I thought this an appropriate NEW YEARS POST. Here’s too everyone’s health and happiness in the upcoming year!!!
I might be considered a late bloomer as I did not find alcohol all that appealing until my early twenties. In my teens I think maybe I held myself in too high moral regard. While she cavorted with my friends, I smugly watched them fall under her spell. Or maybe it was sheer indifference. Either way she eventually caught up with me and extracted a painful retribution for my youthful insolence.
Not in my twenties though. Those were the halcyon days when our relationship thrived. I developed a penchant for sultry foreign beers that tickled my tongue and went down smooth. I was a promiscuous little jack-o-nanny. I experimented with luscious reds and soft liqueurs. The kinkiest I ever got was mixing Kahlua and vodka in a fit of frenzy. But I always came back to the warm embrace of beer. In those days we enjoyed each others company in relative moderation.
Then came my thirties and China. Things got a bit out of hand. I suffered abuse and bear wounds that still plague me to this day. I got caught up in the vortex of China’s rush to modernize its wireless infrastructure. Growth in the business was akin to shooting Koi in a barrel (I know that’s Japanese, just testing your oriental knowledge).
The key moment in any business negotiation came down to ‘The Dinner’. After long, tedious negotiations it always distilled into two or three sticking points that ‘the bosses’ had to resolve over a meal. Thus I would sit at these grand banquet tables and engage in a sadist ritual: see who could get the other drunk thus impairing his or her judgment and winning better terms.
The weapon of choice … Laojiu or a clear liquid that makes rot gut whiskey seem like bottled water. I think the old lady doubled as rocket fuel in the budding Chinese Space industry. She smelled of trouble. Older, experienced, with a harsh acidic burn as she went down. You didn’t drink her as much as inhale her. Small glasses. Large thimbles. They seemed harmless at first. But with each ‘ganbei’ or bottoms up, the thimble got heavier, the room swirled faster, and I lost my steadying grip on reality.
Eventually my morning sickness signaled something had gestated in me. I visited the doctor to find my stomach lining had just about been eaten away by her lavish attention. An ulcer just months away from birth. I took medicine to control it. But my job required the dance. So I improvised (but that’s a story for another day). In the end she had her way with me. My stomach has never fully recovered.
I’m now to the point where I can drink a beer or wine or two. If I let myself go to that third, however, I begin to sense that gnawing feeling again. So I live under a kind of a forced peace. A balance restored in the relationship by fiat at last.
How about you? What is your relationship with alcohol?
16 Responses
It seems you don’t have a relationship as much as a landlord/renter situation. You rent out your stomach and the occupants tear up the joint.
Posted on December 31st, 2008 at 6:35 pm
Yes and the constant eviction notices create a real mess of the place
Posted on December 31st, 2008 at 6:45 pm
For me i grew up in a bar and alcohol was a part of life, my mother stated her days with a bloody marry. By the time i was 18 i was drinking a six-pack before i walking into the school doors.
I don’t remember much between 18 and 21, but the things i do i would like to forget LOL
Then my grandfather was diagnosed with liver problems and told to stop drinking, that lasted for about 1 month. He was a 300-pound man and with in one year they had to have a closed casket burial since he was nothing more than a walking skeleton.
To watch someone withier away before your eyes was enough proof for me to me that this behavior would not have a happy ending,
If you constantly abuse your body you will pay the price, and sometimes it isn’t very pretty. If i have 1 drink now it is a rare thing.
Posted on January 1st, 2009 at 9:09 am
funny how we are all paying prices for the indiscretions of our youth ….
Posted on January 1st, 2009 at 10:21 am
That Chinese booze is the worst I have ever had in my entire life. Even worse than grain alcohol.
Sex Mahoney for President
Posted on January 1st, 2009 at 5:43 pm
i can second, third and fifty that comment
Posted on January 1st, 2009 at 5:54 pm
Spirits work in strange ways. Happy New Year!
Posted on January 3rd, 2009 at 4:11 am
ain’t that the truth!
Posted on January 3rd, 2009 at 8:53 am
My relationship with alcohol could use some fine tuning as well…especially after the holidays : )
Posted on January 4th, 2009 at 4:56 pm
ah i was the model of decorum this year
Posted on January 4th, 2009 at 4:58 pm
I don’t drink. At all. Ever. I have a cast iron stomach and can drink anyone under the table. Always could, even at the ripe young age of 15. In college I downed two full pitchers of Long Iced Teas, not knowing what they were, thinking they were really a form of tea, before someone- aghast at my consumption- clued me in that they were in fact mostly hard liquor. My last good rip, I had 14 shots of Cuervo in about two hours. Drove home. Was fine. Only wound up in the ER because my mother the nurse found out and was convinced I would die of alcohol poisoning. What a laugh. The ER staff couldn’t tell I was drunk until they tested my blood. I WAS drunk, however, and so their ensuing horrified response and immediate leap into emergency action seemed to me like a blurry clown dance.
My relationship with alcohol? Very, very, very distant. 19 years and counting…
Posted on January 5th, 2009 at 12:23 am
my stomach was cast iron until i destroyed it with chinese rocket fuel. that stuff was beyond foul.
i’ve never seen a clown dance but have put it on my ‘bucket list’
Posted on January 5th, 2009 at 12:07 pm
I don’t have a “relationship” with alcohol per se.
That’s just too damned weird, even by my standards.
Nope, I just choose to get blind paralytic drunk. A lot.
Posted on January 5th, 2009 at 7:09 pm
you don’t go for nocturnal trysts with firewater?
Posted on January 7th, 2009 at 10:32 am
My brother’s 26 year relationship with alcohol is finally over, it started with an ulcer and ended with my mother finding him 3 days before Christmas covered in blood from head to toe. Eventually his esophogas ruptured and he bled out, this was the third time this happened the first two he had to be put into a medically enduced comma for it to heal. This relationship was a slow killer that he always thought he could end at any given time, he thought he was in control of her and no point from his first drink was that true.
Posted on January 19th, 2009 at 5:54 pm
there are, alas, many tragic stories like yours
it is truly sad
Posted on January 19th, 2009 at 7:25 pm
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