Nathan’s revelation yesterday that he’s too hungover to blog reminded me of something I’ve heard increasingly from friends: They’re quitting drinking. As a New Yorker, I’m kind of astounded that anyone would even consider this, but it’s true. One friend apparently quit drinking a while back; another, who lives in the South, did so recently.
Now, I can’t presume to really know what they were going through. And I would never simply laugh off their decisions. Still, I find it hard to imagine either of them as out-of-control drinkers, so dependent on booze that going cold turkey was the only solution. It makes me wonder if I really know these guys, particularly the Southerner, at all.
But it also reminds me of a third friend, this one a New Yorker too, who often frets that his desire for a nightly beer and/or whiskey is growing too strong, that it dictates how he’ll pass the post-work hours, even if he never actually gets drunk on his nightly tipple. He, too, is someone I can’t imagine truly out of control, and I begin to wonder if there’s something floating around in the culture that is provoking guilt over what, for thousands of years, has been man’s primary mechanism for coping with the horribleness of life. Heck, even Don Draper’s trying to slow down.
Here on Dadwagon, however, we are very pro-alcohol. I’m the guy bringing his kid to a bar, after all. I don’t see myself getting on that other wagon any time soon.
And that’s partly because I see drinking and parenting as parallel challenges. (This is not just a spurious theory ginned up to stretch out a blog post. Serious!) Both involve trying to balance a need for control with a need to give up control. Just as you hover over a little kid stumbling around the playground, you also need to give the child space to try new things and, yes, fall down from time to time. On the drinking side, it’s tricky, too—when have you reached the perfect moment of relaxation, beyond which more booze is bad?
I’m not saying that one helps with the other (although a beer or two can definitely make playing with small children more fun), just that they both test our limits and our self-knowledge. Although, I guess, in the case of my newly teetotaling friends, self-knowledge has been a revelation.
All I know is, my ability to kick my kid’s ass at Candyland rises exponentially after I’ve had a few.
In all fairness, you should give your kid a few to even up the stakes.
I feel like I’m seeing more of the no-drinky thing around me too. It can be a weird subject to broach, especially considering the weight of bad-ness someone can have been responsible for through the dreaded alcoholism.
I’m coming from a moderately alcoholic family, just enough to make it interesting, broken enough to have something to fix on a sunday, and this is something that pops up into my head from time to time… But I do enjoy my fine spirits, and just regular ones too.
I feel like a good trick is to get more expensive booze, or get funky with interesting cocktails and then we can be, like, “Hey, let’s try this new fancy booze to try and see what our palate thinks of it and maybe we’ll taste some notes on this interesting wine afterwards… and then maybe we’ll see what a few vodka sodas taste like after the fancy stuff and then we can compare notes!”
Good stuff. Our prayers are with Mr. Draper for a swift recovery.