---
date: 2019-08-10
weight: 4
tags:
- echoes
- kind
- snarky
- earnest
categories:
- alcohol
---

When 2007 rolled around, I turned 21. *What if,* I thought to myself. *What if I decided to see what it feels like to be addicted to something?*

By that point, alcohol was this nebulous thing. I'd roped a few people into getting me alcohol now and then, and it was fine. I'd started brewing and it was whatever. I had beer and it was alright. I went through a mead phase--

> You went through several.

--I went through a wine phase, and an absinthe phase--

> Don't sell yourself short. You wrote [an essay on absinthe](https://writing.drab-makyo.com/non-fiction/tasting/new-american-absinthe/).

--and a gin phase. That's the one that got me. I had a bottle of Beefeater's, what was to become my gin of choice, and I had an inch of it poured over ice and I was standing in the kitchen. Such a wide open space. The kitchen at that apartment was larger than my bedroom now, and it opened onto a living room the size of what we have now. I was standing tall in that vast plain of a room, staring down into my glass and watching the way the ice melting into the gin created swirls of two different kinds of transparent. I was thinking how it was probably due to the different ways the two liquids refracted light, and then I was laughing, because I was staring down into my drink like something out of a bar.

*What if I decided to see what it feels like to be addicted to something?* I thought. I drank every night that week.

> Why ruin your life on accident when you can do it on purpose?

I don't think I was thinking in those terms at that point.

> Are you now?

Perhaps.

> Maybe you're just afraid of doing anything by accident.

Perhaps.

> You're sounding like me more by the day.

Learn from the best.

> And so you set about with a will.

Like magic. I set forth my will with a stated goal and made it happen. My spell was spoken and washed down with liquor. I drank nearly every day from then on out. I spent thousands of dollars on alcohol over the next ten years. I went through more mead phases and more beer phases. I went through a distillation phase.

I drank hard with the choir, and then I left school and drank hard with the programmers. If there's one thing that most programmers do better than computers, it's drinking, after all.

I did some work at a bar, even. Just making [their menu](/emb-menu.pdf) and website for them in exchange for free drinks.

> You mastered LaTeX that way. A very you thing to do.

I did well at it. I still have one of the menus and some of the paper laying around somewhere. I did that until the bartender left and, when I asked for my next payment from the owner, he flipped out at me and threatened to sue me for impersonating him. I don't think I realized Raffi, the bar manager who hired me, was already on his way out.

I drank my way out of one job and through a good chunk of another. I drank until I got better at it than I was at software. I drank myself into burnout. I drank until I collapsed.

> You used up your spell slots. You ran out of will. You had to quit by accident.

I worked to quit, I'll have you know. It wasn't easy. It took meds and some rough nights.

> You were less of a person then than you were when you started drinking. The you who started drinking by focusing on **starting drinking** was more real than the you who collapsed in the kitchen from a PNES and stopped drinking because she was completely empty of intention.

Should I start the daily drinking again, then?

> You're more of a person now than you were when you started drinking.

That, coming from you, is a glowing endorsement.

> You may have been more of a person when you started than when you stopped, but you weren't much of one, even then.
