Creeva’s World 2.0

So many peo­ple I know live and breath by the timetable where they can go to the bar and have a drink. Ninety per­cent of these indi­vid­u­als are not what I would tra­di­tion­ally call alco­holics, but I know a few. I also know drug addicts, sex addicts, and what I call fall from real­ity addicts, but I’ll get into that later.

I never was a big drinker, I’ve had my moments though. I’m a light­weight when it comes to drink­ing in about every sense of the word. Other then the vague mem­o­ries of hav­ing a sip of Dad’s beer now and again it was quite a few years before I had any alco­hol at all. On that sub­ject though, grow­ing up we hardly ever had any alco­hol in the house. If we did have alco­hol it was either one of those get together where all my par­ents friends came over and we had beer in the house, or my mother’s high school friend came up to visit and they got loaded on peach schnapps. Before my brother was born I was dropped off at my grand­par­ents so my par­ents could go out bar hop­ping, but this only hap­pened once every 6 months or so. Ironic how much a five year old can remem­ber. The one thing I can say is that for my whole life until my mother started dat­ing again there was one bot­tle of vodka (iron­i­cally a low proof crap vodka) that my par­ents got at their wed­ding which was never ever opened. Other then the schnapps this is the only alco­hol I remem­ber in the house. I don’t remem­ber there ever being alco­hol at my grand­par­ents house, but my grand­fa­ther smoked the occa­sional cigar, for spe­cial pur­poses only.

Alco­hol wasn’t demo­nized in my child­hood, nor was it really cel­e­brated to the extent that my friends party with it. It was there, an occa­sional beer with the neigh­bors, but all drink­ing was done in a social set­ting. So by the time I was a teenager my only con­cern was get­ting caught, not look­ing for­ward to being an adult or let­ting loose. The first now beer sip from alco­hol I ever had was at a band party my junior year in high school. My girl­friend who was 20 at the time brought a forty to the party and I snuck off with her and a few friends to go drink it. I think I had two mouth fulls and that was it for me. My mother was pick­ing us up in an hour and I scarfed peanut but­ter rice crispy treats to try to get the smell off my breath. My friends though I was drunk because I kept ask­ing them to smell my breath, I was just paranoid.

Dur­ing my high school career I had no more alcohol.

At col­lege the first half the year I can say that my friend list wasn’t too big socially. It wasn’t that they were bad peo­ple, I was the type that was the geek, but didn’t want to be the geek and was try­ing to get out of the mold. (If you don’t under­stand that you never were a geek) The sec­ond half the year I got a new room­mate and things changed, we went to par­ties and I always got a 40 oz Zima — yes this shows I was a geek and a wuss — but I didn’t like beer and hadn’t ven­tured into hard alco­hol. I started smok­ing specif­i­cally because of these par­ties — girls would come up ask­ing for a cig­a­rette — you then learn to carry smokes on you.

I can say though (prob­a­bly because I was drink­ing Zima) — that I never got drunk that year at col­lege. After that year I left col­lege unfor­tu­nately it looks like — never to return.

The fol­low­ing year a friend of mine drove us down to the col­lege to visit some friends — this is the first time I got drunk. For the record I had two bot­tles of Boones — a beer — and about 8 glasses of punch that turned out to be 75% 151 rum. We went for a walk and every­one but me wanted to go back to the party. I wanted to keep walk­ing as I knew bad things would hap­pen if I didn’t. When we got back to the party, my friend who drove said he saw the color drain from my face and I turned white as a sheet — he rushed me to the bath­room. I kept say­ing I wanted t o go out walk­ing and I would go by myself — they were hav­ing none of it.

In the bath­room stall I puked so quickly I didn’t have time to turn my head and reach the toi­let — leav­ing a mess thank­fully I didn’t have to clean up. I can’t tell you how many times I have been drunk since that moment — but it’s only a hand­ful of times a year. I keep alco­hol in the house, but it rarely gets drank and I’ve have had some bot­tles of liquor for years now.

Now I’ve given my background.

I wit­ness my friends that I described above con­stantly drink­ing and par­ty­ing like there is no tomor­row. I can’t under­stand or com­pre­hend it. It’s a mys­tery to me that I don’t think will ever be solved. I feel they need to sit back and assess their lives and won­der why they are dump­ing money and brain cells into this. It sad­dens me that they do not see more to life then the next party. In a lot of ways I’m not much bet­ter, to me it’s the next web page, book, movie, or video game. I pre­fer stim­u­la­tion but some­thing out­wardly that can move me, the way alco­hol never will. I think the cri­sis with which alco­hol affects peo­ple is grow­ing and sadly it is tak­ing too many of my friends along for the ride.