In Defence of the Hard Stuff.

I’m not convinced that consuming alcohol ‘changes’ people as such. I think it acts as a disinhibitor; it scrapes away some of the veneer with which we clothe ourselves in order to be acceptable. So, if we have aggression lying beneath the surface, we become aggressive; if we have darkness there, our mood becomes blacker; if we’re highly sensitive, we give more impassioned expression to concerns and connections, and so on.

I think it has another effect, too – broadly similar but subtly different, or so it seems to me. It has a way of shifting the focus of perception from one part of a complex consciousness to another. That’s what I most notice in myself.

That’s why I often wake up in the morning, remember a blog post I made after drinking two or three double scotches the night before, and decide I no longer want to own it. The focus is different in the cold light of morning, and after a night’s sleep, than it was in the alcohol-induced haze of the wee small hours. The sentiments expressed no longer seem appropriate. They can even be downright embarrassing. And so I get up intending to delete the post as soon as I boot up the computer.

I rarely do delete it, and the reason for that is what I find interesting. Re-reading the post nearly always reconnects me with the part of my consciousness that wrote it. That rarely happened before I started blogging, and I suppose what it says is that I like the part of me that I access when I’ve had a couple of drinks. I think it’s a nicer person, maybe even a wiser person. Not always, but mostly.

I said to somebody once:

May I dream of late night discussions over a couple of scotches?

Her reply was:

Yes yes, you may.

That simple exchange will always live with me; there was so much promise in such a small number of words, promise of some very special connection. It didn’t happen and it never will, but that isn’t the point. The point is that it’s one more little angle on the business of being alive, and even questions whether sobriety is always what it’s cracked up to be.