You are of course familiar with the old cliche that whenever you start to make rules about drinking, tis the first and surest sign that you have a drinking problem. Well, yes and no. Most sane people have their own private traditions that act as a guiding hand during the weekend pub crawl. Drinking prejudices, I call them. Preconceived and irrational, they nevertheless manage to add flavor and life to the ‘drinking culture’, as well as giving people excellent reasons for staying out of trouble when they’re out on the town.
The most useful prejudices are those that are designed to divert us away from disaster, both physical and emotional. As a mouthful of booze after a hard day can be a gateway to Heaven, it can also be an access point to Hell. Only through experience and perhaps the sage advice of our superiors do we learn how to make the distinction. Rules are like lists and can go on indefinitely, and in the case of alcohol, everyone has their own version. There are wine and liqueur snobs who treat a casual drink with friends as if it were Kant’s metaphysics. There are people who drink to cheer themselves up. There are those who drink when they are so happy they don’t need to. There are the puritans who don’t drink it at all. These types are numerous and could go on indefinitely.
There are prejudices about mixing. Unlike others, however, rules about mixing can be reduced to something resembling a pseudoscience. It can only be mastered through trial and error. Dark and light liquors should never cross over. If one does intend to change drinks, it should increase in alcohol content as the night goes on. Certain beers to whiskey is okay, whiskey to beer is not. Or is it the other way around? I myself, last Saturday, made the fatal mistake of mixing an entire bottle of white wine with vodka shots, a quarter bottle of JWB and a few shots of ‘grain mash’ from China that a friend had brought back from his travels abroad. The price was paralysis, vomiting, and self-loathing. As for the grain mash, it’s the closest I can imagine myself ever getting to methanol. At 57% alcohol content, it’s worth a try for the experience alone, considered a luxury by the officials of the Chinese Communist Party. I’ll let you be the judge.
Most of you can already see where I’m coming from in my praise of prejudice. They’re like evolutionary adaptations in the natural world, while not always geared towards reason, the successful ones guarantee survival and are passed on.
Little needs to be said about the individuals who don’t understand the value of drinking prejudices. Needless to say, these people drink for reasons that are alien and unfamiliar to anyone with a healthy attitude towards alcohol. For obvious reasons, they don’t stay in the game very long and require no further comment.
But are there sound and fundamental truisms that can be applied to all drinkers. I very much doubt it. There are one or two people with supernatural constitutions, allowing them to drink enough to stun an elephant and still function the next day. Like a Hemingway character. There are people who only require 1 standard drink to reach the stage that we usually arrive at after 4. For the rest of us who reside within the average, our prejudices pave the way to a good morning the next day.
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