The Anonymous Alcoholic

Recently, while hunkering down on my favorite barstool at my local watering hole, somebody overheard me order my eighth Gin Buck and asked perhaps the strangest question to ever cross my ears:

"John, don't you think you've been drinking too much?"

Shock and surprise came over my flushed and drunken face. Me? How dare you, sir? How dare you, indeed. Are you suggesting the possibility that I, John Alim...(yeah, right...asshole), am an alcoholic?

Then, right as I was about to throw my drink in his face and kindly ask him to step outside so we could discuss these matters further through the gentlemen's art of fisticuffs, I stopped dead in my tracks. To throw my precious concoction of Gin and Ginger Ale in his face would be a waste of alcohol! And that was when I realized, "Oh fuck me runnin', I may very well be a goddamned alky." Shock and awe, my friends, shock and fucking awe. So my heavily bruised liver and I surfed on over to the Alcoholic's Anonymous website and tried my best to answer their infamous "12 questions". What I learned shook me to my very core:

1.) Have you ever decided to stop drinking for a week or so, but only lasted for a couple of days? No. Never. I HAVE, instead, decided to take a day or two long break from my usual daily intake of sweet, sweet liver pickler, but only to give my body a chance to replenish itself from the amount of abuse I've inflicted upon the night before. I can only go for so long until I just completely shut down and become a foul, terrible shambles of a man. I'm not a machine, goddamnit.

2.) Do you wish people would mind their own business about your drinking -- stop telling you what to do? This has never been an issue for me, quite frankly. The majority of the people I hang out with are just as much a lush as I am, if not more so. If anything at all, THEY are the ones who push me to drink and get as drunk as I possibly can every time I go out drinking. For one thing, the drunker I get, the better looking I am and the same goes for those who I meet in my whiskey-fueled nightly adventures. To top it all off, if I DIDN'T drink, my friends would call me a lightweight pussy and I've never been able to handle peerpressure. I try to avoid being around people who go out of their way to tell ME what I should do with MY life. Fuck that.

3.) Have you ever switched from one kind of drink to another in the hope that this would keep you from getting drunk? WHAT!? Quite possibly, the most ridiculous question on the list. Who the fuck switches from one drink to another in an effort to get less drunk? Have I somehow slipped into Bizarro World, where up is down, left is right, and 151 Rum sobers you up? If so, then please, I beg of you, kill me now. Because simply put, I drink to get drunk. I don't drink to drown away the pains of my youth, or to forget my own personal problems. No. I drink to get shit-faced, falling down, laugh my ass off drunk. If anything, I switch from one kind of drink to another in the hope I get even DRUNKER!

4.) Have you had to have an 'eye-opener' upon awakening during the past year? Is this supposed to mean the ol' hair of the dog? A kiss from the whore that fucked you? A little fur of the bear that mauled you? Then no, no I haven't. Bloody Mary's don't count, right? That shit's like breakfast in a cup, anyway. It's got fruits, and vitamins, and even a zesty little olive for protein.

5.) Do you envy people who can drink without getting into trouble? I only envy them because they've never experienced the utter humiliation of stripping down to your bare cock and balls in front of police officer, and spreading your ass cheeks so he can take a peak inside your dingleberry encrusted asshole with a mag-light. They've probably never experienced the feeling of saying something you shouldn't have said out loud about that big biker dude standing at the corner of the bar, only to turn around and introduce your jaw to the heel of his steel-toed boot. And above all, they've probably never been dragged out of a bar kicking and screaming the chorus to "Wasted" by the Circle Jerks with your member hanging out of your pants, and piss spraying in the faces and drinks of the other bar patrons. No, I don't envy them a bit. They just haven't "lived" yet.

6.) Have you had problems connected with drinking during the past year? The only problem, at least THIS year, is running out of money and not being able to pay my bar tab. That always seems to be my biggest problem; having Cristal tastes on a Natural Ice budget.

7.) Has your drinking caused trouble at home? Drinking at home has broken television sets, thrown light bulbs at random people's heads, burned cigarette holes in my carpet, pissed all over my couch, kicked down locked bathroom doors, fired BB guns at pedestrians out of my second story apartment window, vomited in a pair of shoes owned by a friend, shoved another friend off a balcony, wrestled in the pouring rain over a mason jar full of moonshine, spit in my face countless times, spit in the faces of others, gotten me into a fistfight with a roommate on his birthday over a video game, blew shit up, and smashed a variety of shit with fists, feet, hammers, and one time with the dead body of an 10 foot boa constrictor. Does that sound like trouble to you?

8.) Do you ever try to get "extra" drinks at a party because you do not get enough? Again, another ridiculous question. Who the fuck in their right mind goes to a party NOT expecting to drink more than they've brung over? To think otherwise defeats the whole purpose of attending a party in the first place. Of course I try to get "extra" drinks off of the host(ess), I can't very well be expected to get shitfaced drunk off of my supply, now can I? To do something like that would make me look an alcoholic. No, the plan of attack for every party I attend is this: Get there nice and early, ransack the booze supply before the godless heathens come and pillage it, and be good and drunk an hour into the party starting...THEN tap into my own supply.

9.) Do you tell yourself you can stop drinking any time you want to, even though you keep getting drunk when you don't mean to? What? Who ever in the history of imbibing fermented fruits or grains has gotten drunk when they didn't mean to? Are there people walking around in society as we speak just randomly having the shitty assed luck to be falling into vats of microbrew? What the fuck!?

Why can't I have that kind of luck?

10.) Have you missed days of work or school because of drinking? There's got to be a punchline to this joke, people. Have I "missed" work because of drinking? Shit, I don't even miss it when I'm there. *rimshot*

11.) Do you have "blackouts"? None that I can remember, and only from what I've been told by friends the morning after. If I can't remember it, it never happened, right? Right? Right.
12.) Have you ever felt that your life would be better if you did not drink? Sober, the world is a cold and unfeeling place, purely analytical and brutal to those who thrive on chaos and tom-foolery. As an artist and an unpaid hack writer, I thrive on such things. Without the benefit of booze, most others like me would never be able to sharpen that finelycrafted edge of wit or think of witty anecdotes and/or outright lies on the fly.

No, life without booze would be a horrible, terribly hellish life that I cannot even fathom living in. Granted, every morning I wake up with a mouth that feels like I've been chewing on cigarette flavored sandpaper, a headache that explodes behind my eyes with each and every grueling step towards the bathroom to shit out 6 pints of liquid hershey squirts, and the approaching dread that I did something somewhere to someone so horribly embarrassing that the mere thought of even trying to THINK of what I must have done last night in a drunken stupor forces me to erase all contacts and text messages in my cellphone so I'll never, ever, ever have to own up to it, I think to myself,

"You know, maybe I SHOULD stop drinking. Is it really worth all this?"

Then the Bloody Mary kicks in, and I'm back in fighting form.