He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.
-Samuel Johnson
This week the Atlantic published a thoughtful essay on our constantly changing relationship with alcohol.
The gist of the article is that we evolved to drink, but not like we do in these waning days (I hope) of the pandemic. Drinking was a way to ease social awkwardness and distance, to unlock creativity, and in some ways became the glue that held civilization together. Moderate drinkers are just happier and more social, based on loads of empirical evidence, than their tee-totaling neighbors. And that makes living together as a community more pleasant, and those communities more successful.
But not always. A couple developments in the last few centuries have created the means of metastasizing all this bonhomie into something a little more malignant. First, our ancient ancestors were mostly limited to beer and wine, and even these were watered down. Drunkenness was seen as a character flaw and a social evil. Around the middle of the last millennium distilled spirits entered the picture, and at eighty proof rather than twenty or thirty provided the means to end up deeply in one's cups without much volume. That Hogarth print at the beginning of this essay was a humorous attempt to depict the consequences as England found itself awash in gin in the mid-18th century.
The other relatively new development is drinking alone. Our idea of a bar, with the drinkers facing straight ahead and not gathered around a table, is a recent western invention. Nowadays, as the article observes, it's often considered creepy to strike up a conversation with the person on the next barstool (one of my favorite diversions when I used to travel for work a lot), and if you look down the bar you'll see folks sullenly drinking and playing with their phones.
So when the pandemic arrived, we had already turned away from the benefits of alcohol as a social lubricant that might make one a little tipsy--now we had the means of getting falling down drunk, and were going it alone.
Add to this our lockdown of the last year, with all the stress and uncertainty we've endured, and it's easy to see why our alcohol consumption has gone through the roof in a predictable pattern. Per capita alcohol consumption rose dramatically in the U.S. through the disruption and mass-migration of our first decades as a republic, and did so again after crises like 9/11. We don't just drink to become a little more convivial; it's also a ready means of escape.
All of this seems sort of obvious to me, having grown up around alcohol abuse and spent my whole life in professions and situations where drinking, and drinking heavily, were the norm. As a child it wasn't all that unusual to have someone in the household sitting alone in the kitchen or the family room, working through a bottle of brown water until every else went to sleep, leaving the imbiber to rail at invisible foils in the darkness of 2 a.m. There was the performance theater of the occasional flash of inappropriate nudity, the sad spectacle of someone passed out on the floor some mornings, and the constant threat of rage and violence that seemed apt to burst forth after several doubles on the rocks.
I started drinking at fourteen, always with the guys, always beer. Then there was my time flying fighters, when every rite of passage was fueled with massive alcohol consumption, often leaving guys so hungover I'd see them throwing up in the parachute shop or next to the $31 million airplane they were about to fly.
Then there is the law, a profession filled with heavy drinkers. This is a more solitary thing--lots of lawyers have bars in their offices, and I've worked in firms where it was normal for a lawyer in the early evening to pour a cocktail in a tall styrofoam cup while tallying up his billable time for the day, then refilling it as a "roadie" for the drive home. And this was definitely drinking to ease the stress and anxiety of a job in which most encounters were in the context of someone's personal crisis, where we tended to find ourselves immersed in the lives of our neighbors at their very worst.
I've stopped at various times while on one health kick or another, such as when I was running marathons, or when I scared the bejeezus out of myself with an "overshoot" that left me embarrassed and nursing a throbbing head. There were a few "never agains", but one should never say "never", eh?
So with that backdrop, the pandemic and our self-isolation at Wyldswood and then up in Corning should have been fraught with peril. I work alone all day, with a very well-stocked bar maybe twenty feet from where I'm sitting right now. And there's been a little stress, with this trying to hold a law practice together as a remote exercise, P effectively leaving the workforce for six months, and of course the nagging concern that one of us might touch the door handle at Winn-Dixie and end up on a ventilator a couple weeks later.
And for a time, we did drink more than we had in the past, but never during the workday. After I'd close up the home office and Peg would crawl off the tractor we'd uncork a bottle of wine, and then maybe another, and sit in the truck-bed pool or out on the screen porch, or curl up with a movie. At some point in there my drink of choice switched to Jameson's from cabernet, after the latter started leaving me with a throbbing morning head whenever there was more than a second glass.
That throbbing head thing, coupled with the fact that our clothes started getting much tighter for the obvious reason that several hundred empty calories were flowing down our gullets every day, led P to give it up altogether. She had no interest in drinking anything other than red wine, and red wine eventually left her with a constant, pounding headache after anything more than a sip. She seems perfectly happy with this arrangement, and our fridge is now stocked with Diet Coke.
I still pour a cocktail at around 5:30 every afternoon, and carry it around with me on our evening walks around the neighborhood. I'll usually have a second with supper. Although P's not joining in, it still feels like a social lubricant to me--happy hour means closing the laptop after logging my time, and concentrating on Peg and us and all the things that matter to us. And our kitchen bar tab is a fraction of what we spent in the middle of 2020 at the height of the pandemic, which is a good thing because this 1849 house (Peg's taken to calling it "Tara") is going to need a new roof and a new boiler soon.
Speaking of which, it's time to pull myself together and get to work on something that will help pay for all that deferred maintenance. Selah.
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