jtmitchum.com

In college, social groups find just millions of reasons to throw parties. The paper I worked for was no different.

With finals around the corner, parties for the last night of production and the barn party, which is happening as I type this, are executed with drunken authority.

I attended none of these. Instead, I worked.

At first, I was saddened at the notion of missing this final hurrah with my peers, but I’m coming to a certain quietude and a refreshing confidence.

I realized I really didn’t want to go to any of these. It’s not a disdain or lack of inclusiveness in these groups that directed this feeling, but more a sensation certainly related to age. But to understand this, I think it prudent and entertaining to review how alcohol enters and becomes a part of my life.

The Innocent Phase

My grandparents have a quaint cabin at the Lake of the Ozarks where my parents would take my brother, sister and I every summer for a weekend, or even week, of family relaxation.

Dad would set up somewhere for tanning, which really means setting up a small fort of relaxation equipment including boom box, 400 Time-Life rock collection CD’s from his favorite years (at 400 I’m not sure we can really say favorite), towels, lotions and (1) one genuine Anheuser Busch beer with appropriate koozy.

Why one you might ask? Ozark summers are one of two things. Hot and muggy. These features are what make the absolutely green/brown water look so great to jump in, but they also warm any serious supply of beer in no time.

Cooler you say?

Lifting a heavy box of ice and brew doesn’t fit in with the notion of relaxation, and here enters the first alcoholic experience.

“If you go get me a beer, I’ll let you have a sip,” Dad would say.

I ran like cotton candy was going to foam over the top of the beer can as soon as I got it. My innocence was such that I took the beer all the way down to him, let him open the fine blue and white can and he would offer a sip off the frosty cold top.

It tasted like ass. This only accentuates a father’s position in a boys life. I loved it.

I would be satisfied with a sip for several years to come. It was never enough to ‘feel’ the alcohol, but I loved it.

Holy wine

Communion in a Lutheran church didn’t offer any more help. It was a shot glass of ass wine, which I holy loved (pun intended). My ghostly father offered me a sip of his beer, and I was happy to oblige, if only thankful for a cracker to break the near vinegar wine flavor.

Here enters the real development.

Beer pressure

Around 12 I met a dear and obnoxious friend of mine. Ryan Young. He had some of several things that ignited my curiosities into life. Black powder, access to his dad’s bulletin board service (that’s pre-Internet era file sharing), and a occasionally unlocked booze cabinet with wonderfully obvious markings for how much water to add when we were done.

We got our heads warm, but realized quickly that any serious imbibing would require time and distance from any parents and adults.

The excitement began.

One night, we planned a camping trip on a large plot of land used for horse trails and such. Ryan’s mom was good friends with Howard Benjamin, a rather rich rancher who was fond of sharing and happened to own large tracks of land perfect for camping.

We were 16 at the time and borrowed Ryan’s grandfather’s truck to go camping. We had a case of MGD, a bottle of Cactus Juice and a bottle of Jack Daniels. Really, we were a shotgun and buckteeth away from being red necks.

I think I was even smoking Camel non-filters at the time; coffin nails we called them. You weren’t really manly unless you laughed at the face of early death and emphysema.

The truck broke down, so we had to ditch the beer. Literally, we stashed the beer in a roadside ditch near an exit ramp we thought we could remember. The bottles we stashed in our sleeping bags for later.

That night, I discovered that Ryan discovered he couldn’t hold his liquor. He drank the bottle of Cactus Juice, rolled over laughing and eventually jumped up saying he was going to puke. He fell in the fire pit for a brief minute or two.

I, in the mean time, found I held my booze quite well. Regardless, we both woke up with a haze that only worsens as you age.

We had fun. We talked like branches and leaves in a Fall wind, wisely rustling the important issues of our lives in intellectual interchange.

This is what alcohol should always be about. But, as teenagers do, we never accept a subtle level of contentment. Not for long, anyways.

Developmental Drinking

Through my teen years, drinking was a sensation, not a flavor. It was dulling and introspective. It went well with the floods of questions I had about my own personality and life. I had taken to writing and loud music, and drunk went well with both.

Drinking was a private affair during these times. I realized and confronted myself with the notion that alcoholism might be a reality given my extremely private nature with it. My grades held, I had a full-time job as a supervisor in a catering department for Holiday Inn, and I maintained very open communications with my parents.

