Letters to the Editor
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Hangover Horny
Yup sex is always fantastic when I'm hungover. Nothing better than a Saturday morning of fun after a hard Friday night of drinking.
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Get Sober Now - Creativity Will Return
I have been in recovery for just over 18 months. I went the Detox-Rehab-12-Step route and am starting to feel the return of creative drives that have been dormant while I focused on recovery. I once again am feeling the urges to make music and write once again.
I have looked at some of my journal entries from the last phase of my drinking career and those that seemed brilliant as I wrote them in a drunken or hung-over state now look pathetic. I review these from time to time to remind myself how bad off I was.
I don't know for certain that you are an alcoholic, but much of what you say sounds like you are. You seem to plan and manage your drinking. You have adapted to drunkenness as part of your lifestyle and believe you have a dependency upon the mental state of a hangover for creative energy. You say you plan to quit drinking someday for children you do not yet have. These all sound like alcoholic thinking to me, with more than a smattering of grandiosity.
You should seek out a 12-Step group and meet some people who have already recovered. They will tell you about the facets of their life that have returned. Since getting sober, I have met several other musicians who have had their muses return with greater strength than they ever experienced while drinking or drugging. Being able to hear/read yourself while sober will give you a better idea of the actual quality of your playing or writing. While this may be a humbling experience at first, you will get comfortable with who you really are and what you can do. From there, you can grow for real.
Finally, if it proves that pain is really what stimulates your creative side, put a pebble in your shoe and take a walk.
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a recipe for success
Stay up until 6:00 am. Sleep for one hour. Get up, rinse out your mouth with white vinegar and headbutt your bedroom wall ten times. Repeat as necessary.
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Homogenous Genius
Christ. How many of the responders to Cary's column are drunks ar close family members to? Salon seems to employ the patron saint/columnist of alcoholics.
Oh, and anyone who rationalizes a need to drink based on the supposed benefits of being withdrawn from booze is about certain to be an alcoholic.
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Horny and inspired
hangovers can definately increase sexual desire, and potency. My theory is that the alcohol has usppressed many things in your body, including the neuroreceptors involved in sex, but also testosterone levels. As you sober up slowly, the testosterone level springs to compensate and BOOM, off you go.
As I have gotten older that is far LESS true, probably because one's natural levels of testosterone are slightly lower and the body no longer quite geared toward such voluminous testosterone production.
Similarly, while I once enjoyed some hangover days -- my friends and I used to call it 'space-brain' -- a feeling somewhere between spacey-high and clear-minded -- I now find I don't. When I do drink, I get drunk and more hazy in my recollection, and the mornings are crap.
LW, your problem with hangover's being an inspiration will end naturally as you age. Enjoy it while you can, if you like, but avoid becoming any manner of full-blown alcoholic. I think, like cigarettes, booze is probably best slowly weened away from once the excesses of youth are done. Hard to do if you like drinking as much as I (and you) do, but something to keep in mind.
Note to Those In Recovery: While I understand you may identify what you see as binge and alcoholic behaviour in some of the writers here, methodically preaching "Get help NOW" does not help. You appear somewhat grating and deterministic to others, and while I understand many in recovery feel the need to reach out to others in whom they see some of their behaviours, unfortunately it comes across poorly, or, even snooty and superior.. even if you have a sad or witty anecdote to accompany it. It seems a bit like having someone tell you how to raise you children, or other well-known irksome matters.
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THis letter gives me some insight into the War on Drugs
The second night didn't feel as great when I found myself at a party being overly competitive and cruel about a board game and started cock-blocking a nice guy I had just met over a girl I wasn't especially interested in, but who had given me a couple of smiles earlier in the night. I couldn't pass up the opportunity to throw my hat in the ring just in case she was whimsical enough to go home with me. All of that felt shitty the next day. But what didn't feel shitty was being awake at 8 a.m. and, despite all the shame, feeling more alive than I had in weeks.
Me, me, me. What the about the other human beings you've cast your personal drama?
Maybe they feel shitty too? But maybe they don't feel so liberated by it?
I think this is how the War on Drugs works.
It's the kind of thing that drinkers do -- take out their self-loathing and their alcohol-induced aggression on other people they've cast in their own personal dramas.
That's why one out of every hundred American adults is in prison. That's how the drinkers make themselves feel better about their drinking -- by putting the drug users in jail.
It makes them feel alive.
This is what the drinkers at the BBC are doing now to feel alive: they're going to show a film of someone injecting THC, to scare the kids away from marijuana.
I've never heard of anyone injecting THC in my entire life! It sounds pretty painful, since THC is not even water-soluble.
Maybe that's why nobody's ever tried it before, other than the drinkers who run BBC.
This is how the drinkers cast other human beings in their own invented alcohol-induced dramas.
I'm effing tired of it. The world pays too much so they can feel alive.
Dear LW,
Exactly how much do you expect other people to pay so that you can feel alive?
Sincerely,
Me