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ALCOHOL

I've always avoided getting involved
with drinking alcohol.

I've had about two sips of beer in
my life (one of which I spit out).
I even try to avoid things cooked
with alcohol.

This is very peculiar behavior in
this culture.  It's taken me a while
to learn how to deal with other
people about it.  When offered a
drink, I originally just said "No
thanks", but it was awkward when
they kept repeatedly offering me
drinks when we met.  So I
experimented with saying "No thanks,
I don't drink."  This earned me some       (In fact, I used to get this
very curious looks, and the bolder         reaction a lot: "You don't
people would ask me why.  At first         drink, or smoke?  What do you
I tried things like "Oh, it's just         *do*?"),
a personal decision, I don't really
like to get into it.  I don't go
around making Temperance speeches."
This didn't work at all.

So finally I settled on "No thanks,
actually I don't drink.  My mother
was an alcoholic and it always seemed
like a good idea to stay away from it."
This shuts most people right up.

But sometimes I run into people
who are also children of alcoholics
and it didn't stop *them* from
drinking so why should it stop me?

So I have to try another tactic.
I literally don't know what to say
to that one...                                WHY

If I had to pick one solid reason that
I never started drinking, it would
probably be that I was a compulsive
non-conformist when I was a teenager,
and too smart to fall into the usual trap
of conforming to the other non-conformists.      CONFORM
Drugs were too popular, too *normal* for
me too want to get involved with.

But I'm no longer such a knee-jerk
non-conformist, and there have to
be reasons I've never changed my
mind about it.  One of them is a
passion for "real" experience (see
above), one is a realization that
peoples perceptions of risk are so
screwed up the fact that "everyone
is doing it" means *nothing* about
whether or not its really
dangerous, another is a genuine
appreciation that I'm not
necesarily such a strong person in               ADDICTION
some ways... I take things to extremes.

But what do you say to people about
all this?  I'm still working on it.



((
Problem of making extremism comprehensible.
e.g. no alchohol in food.))

((An appreciation of the fact that many people forget.
It means that I'm accepted, they're treating me like
they would any person, in spite of my fundamental weirdness.))




((More related to drugs:))

Sfnal veiw. Possible improvements. e.g.
removal of obvious disadvantages, like physical
addictiveness.
Possibly there are real temptations to come, like smart
drugs that really work.

Nightmare scenario: a powerful smart drug
has negative effects that only show up 20
years later.  A generation of intellectuals
gutted.

                                          ("I saw the best minds of my
                                          generation destroyed by madness,
                                          starving hysterical naked,/dragging
                                          themselves through the negro
                                          streets at dawn looking for an
                                          angry fix" -- Howl)

A more verbose version:

There's a nightmare scenario I
kick around in my head sometimes, that
goes like this: suppose someone comes up
with a really useful drug, say a smart
drug that improves your memory
tremendously.  Legal or illegal, every
college student in the world winds up
using this stuff frequently.  Ten years
later it turns out to have some nasty
long term effects, and the world loses
an entire generation of intellectuals.


(1/8/95)
A better one: A character lives through
a time when many revolutions in the
technology of "getting high" are taking
place.  Each technique the character
experiments with involves progressively
extreme techniques of self-modification.
Implicit question to the reader at each
stage, okay, so you had no problem with
that, but would you do this?  If not,
why not, what's the difference?


Side issue: Impossibility of
conveying experience in language.
Occasional triumphs of poetry.
"Heroin is like coming home."

Another side topic: why so many
impressive, creative people who've
been involved with drugs ?
Lou Reed.  Jim Carrol.  David Bowie.
A trap for those who believe
themselves to be intelligent,
people who are willing to
experiment, and who don't take the
official word as the final word.
Or a spur to weirdness, something
that kicks you out of the normal
orbit.

General evilness of alcohol in
comparision to other prevalent
drugs.  Civic duty to promote an
alternate, e.g. MJ?

An argument against alchohol...
I've known some older Mormons,
people who have never drank, who
looked 20 years younger than they
are.  I've know some young
alchoholics who looked much older
than they are.  (Personally, I can
usually pass for being younger than
I am).  How much of what we think                      NO_SAFE_LEVEL
of as the effects of aging are                           
really the effects of alchohol?                          
                                                         
Common argument: moderate drinking is good for you.      
Supported by stats showing more heart problems           
amongst tea-totalers.  Problem w/this data: to be
a teatotaler, you must be weird, an extremist,
driven.  Stress of being abnormal?

(There's a simpler counter-argument: grape juice is
apparently as good as moderate wine drinking.)


Spin off topics, legalization, "war on drugs".

Useful also as an analogy in
libertarian arguments,
e.g. impossiblity of gov. control
shown by prevalence of black
market.  Also, inter-gang
violence... will it ultimately
evolve into a cooperative situation
with analogs of legal contracts and
enforcement?  i.e. can order arise
from the chaos that often
accompanies the introduction of
anrachy (connect to world
international situation: no laws,
i.e. anarchy.  given states as
analogs of individuals, does
international situation most
resemble chaos or ordered anarchy?)
(note need to clearly distinguish
between this chaos and the
mathematical concept).  ))

Definition of alcholism.

A friend of mine who been through
the AA bit struck me as having a
very broad definition of what
alcholism was.  Anyone who talked
alot about getting drunk on
weekends (a popular activity
amongst many an undergrad) was
flagged as a possible alcholic.  I
argued that this was silly...  A
lot of people go through phases in
their life where they drink a lot
but then they suddenly quit without
any apparent effort: doesn't look a
lot like an addiction to me...

Another friend of the AA persuasion said that alchoholism is
"using alchohol to change your personality."

Sounds to me like a definition of
what alchohol does, rather than
alchoholism.  A common refuge of
the nervous and insecure is to
anethesize their higher faculties,
temporarily...  Some good freinds
of mine wound up getting married as
the culmination of a chain of
events beginning at one particular
drunken party.  At a guess they
never would've met without
alchohol.  (And I *doubt* that
they're alchoholics, though I don't
see them often enough these days to
swear to it, I suppose.)

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