Abstention doesn’t entail a sober life

“Abstainer, n: a weak person who yields to the temptation
of denying himself a pleasure.” ““ The Devil’s
Dictionary, by Ambrose Bierce.

Our typical drunk bore, and the binge culture he symbolizes,
fits this definition to a tee.

All over campuses nationwide, people are abstaining from being
interesting and having pleasure when sober. They are denying their
own wit, originality, personality and capacity for jubilation. And
they are doing so from the mistaken belief that being drunk is a
prerequisite of having a truly good time.

Call it a “culture of abstention” or a
“culture of binge-drinking” ““ it’s all the
same, and it has spread boredom and dullness. It has turned the
boring drunk and the boring drunk story into famous set-pieces of
the college experience.

Typical drunk story: Something stupid happens. If we’re
lucky, the story ends in tragedy, such as a delirious junior
switching majors to sociology. The only really funny drunk stories
feature any one of us as the punch lines, and our parents as the
butts.

Why do people feel they have to be drunk in order to be warm,
lively and entertaining? Why don’t they act that way all the
time? To have to pee or not to be, why is that the question?

Getting drunk is understandable as a careless result of
“one too many” or as a cure for a bad day. When it
comes to the matter of fun, however, it simply lacks logic for
drunkenness to be a foundational premise.

It involves stimulating yourself on a depressant. It involves
enhancing sexual arousal with a substance that is known
scientifically to inhibit performance. It involves consuming vast
quantities of something with a taste you might hate, to enable
yourself to do what you otherwise would not. None of this makes
sense.

Ultimately, alcohol replaces psychological inhibitions with
physical ones. Far from enhancing the capacity for enjoyment, it
only lowers standards, making present boredom more bearable.

I don’t get drunk because I can’t afford to be
sober. Sobriety is boring. Consider some of its dictionary
definitions: “plain or subdued;” “marked by
solemnity of character;” “devoid of speculative
imagination.” This much describes the physical sulking state
induced by sauce-flux.

Everyone’s aware of the negative and positive effects of
alcohol. Alcohol can make you kiss somebody you wouldn’t even
sleep with when sober.

But this is not a column against drinking. I’ve had a
taste for beer since the age of three, a taste that could never be
fooled by my parents’ attempted substitution of non-alcoholic
brands. And I’m sure I enjoy drinking far more than most
coeds, given that I do it for the taste.

Drinking for the taste. Whenever I mention that concept to a
fellow student, I get the exact same look I would get if I said I
was married to my grandmother ““ total confusion, with an
undercurrent of curiosity. Yes, yet another casualty of the
binge-drinking belief is the actual enjoyment of drinking.

We drink because we’re boring; we’re boring because
we drink. Whenever an effect is the same as a cause, there is
usually a deeper cause at work. I blame foolish fuss as the cause
of our abstention. We are possessed by too many false and worthless
inhibitions, which need to be shed in real life, when we have the
wits to take advantage of the liberation.

People are wound up by petty and superficial ephemera. What he
said and what she will think, this tepid trial and that tame
tribulation, all burden to a boring moan. Thanks to political
correctness and the therapy culture, fears of social unease, being
disliked, and offending people disable life enjoyment and
self-amusement.

As a result, phony chuckles and facile chatter are the common
currency of our daylight interactions. Whoever breaks the tedium is
usually referred to as “crazy” or “weird,”
and then all the more crazy and weird if he doesn’t drink
himself stinky on weekends.

In Italy, few people ever get drunk ““ as I learned from
several people I met, including bartenders, who told me when I
visited the country last summer.

Imagine. The most passionate, stimulated, vivacious culture in
the world ““ whose love of wine is unsurpassed ““ is
foreign to the ugly art of binge-drinking. Nothing could better
prove my point, unless it is confirmed that in Canada everybody
always gets drunk, but I’m not qualified to say if
that’s true.

It pains me to grant anything to Europeans, but our own binge
culture is an American one more than just a college one. It comes
in a long line of Puritanical fascinations with abstention. While
the alcohol abstainer may be annoying, and the sex abstainer may be
a drag ““ the abstainer from regularly enjoying life is worst
of all.