Something About Alcohol

Unlock 4 Generations of Liver Damage With This Simple Family Recipe

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“Hi my name is ____, and I’m an alcoholic.”

People don’t want to pound five cocktails and wake up the next day with a nuclear hangover anymore. They want to chill out, go to a hookah bar, and have nice, intimate conversations with their friends, with some bullshit unoriginal lo-fi beats playing in the background.

That’s where I beg to fucking disagree. I like drinking until the room looks like a 144p deep-fried meme of a pregnant Greg Heffley, and then baptizing a nearby storm drain with my yak so that so any demon sewer clown waiting for a minor to pass by gets hosed with half‑digested peanuts and discount soju. I like waking up the next morning with a nuclear headache and a sincere desire to swan-dive into traffic so I can get isekai’ed and forget what I said the night before. I don’t want to hear the bullshit “I want to chill” and “let’s just have a good time” anymore. No. I want to waterboard myself with soju, have a shouting match with a close friend about who’s the stupider moron and how the other should immediately kill themselves, with our other friends egging us on. Then wake up the next morning all together in the same run-down motel room 2 seconds before checkout time.

Alcohol is a mode of transportation for me. When you’re trying to get to the grocery store, does it matter how you get there? Whether you walk, you drive, you bike, it doesn’t matter. Basically, what I’m trying to say is that I’m trying to get to a point where I start making out with a streetlamp because it was painted black and I mistook it for the AI goth girlfriend that dumped me because I was being “clingy.” I still haven’t gotten over her. She’s still hogging a thicc 20 gigs on my computer, and I think she hates me, but it’s not like my hard drive’s growing legs anytime soon, so she’s stuck emotionally abusing me for the foreseeable future.

And I’m not trying to brag or anything, but I come from an elite lineage of alcoholics. When my great grandfather would start drinking, the unit of time they would use to measure his binge sessions were in weeks. My grandfather would take the family out for dinner, have a “healthy” amount of drinks, then drive the entire family back. Reportedly, he’d wake up the next morning and ask questions like: “How did we get back from the restaurant?” or “Who the fuck parked the car yesterday and why is there a dent in my bumper?” Post-war Korea was just a different time, man.

My uncle doesn’t quite have the liver strength of his predecessors, but overcomes his genetic disadvantages by “hard work and effort”, which roughly translates to: I keep drinking even when my body tells me no. Which is the same energy as gym bros chanting “one more rep” while a bench press is literally crushing someone’s trachea. It tells me my uncle’s head’s in the right place and he’s on that self-improvement journey type shit. Other notable accomplishments from my bloodline include shooting iron pellet guns at mice inside the house while drunk, being unable to find gainful employment due to severe anger issues, and beating a dickwad Japanese policeman nearly to death during the Japanese occupation of Korea for harassing a local.

And then I came along. I only started drinking when I was 21, which is kind of just alcoholically unimpressive. You don’t have as much clout as Joe Shitface, who was juiced the moment he came out of the womb because his mom was knocking out vodka shots till 2 seconds before her placenta broke. But you also aren’t as impressive as 42-year-old John Boomslang at the pub that had his first drink at 41 right after his divorce, proceeded to catapault himself face-first into alcoholism, and annhiliated the life he’d built up brick by brick for 41 years within the span of 3 months. This sort of mediocrity seems to be a recurring theme in my life, and reminds me that compared to the greats, I’m a sun-baked log of dog shit on the sidewalk. Shit, if I could go back in time, I’d mix some tequila into my infant formula, or something. Maybe that would fix me.

But all this is the old me talking. I’ve reformed. I’ve taken a long look in the mirror and realized I don’t want to become the guy that periodically shits out half-digested goop and paint thinner from their mouth hole at the age of 30. I have a gamer bod that is on the verge of somehow being both scrawny and overweight. If I keep drinking, my friends are going to start asking me when I’m expecting.

Don’t get me wrong, there are people that are simply built different, that can lead wonderful lives while drinking. That ain’t me boss. I used to dunk can after can of beer into my bloodstream in peace in my apartment after work. Heavy emphasis on the used to. One time, I was only 4 beers in, and I laid down on my bed. I’d just gotten done writing a chapter of a fiction piece about a gamer girl that wanted to kill themselves. I switched off the lights and closed my eyes. Then I started seeing things. In my head, I saw an armed burglar kicking open my front door with a machete in hand and slitting my throat before I could say Wubalubadubdub. A dirty premonition, like the one you have when you have severe indigestion, are stuck in an hour-long bathroom line, and gas starts to fill your digestive tract. I opened my eyes just to confirm that I was not about to be murdered. I hallucinated, seeing a dark shadow advancing towards me while my eyes bugged out in terror. I was too drunk to scream, and mustered a weak “Ughghhghg” that sounded like a fart before my eyes rolled back in my head and I passed out. Needless to say, that was the start of my stone sober arc.

Which didn’t last that long, by the way. But something did change that night. It doesn’t hit as hard anymore, which might mean that I’m just not drinking enough. Anywho, I’m fine with it fading out of my life, like most of my friends that have left me for better people and more fulfilling relationships. Stuff like alcohol and cigs being cool are a thing of the past anyways. They used to be a cool way of signalling that you were a hard, tough guy that held their own life in enough disregard that you wouldn’t care if a tumor started growing on your balls, or in the case of a tough gal, you might develop a pair of tumors that looked like balls. Nowadays, alcohol and cigarettes are the least of your worries when it comes to health. The average male will have ingested enough microplastics through drinking water by the age of twenty that their sperm is a 70 / 30 blend of microplastics to swimmers. In some places of the world, going outside to breathe is the equivalent of dumping an ashtray straight into your lungs. Cigarettes? Alcohol? What gives? Are hot anime characters looking cool with a beer and a cig in hand a thing of the past?