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What is it to be a good drinker? What is it to be a responsible
drinker? Being a good and responsible drinker isn't what one
would think. One would think that being a responsible drinker
means that you designate a driver to drive you home once you're
plastered, schnokkered, canned, drunk off your ass, totaled,
wasted, blitzed, knock down, dragged out, kick'n and squeal'n
drunk out of your mind. But oddly, this is not what a responsible
drinker should be in its entirety.
Yes,
you should always have someone drive you home if you're too
drunk to drive. We've all seen the commercials with the two
crash-test dummies. But what I am talking about is pride,
general prideful drinking. We lost a crucial portion of our
claim to adulthood. I don't know what from. But no matter
how drunk you got last weekend, guaranteed it was nothing
in comparison to how drunk your Irish grandfather could get
and still function as a person. We're drunken wimps! My great
grandfather, Old Patrick McInnes, drank himself through two
livers. Remember these are the days before transplants. He
took a rusty butter-knife and cut his own liver out and replaced
it with a cow's. Once he was asked, "Patrick, didn't
that hurt like hell?" And I swear to god he said, "I
don't know, I've never been a cow!"
But
the point is this: The man knew how to drink and when it was
appropriate. It just happened to be that " all the time"
was the appropriate time.
What
do we do now? We hold off from drinking until we're twenty-one.
Why? Do any of us really wait until we're twenty-one? Does
a bear shit in the woods? No, not if he's a polar bear! Of
course we don't wait. It's more fun to defy the law. But unfortunately
we get plastered with only five or six beers. And then we
start calling the x-girlfriends three in the morning "Why
did we break up?" "I've always loved you."
"Do you remember that time we went to the zoo and I threw-up
at the seal show?" Boy, I miss you Carrie!" meanwhile,
she's thinking she's sitting there and wondering who the hell
is Carrie and why does this guy keep calling me?
One
might think that we need to raise the drinking age. Well,
one would be wrong. We need to lower the drinking age, and
by a good bit too. That's why we're sissified, we don't have
the mental or intestinal fortitude to hang with our ancestors.
We need to come back from our first hunt, strip down, dance,
cook whatever we killed with our bare hands, and get stumbling
drunk. But what do we do? Like fifty-year old women from the
1930's we try everything in the book to discourage our youth
from picking up the bottle. We need to start raising the bar
by lowering the drinking age in them.
It
might cause more traffic accidents. Well, lower the drinking
age and raise the driving age. The Europeans drink like fish
even before they can walk. But that's the key, they walk everywhere.
They don't take daddy's Porsche to get from the front door
to the mailbox and back. Drunk-driving incidents in England
and Scotland are much lower than what they are here in the
states. Is that because the British are stronger people than
Americans - WWI and WWII baby, bailed'em out both times! We
wouldn't have been speaking German if we didn't go to Europe,
but the French and the English would have! Heck, we send young
men and women off to war before they can drink a glass of
beer in a public place. Odd? Extremely, odd! You can die for
your country, but you can't have a Budweiser at your funeral.
And
think about it! It's evolution on a small scale - you drink,
you kill off lame brain cells. They're not doing anything!
They're at the back of the pack, hang'n out like those skateboarding
teenagers in front of the gas station - "What do you
wanna do?" "I don't know man. What do you wanna
do? "Noth'n, I guess." They're weak and you're just
making yourself stronger by getting rid of them. And, really
drinking is like everything else - if you wanna be the best
at it, you have to practice. It doesn't take that much, just
twelve easy steps a day: Step 1, wake-up. Step 2-11, drink.
Step 12, pass out on the living-room floor. Just follow this
easy twelve-step program and you'll feel your tolerance getting
better and better in three short weeks!
In
short, we need to get out there and do what's best for the
country and our evolution as Americans. We don't have any
major crisis, no world war, no famine. Let's do this now so
that when our kids are growing up and complain about life,
we can say with a straight face, "Tommy shut up, and
get your dad another beer out of the kitchen!"
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