The Drunken Years

There is a time in every boy’s life when adolescence sets the world on it’s head. Girls (and sometimes other boys) suddenly become interesting in a less-than-innocent way. For the first time a boy starts to think like a young man; inevitably, he fully realizes his role in society. That is when adulthood is truly achieved. The wonder years are those golden few before adulthood’s onus weight burdens man’s mind.

Contrarily, the drunken years are those of prolonged adolescence. Drugs and alcohol relieve us of our need to be responsible in action, in fiscal matters and in relationships, otherwise known as adulthood. At some time my drunken years transformed to something beyond that, beyond just drinking to kill time. If you keep adding fat people to the life raft, eventually you’re going to sink. My brain has been bailing buckets of bourbon out of its inflated rubber dinghy loaded with survivors of the HMS We-Eat-Alot. I’m still in my drunken years, but I’m on the outer edge of them.

Memories are footprints– they tell us where we’ve been. I don’t know where the ‘F’ I’ve been, if you’ll pardon the harsh letter. I’ve walked across a great sand dune. Imagine my dismay when I look back to see that not even my footprints remain. My footprint-eraser takes the form of drunken blackouts.

The first major wave lead to my DUI two years ago. This year, I’ve rode my bike home in that state many times, as my scarred joints can testify. I’ve started two fights– that’s dangerously close to tipping my “fights I’ve been in that I caused” to “”fights I’ve been in that I didn’t cause” ratio. It’s like I’m Dr. Sam Becket on Quantum Leap, except that instead of leaping from body to body hoping the next leap will be the leap home, I go from blackout to blackout hoping that the next one will be the last. The blackouts have brought me many epiphanies of late, as if they transform me into a drunken Delphic Oracle. I’ve grown up more in these drunken years than in any of my sober ones.

I look back at these events not with shame but with curiousity. I’m curious as to what could drive me to go that far. I’m curious about my subconcious, because ultimately that controls those most primitive urges, be they drinking to dull the voices, drinking to dull the pain, drinking to be less inhibited or drinking to be cool. I’m not advocating it as a path to complete self awareness, though. I tried that path and have many blank pages in my mental journal. There are even a few sections I’ve tried to scribble through, but you can still read them. But it is as it should be– some things you have to learn the hard way. For everyone those things differ, but one of mine is and will always be liquid amnesia. I don’t know how many more leaps I have to make, but Al says Ziggy is giving me a 37% chance of being home next time. Tune in next week.