Waiting For The Smug

Some of you may know, some may not, but since we last spoke I've decided to knock the booze on the head. When you find that you spend more time recounting the horrors of your hangover than the pleasures of your nights out it might be time to call it a day. Besides when I started drinking it still felt a little roguish - these days a five minute dip into Channel 4 trash like UK's Most Hammered Infants (or whatever) it feels like the art of drunkenness has become decidedly low rent. Seeing some gormless Cornish teen bragging about drinking two pints of vodka a day before shitting his pants in A&E is hardly the stuff of Richard Harris.

So it’s been a couple of weeks of uncontaminated sobriety here at Toxic Towers. It's amazing the amount of things that go through one’s mind when it’s not occupied by the recurrent mantra of: ‘I’m not going to throw up. I’m not going to throw up...’ It’s like having a million radio stations playing at once, like someone has downloaded an internet of everything I’ve ever known and fed it back into my brain through some kind of funnel and played it on shuffle. I feel almost constantly sharp, free from paranoia and full of this brainstuff called “recent memories”. Time has performed a rapid yet simultaneously gentle grind to an almost halt like it’s moving through golden syrup while I dart off down a shaft of light bathed in high grade engine lube.

The only downside seems to be all the squares telling me how proud they are of me. The last thing I want is praise from teetotallers. It’s one of the reasons I carried on drinking as long as I did. I always feared that being dry would automatically endow me with that dank whiff of pious, po-faced joylessness that lingers around abstinent people. I don’t want to be no puritan. To err is divine, isn’t it? Judge not lest ye be judged? Take this wine, it is my blood...

I’ve always sensed that non-drinkers derive a disproportionate amount of pleasure from watching, remembering and then gossiping about drunks. It’s the worst kind of voyeurism. A vicarious yet moralising and essentially parasitic existence. If I drifted that far I’d have to correct my path by mainlining meth for six months straight.

Not that I’m not looking forward to a certain glow of comfortable smugness. Not vegetarian smug, not gym-goer smug, just a simple Reddy Brek glow that I hope comes with having been there, done it and decided against it. Maybe I’m hoping I’ll come across as wise – but I’m long enough in the tooth to know it’ll be an insufferable smugness that oozes from my newly glowing pores.

The other thing I’d like to avoid is that indelible stink of shame that accompanies some victims of temperance. That unmistakable aura some ex-drinkers have of something bad having happened to them – something so unmentionably bad that they’ve had to pull way from the remotest danger of anything resembling fun ever happening to them again. These grey skinned phantom people who seem to be living in hope that death catches up with them before anyone finds out their terrible sordid secret.

There’s certainly a morbid sense of curiosity in people’s approach to me at the moment. They enquire just politely enough to see if I have some kind of confession to make before reverting to the sort of sombre expression reserved for the terminally ill, or possibly the already dead. Some people’s interactions with me at the wedding I was at on Monday were so fleeting I began to wonder if I had died and no one had remembered to tell me.

I’m thinking of making up horrific tales of debauchery including dextroamphetamine, dwarves, dumpsters, defilement, and the devil in order to see people’s faces. Actually many of my own drinking stories are enough to shame an average person into "taking the oath" but I’m nothing if not committed. There were plenty of times in my twenty-three years of boozing that lesser men would have hung up their tankard. Despite having surprisingly few problems avoiding booze, I’m still thinking of joining AA to tell my best drinking stories to a fresh bunch of people.

One thing I've been warned of is how irritating drunk people will become to me. This certainly hasn't been the case so far. Besides it's hard to imagine how people could annoy me any more than they did when I was drinking. Insofar as my friends go, the last thing I want is for them to be sober. I'm not sure I could live with myself if I found myself associated with a bunch of Fanta drinking fairies tucked up in bed by nine every night planning another paintballing weekend. Whilst at the wedding I found myself positively frustrated by the collective coherence of my compadres. I wanted nothing more than to be surrounded by a sea of shitfaced gin-monkeys dancing to Neneh Cherry like the big one was about to drop. I do have standards.

I'll admit to a reluctance in putting this up on here - mostly because I’ll look pretty fucking foolish if I end up drunk out of my gourd with pee down my trousers selling yellow pencils from an empty meatball can by the end of the week. After all, anything is possible. Anything.... That hasn't changed.