If I Keep Drinking They Might Shut Up

I should be dead right now. It’s true, various cancer council groups, family-friendly researchers and a whole gaggle of finger-pointing fun-haters are all baffled by my seemingly unbelievable ability to form words at all. I should have developed a dozen kinds of cancer, heart disease, kidney failure, liver cirrhosis, brain damage and jaundice. By no small miracle I appear to be fine. Yup, still got a pulse, just checked it then. Liver? Currently straining a pint quite nicely.

Now you might be a little confused as to what kind of affliction could possibly mean I should be suffering from such a selection of near/rapidly nearing death experiences. Have I been snorkelling in the lovely glowing reefs downstream from Japan’s happy-go-lucky Fukushima nuclear power plant? Did I suddenly develop a terminal case of being 65 or older? Perhaps I’ve taken up a job testing suspicious substances found by the post office by snorting the lot of it with the force of a jet engine. No sadly, it’s nothing so glamorous or welfare-friendly.

I’ve been drinking. Alcohol in fact, all kinds of it; Beers, spirits, wine, and a wide variety of cider too. I’ve mixed energy drinks with alcohol, I’ve knocked back shooters, bombs, test-tubes, jelly shots, chazwuzzers and quite a few drinks that require you douse their flames before you drink them. I have engaged in “high risk” drinking activities (as described by someone’s mum as having more than 6 standard drinks in one night). I called that pre-drinks before heading out. Hell, some days that was just how I got ready to go to work! Various health groups would see these activities outlawed, some of them already are.

There’s a bit of truth behind the argument that “there wouldn’t be a law to stop people doing this if they didn’t want to do it”.

I’ll admit it, I have considered it a “good idea at the time” to start an evening/afternoon/morning off with a few pints of champagne, vodka and cider (um, yeah, all in the one glass). It went down a fizzy little treat and I have to say made an excellent basis for the black-out party that occurred for the rest of the night inside my head. By all accounts I was charming, well-mannered and a great dancer. I felt like death the next day but I’m fairly certain I hadn’t been murdered or died of alcohol poisoning, much to the shock and disbelief of certain parts of the media.

I have injuries from drinking, many through stupidity, and some from a big Maori who didn’t like me judging by the scars. That’s right, I’m part of the statistics, I wouldn’t say I got into a fight out drinking. That would be inaccurate. I’d say I got the crap kicked out of me while I was drunk. I’m not upset, I got into more fights in school than in bars yet I don’t see a government push to ban fifteen year-olds. Drinking injuries are the same as bike riding/skateboarding/chair-racing or sexing injuries. You learn from them and improve over time. Failure leads to learning, you can’t have one without the other.

So why are we stopping them? Why is it becoming illegal for bars to sell people shots, or bombs, or giant cocktails served in a fishbowl? I’ll answer this in two parts:

Part one: Because people want to drink. They want to drink shots, or large crazy cocktails. Why? because it might be fun, it might be new and it might get them drunk. And, like peeing on powerlines, this might come as a bit of a shock, but young people like to get drunk.

Part two: Because there are a bunch of people from generation who popularised LSD, Weed, Acid, magic mushrooms, drink driving, and conscription that feel the need to tell us that we drink too much alcohol. You think? Well everything else is illegal now so that’s all we have left! Excessive drinking and partying might not be the best option, but it’s all that we’ve got these days.

The point is that despite all the government warnings in the world people are still going to drink and still going to survive. I spent a few years where I was more often drunk than not, I called it university, it was awesome and somehow despite all this recent tests showed that my liver, kidneys, and heart are all in perfect health. That’s right, it turns out your body can take a fair bit of punishment if you work hard and train it to handle a bath-tub of vodka per night despite what a bunch of whinging health groups would have you believe.

So I’ll keep drinking as much as I like and knocking back cocktails, shooters and buckets of gin at any hour of the day or night like I’m the Queen Mother. If we’re lucky the nanny-state health groups might become so enraged they fatally choke on their cous cous and bile while we enjoy the spectacle from the beer garden of our warm, fuzzy contentedness.

Because we live in a liberal society, not a kindergarten, and we should be able to do what we damn well want.

-Worst Guy Ever