June 7, 2010 - afternoon

At odd times memories of my drinking days come back to me. Today, driving home from school, maybe I was thinking of a guy I saw flip his Harley and survive a couple years ago on the same highway, I remembered that saying from AA "God loves children and drunks." I don't know about the children part. A lot of inexcusable things happen to children around the world every day every second. But it is true, drunks seem to make it through lots of disasters implausibly unharmed. Walking away from car wrecks for example. It's like the feeling you have when you're drunk, that you're wearing a heavily padded spacesuit looking at the world through a fogged window, affects the physical world and things bounce off of you. Thinking about it led me to think about some of the recovering alchoholics that I've known. Most of them were "drinking people." They had a hard-living approach to life and drinking was a part of it. Then there are those rare few people you'd either never suspect of drinking or of having their drinking be a problem. Really quiet socially awkward people on the one side, on the other rich professionals who drink a lot openly but still keep it all together. This led me to this question, are most alchoholics fuckups first, and alchoholics second? I don't have an answer. I seem to be both at once.