Eat, Drink and...

Me and Alcohol aren't friends. We met in college, went out once or twice and just didn't hit it off. It could be because my first time drinking was with a group of friends who wanted to see my plastered. I'm funny so for some reason people always want to see me drunk or high. I guess they think I'll turn into an Animaniac or something. Anyway, they gave me a 16 oz cup of Everclear to start me off and I drank it because I didn't know any better. They waited a few minutes and when nothing happened they gave me another cup full of E&J.

That did it. I was tore up, but they didn't get the show they were hoping for. Apparently I'm a very boring drunk. I sat there the whole night thinking about life. Then I started writing out a theory I had that blinking somehow makes you heavier. I thought that the force of your eyelids moving downward made you heavier kinda like flapping your arms on a scale. That was it. No loud rants, no cursing, no stumbling around. I didn't even throw up or have a hangover the next day. I didn't like the way it made me feel so I wrote it off the same way I did cigarettes.

People always said I just needed to try something else and on a few occasions I did. I still didn't like it so for the last ten years I've pretty much shied away from drinking. And of course my friends laugh because there's always a bottle of Smirnoff Ice in the back of my fridge that I keep as an emergency "really shitty day" bottle. The fact that something with 5% alcohol does it for me just amuses them.

So anyway, I went to a Yelp Elite event a couple of weeks ago and as usual there was an open bar. One of the perks of being a Yelp superuser is that you get invited to all kinds of free events at new restaurants. It's like a movie critic being invited to a free screening, except this is free food and all you can drink liquor. I figured "what the hell" and decided to have a drink made my a real bartender instead of my wannabe friends. I had rum punch, which I'm gonna go out on a limb and say had rum in it.

The first mistake I made was drinking it like it was a wine cooler. As I gobbled up free food at the bar, I'd take another cup. I went through three in about four or five minutes. I couldn't taste any alcohol, so I assumed it was a watered down free version. A friend would later tell me that rum doesn't have a taste, but I figured that out on my own. Let's just say the picture in the Yelp photo album has me standing there grinning like the Cheshire Cat with a carnival hat on, a pair of red sunglasses and a scantly clad carnival dancer on each arm.

Then the other night I went to another event where they greeted you at the door with a large glass of wine. I took that and decided to drink it slow throughout the night, but I started choking on a piece of steak and ended up downing that. It was downhill from there because they had nothing but cocktails, beer and more wine. I drank three "somethings" and realized it was time to go when I found myself in a conversation with two women and a voice inside my head said "Look with your sober eye." I swear to God that I could feel my pupils spinning around like a camera lens and my new vision revealed to me that I wasn't talking to two women. One was a guy who kinda had the Prince androgynous thing going.

Time to go. Oh shit, I drove.

I walked around downtown for about an hour waiting for it to wear off. I started giving myself field sobriety tests in front of the Post Office Pavilion. Walk only on these bricks in a straight line. Z,Y,X,Q? No, not Q. I knew I was sober again when what I was doing began to feel stupid. Also, when the homeless people started smelling homeless again I knew I was ready to go.

I'm done with alcohol once and for all. There is another Yelp event next month, however.