasionally pulling “Hey Misters” at the gas station in the next suburb over.

Ignoring the abstinence argument foisted upon us by our D.A.R.E. instructor, weekends became debaucherous and sloppy, if not outright dangerous, all in the name of sociability. Because if you weren’t drinking, with few exceptions, you weren’t cool.

This is the basis upon which my understanding of alcohol was built, and when you’re sixteen, or eighteen, or twenty, trying to make friends with people whom mostly grew up understanding alcohol the same way, it’s no small wonder why alcohol has gained a tenuous place in our culture.

I’d like to think that now, in my late thirties, I have the confidence to say no. But then I go to a party and, even if I’m not drinking, I sometimes still order a tonic with lime in a rock glass, just to avoid questions. Some might say this marks a deep-seated issue . . . yeah, please see the above three paragraphs.

But, like I mentioned, over the past couple of months I haven’t been drinking and I’ve been paying more attention to the idea—not from some conscious effort to understand this thing with alcohol, but more a noticing of how I felt when booze was on the table. So, about that judgement.

Mainly, I’ve seen how I judge myself. Case in point: at a work happy hour this November, as everyone sat on the patio, I went into the bar and ordered a non-alcoholic beer, pouring it into a glass. When, out of friendly curiosity, someone asked what it was, I only said an IPA. Because I thought they cared.

In a separate instance, I brought a few cans of NA beer to dinner at a friend’s house. He saw it, nodded, and pulled out a bottle of wine. “Don’t judge me,” he said, “but I want the real stuff tonight.” Because he thought I cared.

There’s that quote from David Foster Wallace: you’ll stop caring what people think about you when you realize how seldom they do. That’s right. So, the question is: if other people don’t really care what I’m drinking and I don’t care what they’re drinking, who exactly is doing the judging?

Drinking has a storied place in our culture. Take Hemingway, for instance, who might be as famous for his drinking as his writing. His stories make you (read: me) want to drink. I had vermouth straight-up for the first time after reading A Farewell to Arms. I bought a wine skin to take into the mountains after finishing The Sun Also Rises. So, when I detoured my honeymoon to visit his grave in Idaho (a whole other story), I figured I’d like to have a drink there in his honor. The gravestone itself was covered in bottles—whiskey, wine, beer, vodka—other people toasting the man. But I didn’t end up having that drink; instead I stood there for ten minutes and left. In retrospect, the place perfectly captured our collective ambivalence about alcohol, because sitting there amongst the bottles of booze was a coin, and when I knelt down for a closer look, I saw it was a token from Alcoholics Anonymous—24 hours sober.

Next to a figure like Hemingway, a celebrated drunk, perhaps the nagging feeling of judgement which accompanies drinking is deflected. I certainly didn’t feel guilty about not having that toast.

Even the founding fathers of this country wrestled with the internal conflict brought on by alcohol. Benjamin Franklin once wrote: Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy (in fact, he wrote this about wine, but whatever). While elsewhere, in his personal letters, he aspired to be “temperate in [his] Pleasures . . . Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation.”

In other words, to use the cliché, “everything in moderation.” And what is moderation if not simply having alternatives? I’ve certainly had role models in my life—my grandmother, for one, was always the life of the party and I saw her drink exactly one sip of champagne in her life; likewise, my grandfather has always stopped after a single glass of Merlot—but those wholesome examples were obscured by the persuasive glare of peer-pressure screaming, drink this beer dude!

However, the malted tide seems to be ebbing. There are dedicated non-alcoholic bars out there; there are a ton of companies making non-alcoholic beer (we’ve moved way beyond O’Doul’s at this point). Sobriety is, dare I say, kind of trendy.

One of my best friends has been sober for nine years, providing him a lot of time to think on these things, and I was talking to him about this the other day. At one point he asked: how often do people who don’t actually want to drink go out and do it anyway? A lot is the answer.

So why do we drink, or even pretend to drink, when we’d rather not? Personally, I think it’s my twenty-year-old self in there, the one who is doing all that judging, still convinced that if you’re not drinking, you’re not cool. But you know what I have to say to him now . . . fuck off kid.

Someone who’s put this more eloquently than me is the writer

Courtney Maum

. She has a great piece on her evolving relationship with wine—well worth the read—and in the end she says: “I wish I had the fortitude of character to finally make the call: red wine has been making me feel like shit for years, and it’s time to give it up. But somehow, I’m not there yet. Maybe it’s a question of a gradually cooling turkey, instead of going cold turkey overnight.”

The past doesn’t quiet so easily, after all. Especially if you don’t have something better to run toward. Ironically, it’s a childhood vice that offers me some kind of answer.

Recently, a few of my friends came down the mountain from rock climbing. They were debating where to grab some beers, the normal post-climb play. But then one of them suggested ice cream—and it turned out none of them actually wanted to drink anyway—so instead of going to the bar, they went to the ice cream parlor.

Maybe in the end the key to quieting my twenty-year-old self is by hanging out with my eight-year-old self instead.

Either way, here’s to some judgement-free beers—and ice cream socials.

-Martin

p.s. And Happy New Year