As a matter of fact, casually drinking with my parents became more common through my later teens. They commonly offered me a beer or a glass of wine with dinner. I rarely refused and never drank excessively in front of them. Alcohol had become a sign of adulthood as well as a sensation.

Adultish drinking

Enter moving out and post-high school.

Alcohol is popular!

My room mates and I work feverishly procuring large quantities for no particular reason. When sufficient stocks had been reached, we pillaged our own supply until we were just retardedly drunk. Alcohol became a sensation, a sign of adulthood and a release into freedom and personality.

It was also expensive. Only at this stage of life do brands like Hamms and Natural Ice beer ever actually taste good. McCormick’s was the finest vodka we owned, and I found I liked even really bad vodka. I found out I could really hold my booze.

At this age, it was appropriate to have your friends brag for your liver’s sheer Olympic capabilities. We played card games called presidents and assholes, and it usually required that I drank far too much for any good purpose. Still, I never threw up, which at that age is the only sign you’ve had too much.

And that really was the only limit for several years. You don’t evaluate your social dependence, your psychological exhaustion or your obviously misranked priorities. If you did that, you’d be responsible, and that just sucks.

College

Can we say drink fest? Booze hit its all time popularity. Shawn, my room mate, was 21, and we had it made. We lived in a small townhouse that was nicely furnished. I was making good money as a sleep technician and our taste in alcohol had jumped up quite a bit.

Bud-light was the lowest beer we would drink and I had taken to rum and Southern Comfort as a staple. It was tough sleeping days and switching schedules for school, so alcohol served a medicinal purpose on top of social function.

Let’s not kid ourselves.

The alcohol really served as a social stool loosener. We started hosting large parties with the sole purpose of getting inebriated and maybe talking confidently while slurring to some girls.

We’d even drink as many shots as we could stand before heading out to local dance bars. We needed that smooth bounce in our step to encourage dancing and mingling. Alcohol and sexuality became Siamese twins joined at the hip.

While we were incredibly restrained, it was more a fear of commitment mixed with a healthy respect for women and sex that kept us from whoring out.

This extended to the bars when I finally turned 21. Alcohol was purely an indulgent vice. I swam in it with nearly no break in the week. Work and school were in fine shape somehow, but they were really just inconveniences to drinking. I would have felt bad, but all the college students I met were all about the same thing… the next party. Somehow, I really believed this was the key to happiness.

Actual Adulthood

It wasn’t.

Alcohol would lead to terrible depressions that I held internally only so well. Occasionally, Shawn would catch a glimpse of something wholly unreasonable inside me. My confidence was failing and I questioned my sense of worth.

I would start partying as happy as any of them, but on some nights, with just the right amount of time with no one talking to me, I would slip away into a predictable place. Self-loathing.

The stress of work and school along with a new sense of social ineptitude drove a need for release. I wrote and smoked like no other. The political structure of the lab I was working in added new social career pressures on me that I probably shouldn’t have faced. I was expected to perform with extreme perfection, and I delivered constantly. Adult co-workers supported the notion that getting ripped was the normal way to deal with these pressures.

My God were they wrong. I was wrong. I was very very wrong.

You become what you are known as

Socially, alcohol still made me the life of a party and I had a hard time departing from that image. Change, I would realize, is doubted by everyone around you until you have a proven record.

That brings me to now. In reading over the article, it seems the reason I’m happy to be at work is now prima facia, or dead obvious.

I’m not insinuating that my path is equivocal to the one my peers are indulging in, but I must say, I don’t observe much variation from the story I’ve so quickly laid down. I’m positive alcohol had a more devastating effect on me that it does most, but that’s my own growing mission.

My ego, as it were, has become less pliable to such things. In the body, keratin is a protein substance in the skin responsible for helping create callous where it is needed. I think my ego, my personality has excreted a very healthy amount in a way that I am quite comfortable with.

Kerry, my girlfriend, found a picture of me from a New Years party two years past. I’m obviously drunk with my arms outstretched like I could fly. I had knocked over a platter of mini-cacti of my friends, passed out in my truck bed in the cold and even threatened to throw an empty beer bottle at passer by’s under the obvious instruction of my friend Theseus.

“It somehow doesn’t seem like you anymore,” she said.