Snarky Behavior

What do Lindsay Lohan and I have in common? A bloody nose. That, and a great rack.

Well I woke up this morning with a bloody nose. You can’t really tell because my sheets are already red, but I’m still going to wash them, eventually. I’m clean like that.

Bloody noses are strange. If I lived in some pre-colonial native society I would be slaughtering a buffalo as a sacrifice to the goddess right now. It’s a total freak-out! It’s very disorienting to randomly start leaking fluid from your head. So much so that I called in sick for the first time in nearly 9 months. Use it or lose it… that’s my motto.

As for the cause of the nose-bleed, my body seems to be revolting against the insane abuse I have been sending its way. Without getting into too much detail, let’s just say that since the Monday before last, I have:

• Gone to bed at 4 am or later 7 times, waking up at 8 am or earlier each time.
• Lost over $500 playing Pai Gow and Black Jack.
• Eaten two buffets at approximately 12,000 calories each.
• Drank approximately 15 red bull and vodkas, 8 whiskey sours, 25 bloody mary’s, 25 gin and tonics, 2 Fat Tuesdays and 40 beers.
• Smoked countless cigarettes.
• Walked over 50 miles.
• Purchased over 20 coffees.
• Drank less than 2 liters of water.
• Grown a “Montana Beard,” as my father likes to call it (for its wide open spaces).

It’s the penultimate one that I think has really gotten to me. Somehow I managed to make it through Vegas weighing less on the scale than I had when I left. If I were a plant, I would be brown and withered. But instead I’m bleeding from my nose. Go figure.

One of the problem signs of alcoholism is letting drinking interfere with other important aspects of your life. Considering I am missing work today because my body is breaking down after a two week bender (that won’t end until Saturday, thanks to yet another going away party), I’ve decided to give this due consideration (or at least self-deluded rationalization):

My friend Rohit brought this article to my attention from SFGate.com . It is written in reaction to the public spectacle that is and has become Bay to Breakers… the third Sunday of May when Bay Area hippies and hipsters stagger naked and drunkenly across the city. In his article, entitled “Why Are You So Incredibly Drunk? What is it about public displays of extreme, staggering wastedness? Is it fun?” the author writes:

What the hell is the appeal of severe, excessive drinking, over and over again, to the point of illness and physical collapse and extreme stupidity and brain-melting moronism?

(…)

I am talking about all those otherwise healthy, well-bred folk who repeatedly, intentionally cross that threshold of bodily tolerance and behavior, the extreme soaking of the liver, that incredibly toxic and humiliating activity largely undertaken (it seems) by those with good jobs and good families and plenty of beauty and youth and strength but who still find some sort of need to turn into heavy-lidded blotch-faced weak-legged body-slammed mysteriously bruised-in-the-morning lumps of bloated toxic hangover every third day and definitely on Fridays.

(…)

Of course, you could also easily argue that regular, near-comatose wastedness also reflects a rather obvious sense of sadness and self-loathing, a feeling where you are, deep down, so afraid that you don’t really have much going on deep down that you cling to this cheap drug’s ability to remove you from the responsibility of trying to figure out who you really are. You know, just like organized religion.

Or maybe it’s none of those things, and what I see and what you see every weekend in bars and street fairs and house parties across America is merely the way of the culture, just everyday people blowin’ off steam in the only legal way they know how, not really knowing when to stop because, for whatever reason, they simply do not have the proper mechanism, or forgot they were supposed to cultivate a mechanism in the first place.

It’s a fair question, right? Well, I don’t think there’s just one answer. It’s VERY rare that I drink with the sole purpose of getting obliterated. I tried that my sophomore year of college and recognized it as a) destructive and b) expensive. And not particularly fun or healthy, either.

I DO enjoy events like Bay to Breakers, Fox Fields, the Idiotarod, Las Vegas or Rose Bowl Tail Gates because its an opportunity to engage in unfettered celebration with friends in a tacitly acceptable environment. I’m not getting this drunk on any random night in public and screaming at people in Dupont or Adams Morgan (well, except for last Monday, but that was an anomaly… Christ, we found $50 on the ground! We had to blow it on booze).

I spent a good three months this winter traveling 50% of the time and staying by myself in posh and lonely hotels in strange cities. I rarely drank, ate meals by myself, and felt like I was missing out on activities back home.

Now that it’s springtime and I know where I’m going to school next year (and what sacrifices that inherently entails,) I feel pretty guilt-free about going on a two-week bender.

Even if it means calling in sick for work over a nose-bleed.