Drinks

I have always found bars peculiar establishments. Watering holes sans sustenance, where one can drift slowly (or quickly if Everclear is involved) into euphoric inebriation. To get "so fucking wasted, bro," as it were. I am often invited out for a drink with friends or co-workers, and often I decline. Every now and again I will relent and throw them a bone (or boner, if you know what I mean [I apologize for the last joke, I have a court order to reference my erection at least once a day {I have a terrible lawyer, btw}]) and go out, but I always have an internal discussion over how I am making a terrible mistake. 

Drink? For what purpose? To simply be drunk? Aside from the fact I despise being drunk, becoming drunk is a solitary endeavor. Last I checked vodka doesn't provide a contact high. No need to surround myself with strange strangers yelling over a shitty Coheed & Cambria song about that one time they got so fucking wasted, bro.

Drink with friends? Then why go out to a bar? Just drink in whatever fixer-upper trash heap doubles as your humble abode and avoid the minor claustrophobia and missing phones custom to the pub/bar/dive experience.

Meet new people? Not to paint the entirety of the drinking population in one self-righteous brush but I'LL GO AHEAD AND DO JUST THAT: the typical bar patron lacks creativity, empathy, and the all important hmm-my-tattoos-are-looking-kinda-fucking-stupid-guess-I-should-stop-while-I'm-ahead sense. Those who regularly frequent bars are not my cup of tea as people go, since they are drinking alcohol, not tea.

The very idea of bars is akin to fast food playpens; a relatively safe environment for one to interact with strangers, gorge oneself on various pro-heart attack hors d'oeuvres, cry randomly, bleed mysteriously, and make bad decisions. Pinatas too. Sometimes there are pinatas.

And yet! There, near the garishly decorated pool table! Do you see the man blissfully unaware that that is actually not a dance conga but merely a line to the bathroom? The women's bathroom, no less. Do you see the man gurgling the lyrics to four separate songs that he Macgyvered into one mega-song? Do you see the man laughing at everything and nothing simultaneously? There stands the happy drunk (who is well past "so fucking wasted, bro," bro) to drown my cynicism with a parade of 50 cent wells. I once believed the phrase a misnomer. Happy drunk. Isn't one of the benefits of inebriation lowered inhibition and, conversely, lowered emotional connectedness? Wouldn't one be more numb than blithe?

Then I considered the thought of being connected, even if only tangentially, to others disconnected was enough to warrant a smile. A laugh towards the heavens. To enjoy the nether of the moment, chest bump nonexistence. That aside from the positive societal connotations a drink with friends has represented for centuries there is something more to drinking, more to dancing on tables like an asshole, that one can transcend the quiet pleasure of nursing one's last drink past simple inebriation and onto nirvana. Temporarily know the feeling of congruence between the universe and the self.

So I look at the puke-stained man carried out by friends as one who has captured a part of the essence of being. A scotch sophist, a bourbon Buddha.  Balance unsteady, world aligned.