It seems obvious to say now, but one of the biggest problems faced by alcoholics is the sheer ubiquity and social acceptance of the poison in question. From the holiest sacrament of the Christian faith, to the notion of ‘wetting the baby’s head’, from a night out with the lads or girls, any sporting event you care to mention and an evening dinner spent with friends, the Devil’s Petrol gets just about everywhere. Speaking of petrol, my friend C who’s just left rehab wasn’t averse to the odd drop of gasoline when push came to shove. Well, she was averse after she tried it of course, but that’s a different matter altogether.
Of course, whilst desperately siphoning off petrol from the fuel tank directly into your receiving gullet isn’t exactly the done thing at middle-class dinner parties, most imbibing is very much accepted, even expected. There’s an unspoken societal contract which agrees that drinking and its corollary, getting drunk, is perfectly normal and desirable. The deviance comes with questioning the consensus. Outside of not wishing to drink and drive, declining a friendly drink is seen as some kind of heresy. Saying, ‘I’m sorry but I don’t drink’ has, I’ve noticed, often had the effect of making the boozers look distinctly ill at ease. ‘Sucks to be you’, one of my still-drinking friends had observed defensively. Well yeah, it does suck not being able to drink happily, because I like a drink and it would nice to be all normal and refined about it. Sucks even worse, however, to end up yet again being carted into a hospital four days later after embarking on yet another uncontrollable alcoholic bender of epic proportions. Although standing in the corner sipping a lime and soda whilst desperately trying to regulate your breathing as the wine flows freely around you, doesn’t exactly have P-A-R-T-A-A-Y written all over it, it does have its life benefits. Finding the still centre at the heart of things can be immensely rewarding in any context, particularly so if your life and sanity are at stake.
But this stuff isn’t easy. During one of my periods of ‘white knuckle’ sobriety, I recall walking hastily past the local bottle shop and clocking a sign inside which stated baldly: ‘DRINK. IT’S OKAY’, which really wasn’t very helpful at the time. But you have to see these things for what they are, and learn to live with them. I’ll never be an evangelist for teetotaling and mostly an advert is just an advert, not a deliberate attempt to sabotage my precious sobriety. When it boils down to it, the equation is simple: knowing what always happens when I drink, is it now worth the risk to actually have a drink? For me, the answer is clear. But finding that ‘No’ in the midst of an addictive mindset isn’t always straightforward when just about everything around you is screaming ‘Yes’.
Needless to say, and petrol drinking aside, the dubious glamour of alcohol consumption is ramped up to the megabucks by advertising, movies, music, sport and just about everything else. There’s no escaping the alcoholic society we’ve become.
At Club Tropicana, the drinks were free but for many of us there’s been a high price to pay for accepting the ‘Happy Hour’ culture that surrounds us. And for those such as me, there’s no gain to be had in pointing out the tripfalls of society. We’ve rolled with the punches when the times were good and now we’re out for the count on the canvas, there’s little point in complaining that it was us who clambered eagerly into the ring into the first place.
For the addict the trick is to negotiate a path through the tawdry glamour and glossy marketing tricks that call out to us from every street corner or TV show and make our way, however twisted, out of the woods and onto whatever broad, sunlit upland we choose to make for ourselves.
One day at a time.
Photo by Johann Trasch on Unsplash
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