Intoxicating

I don’t drink. Not by a long shot.

I’ve never really enjoyed the taste of alcohol. It’s the same reason I’m not fond of chilli. How can the masochistic infliction of pain on one of the most crucial and sensitive parts of your body be considered culinary? I can see why you might want to drink it, perhaps in the coldest winters when a long pull of vodka will put fire in your belly and hair on your chest. But otherwise, you’re throwing a caustic liquid down your alimentary canal – how does that even make sense?

But let’s ignore the taste for a while. Let’s say they manage to invent an alcohol which is tasteless, or you take it intravenously. It should be fine if you ingest small quantities – I had half a glass of wine yesterday, and nothing happened. Sure, small doses of red wine are supposed to be an excellent antioxidant and help your heart and whatever.

But yesterday was my first time seeing people truly intoxicated, and it… terrified me. I saw how it really lowers your inhibitions and, perhaps, clouds your judgment. It honestly scared me.

I believe that every single human being on the planet has a tremendous capacity for evil, existentially speaking. I don’t see it as much as an “original sin” thing as much as it is a “human nature” thing. It’s just how we are, regardless of the existence of a divine presence or not. And one of the reasons we’re not rampantly killing or murdering people in the street every day is because we have a socially-constructed set of rules and regulations with enable the conscious mind to act within a generally accepted, lowest-common-denominator standard of insanity. (And it never works all the time, even when people are sober.)

And then alcohol comes in like a sneaky joker in a game of cards. The “get-out-of-jail-free” of life, but instead of jail, it’s social conventions. And you lose control one of the most important things in life: your mind. You take the backseat in your brain and put a bottle of whiskey in front of the wheel, and expect him to make it out of the inner-city maze of the social commute when that bottle knows all the theory but has never seen a car.

It’s like your consciousness is the single guardian of all the screwed up stuff in that Pandora’s box of murder, rape, pillaging and queue-cutting that we call our heads. And when you down six shots in a row, you give him a day off and tell him to come back tomorrow. How do you rationalize that kind of thing?

You can’t, because you’re drunk.

Soberly,
The Edna Man