The Wonderful World of Sobriety

by snaggle at 01:13 PM on April 20, 2003

Most people make New Year’s resolutions during, well, New Years. I, however, usually tend to make them come springtime, roughly coinciding with the thoughts of “God, I’m scrawny. I need to get buff and find me a boyfriend. Everyone else is looking so cute in their little t-shirts with their big arms and cute short hair and then there’s me, scrawny, wasting away. Someday maybe I’ll find that stallion to sweep me off my feet but until then I’ll just pine away.”

But I digress.

One of my springtime resolutions was to severely cut back on the amount of alcohol I imbibe. Anyone who’s spent a night out trying to keep up with me can attest to the fact that while Jesus may have been able to turn water into wine, my body seems to be able to turn wine into water. (Take that, Jeebus!) This unprecedented ability unfortunately often leads to episodes of shameless dirty dancing, grinding on straight boys, and trying to take them home. Or things of that nature. One weekend this spring, when I passed out on my living room floor Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights in a row, I decided it was probably time to make a change. Oh yeah, and did I mention I’m on two medications that have those little labels that say, “Do not take with alcohol”?

So we’re making a change in my life. So far, it’s been a strange paradigm shift. Usually, I am the instigator of craziness, the rampant animal waiting to be unleashed as the weekend draws near. It is I who leads the army to the bar and it is I who outlast them all as they fall one by one to the sweet vintner’s arts. Now, instead, I’m the lame-ass who gets tired at 12:30 and goes home.

Yup, my entire world has shifted.

It’s a very strange feeling to no longer be the crazy firestarter that everyone knows you as. I’ve been trying to substitute caffeine for alcohol and while that works for a time, there’s usually the bitter result of tossing and turning in bed once you get home rather than falling into a blissfully drunken stupor.

There are other side effects as well. Last night I went down to the Garden, a gay club, with a few friends. This has been a favorite spot of mine ever since I turned twenty-one, and it has rarely failed to provide me with a good time. Last night was no different, in general. It started off fairly normally, making the rounds and saying hi to the DJs, owner, bartenders, drag queens, circuit queens, etc. At some point I ran into my friend Matt, who was celebrating his twenty-first, appropriately with a large quantity of drinks working their magic upon him. As the night wore on, we ended up dancing together on the dance floor, a sloppy mess of two sweaty, shirtless gayboys. Normally, skin-to-skin contact like this is quite welcome; there’s something about the closeness of people to you on the dance floor, where the writhing of sweaty bodies to the pumping of bass is so reminiscent of the writhing of sweaty bodies under other circumstances. And yet, with one singular Long Island Iced Tea in my body, most of the alcohol having already coursed its way through my veins and out my pores, I was not enraptured in the moment, fixated on helping my friend have a wonderful, sweaty, gropy birthday and enjoying the otherwise welcome attention, as I have done on similar occasions. Instead, I was obsessing over one thought:

I reek.