On drinking in moderation

To drink in moderation is to not drink at all. Or at the very least, to not drink properly. The trick with drinking, though it can as easily be applied to any of life's endeavors, is to do so in the right amount. Pour yourself a whiskey sour and read the evening news. Open a bottle of Shiraz and sip it as you watch something deathly unfunny on CBS. You are nearing the right amount. 

 If you drink the right amount the world takes on the quality of a very good dream--jokes are funnier, lights dimmer in a pleasing way, food plentiful and yet inessential, and the eyes of our interlocutors are deeper, more intently locked with ours. In this higher state, it becomes clear that people you'd mistaken for acquaintances, distant cousins, or people who worked a few cubes away, are really friends, people who you've just been missing because the world is shaped so imperfectly. And friends suddenly become confidants--people with whom it is safe to share the joy, the laughter, the wonder, and the deep silliness and sadness of the world. 

To have two or three drinks is to see the world in all its color. It is to see the world as malleable, and our place in it essential. No one is Mercutio after two drinks, a volatile and minor player caught in the midst of a grander affair.  Temptation, being what it is, first and foremost, tempting. Though I'll submit that it's a horrendous way to define a word. Temptation is an essential fabric woven into the universe-- an apple crunching, a wallet found untended. Thus, a drink or two more poured upon such a wonderful world would seemingly only augment the good feeling. Of course, the idea of an extra drink or two far surpasses its actual pleasure. But we have such a hard time rectifying our dreams with our realities. 

In this new state, which more sober men have called drunkenness, strange things will begin to happen. The room will be transformed a second time as Dorothy's was when she was sent to Oz. You'll realize that people who you'd thought you'd forgiven years ago for some minor slight still make you angry--an old boyfriend who made you read Dante in the original Italian, a friend who failed to call the night that you almost died, a girl who once told you that she liked your dress disingenuously. And suddenly a torrent will rush through you, a certainty that the distance between you and everyone else in the room is miles upon miles. You will see that to reach them you'd have to paddle across deep and troubled waters, and you're drunk anyway, and would capsize and drown.  

To drink in this way, heavily and with purpose, is to splinter briefly the veneer of self that we are always busily constructing. And in the morning, when the light is still pale and new you'll rise from bed and start picking the glittering pieces of yourself off the floor--that you might build anew, that old facade of the self. Inevitably, something gets put back in the wrong place and you'll wonder what's wrong. Though one could ask if the pieces ever fit together at all.