This might surprise you, but I drink a lot of beer. A lot.
It’s exhausting work, drinking beer most days and having to write about it. So is watching the belly expand. And observing the looks of consternation grow more permanent on my wife’s face, what with the grizzled beard and regular hangovers. Also, witnessing the fridge’s ratio of fresh veggies to beer bottles skew ever greater toward the latter.
I’m helpless to stop all of it, of course. This is free beer we’re talking about.
But can you believe I receive little-to-no sympathy when discussing the perils of this job? I’m beginning to think no one wants to hear about it. All I hear are orchestras of tiny, stringed instruments, playing off in the distance, whenever I bring this up.
I’m going to make a change. Complaining has led me nowhere. Attempts at a healthier lifestyle have fizzled. My only option now, after six months of beer writing, is to embrace the life totally, to own my destiny completely: I’ll become a flabby, drunken slob.
Here’s how to do it. Come join me, won’t you?
Limit “self control” to self-controlling exercise.
Once you give up the desire to do anything remotely active, and the illusions that it’s somehow “vital to your health”, you’re open to a world of unimpeachable freedom. Yes, a freedom to partake in diddlysquat in your underpants with a can a beer resting on your swollen abdomen. It’s a beautiful thing, letting it all go.
Avoid relationships that don’t involve alcohol.
This includes your spouse, if you have a marriage like mine, where you haven’t gotten obliterated – just the two of you – since the heady days of courtship. What days wasted! Such time, lost!
Ensure all social calls include beer.
If this means you see the same two people every single day, one of whom has been missing his left shoelace for three weeks and primarily smokes discarded cigarette butts, then so be it.
Cut out anyone that questions your drinking, or expresses concern.
Be savage about it. Most people aren’t worth speaking to any way.
Avoid sessional beers.
Yes, low-alcohol, the so-called “sessional” beers, are trendy right now, but any serious beer drinker knows these beers are for pansies. What, you call that can of Bottle Rocket a real beer? Chump, please. Get a head full of Thor’s Hammer, then we can talk. Yes. Only then can we talk.
Eat A&W.
Because it’s the best. Also I’m paid $20 and a Teen Burger every time I mention the brand in print.
Keep beer in your desk.
The most effective cure for the workplace hangover is more beer. OK, I understand that not everyone has the luxury of receiving free beer at their office on a weekly basis, and that not everyone’s co-workers understand and accept that the half-empty 650ml bottle of Imperial IPA cradled between your thighs at 10:42am is “for research purposes.” I get it. A creative approach might be necessary. Coffee mugs and breath mints are helpful tools.
(Speaking of which, peppermint schnapps is a fine alternative to both breath mints and toothpaste.)
Lie to everyone, regularly.
In response to a brewery manager’s query of whether I had enjoyed the free beer he had recently given me, I wrote this: “I’ve been clean and sober for the past week, so haven’t [sic] had a chance to try the beers.” This is fiction. I’ve been semi-drunk since last Saturday.
Why would I lie?
Because it’s necessary to keep a healthy – emphasis on healthy – distance between yourself and everyone you know, at all times, in order to stave off any insights or perspectives that may disrupt your desire to drink constantly and prodigiously.
So lie. Lie to your mother. Lie to your spouse. Lie to your dog, and your grocer, and your barista. Tell them white lies, and porous black ones.
But you must, without question, lie to yourself about everything, always, if you want to keep it up.
There we have it. We’re now drunk losers. Manifest destiny. Onward soldier. Prosper. Blarghin.
