Drunken Dispatches

I don’t drink for the taste of alcohol. I drink for the pleasure of drinking.

And as you get older, that pleasure is partly from tapping into drinking sessions past, when getting drunk was the end all and be all of drinking.

Increasingly, it’s to rant about work, or the girlfriend, or the wife, or any of a million little things that get in the way of a good drinking spree (violence, say). And so, when I raise my bottle to you, it is partly an attempt to clear the air, the clinking glasses working the way wind chimes do in Feng Shui. 

When I raise my bottle to you, I’m toasting you and the hundreds of other people I have had drinks with, many of whom I have since lost touch with. Some I lost to time, some to accidents, some to disease.

I drink to remember how it felt to be young, to be full of potential, to be cocksure that I had everything figured out. Time has proven that I did not have as many answers as I thought I did, and that I have not asked as many questions as I should have. “Is this a good idea?,” chief of those.

I still get glimpses of that, though. The brilliance and the talent that I thought I had back then. The promise. All of that good stuff that they say is wasted on the youth.

And I guess that is why so many drinking sessions degenerate into impromptu karaoke sessions of cheesy songs from the past. It’s part of the ritual, like spilling some of your drink for drinking buddies lost. It’s a group hug. It’s whistling in the dark.