don't drink very often, other than an occasional glass of wine in the evening when I'm writing. Usually white, with pretzels for a snack, in the hours after Malaya's gone to bed.  Since that's not interesting enough to write about, this page will contain longer drinking related entries. If Malaya and I get drunk and do something silly, you'll read about it here. You might also encounter something I wrote about the absurd drinking habits of other people, from time to time.

More recent ridiculous things will be added on top of the page.

June 18, 2003

Neither Malaya or I drink much.  I'll have some wine once in a while, usually when I'm eating at my dad's, since he's a big fan of wine and quite the connoisseur, with cases and cases of good stuff stored in his house.  He runs wine tasting events and such, and can tell you the type and vineyard by a taste, all that sort of movie snob stuff.  He's not a snob about it, but you know what I mean.

As for alcohol, I've never chosen to develop a taste for beer.  I had it a few times when I was a teen, as everyone underage does, and it wasn't horrible, but it didn't do much for me.  Neither of my parents have ever been into beer very much, and I wasn't one of those guys who determine that anything they aren't "supposed to" do is therefore super cool and must be done.  So I never had some burning desire to drink alcohol just because I was not legally allowed to have it.  And in the years since I've been past 21 and could buy it, I just have never bothered to get into it.

Pretty much the only time I can ever remember drinking beer and enjoying it was when I had half a pitcher of Bud Light with my Granddad when I was about 16, in a pizza place.  Not sure why it was good then, probably since Bud Light is only just barely beer, and it didn't have any real kick or bitterness.  Ironically, my granddad has had problems with alcoholism his entire adult life, problems with greatly contributed to the major issues he had when Granny died, as I described a few days ago.

I've had wine a few times and did shots once or twice with some friends when I was in my early 20's, but I've never much enjoyed drinking.  It's okay for a cup or two, but it costs way too much and I never enjoyed getting a buzz on.  I just got drowsy and bored from it.

Malaya wasn't much different than me; she likes some types of wine but doesn't have them often, and has never been a fan of beer, and only does shots or other hard liquor on social occasions. Plus one of her ex BFs was a big time drunk and for that reason she's quite happy that I'm not one.  Especially for beer, that loser's drink of loser drinks.

Despite our non-drinking history, we've been talking for a while about getting hammered one night, just to see what it's like.  Both times previously in my life that I drank a lot I got really dizzy and sleepy and had to puke, and felt totally fine afterwards.  Like not drunk at all, once I got it out of me.  So I'm not sure I ever really was drunk, since maybe I horked it up before it got to that stage.  Oh I'm sure I was legally drunk, .08 easily, but since I wasn't anywhere near an automobile, that's no problem.

So after weeks of "we should get drunk some time" we finally did, a couple of days ago.  She had half a bottle of Goldschlager left from years ago.  It's pretty tasty, 97% proof cinnamon schnapps, with real gold flakes floating around inside.  Not that you taste them or get any benefit from them, but it's sort of a cute look and a clever marketing device. There was enough for about four shots each of that stuff, and after that we wanted to have some wine, but she realized that she didn't have a corkscrew or any other such device to open a wine bottle with, short of just destroying the cork.  Which we didn't want to do, so we went for a bottle of home-grown coconut vodka that she'd brought back from the Philippines some months ago.  No idea what proof it was, but it was strong stuff.

There was a funny scene in the kitchen when we opened it up, since Malaya had had some in the past from a different batch, and hadn't yet tried this one. She was apprehensive about drinking any, since the past batch was of the "rocket fuel" style, so she said if I could do a shot without coughing, she'd follow my lead.  And when I knocked it down without a tear, she had to put up or shut up.  And of course she did.

The occasion for the drinking was a game of Scrabble.  I like the game and play occasionally, and Malaya likes it a lot.  So we started playing while doing shots, and the rule was any word under 5 tiles meant we both had to take a shot.  We obviously weren't going for a competition or drink off, it was just a way for us both to have some fun and get drunk together.  And drunk we got.

I'd estimate that we did 4 shots of Goldschlager and then 6-8 of the coconut vodka.  Each.

The funny part is that our Scrabble playing continued fine, though we got a bit giggle after a while.  We both scored around 270, with her beating me mostly due to scoring a fat Scrabble off of "juniors", which netted her like 90 points on the word. I slowly caught up after that, but she stayed just ahead to the finish.

We played another game of Scrabble last night, alcohol-free, and scored nearly the same, with her beating me by just a fraction again, after again having one huge scoring word ("square" with the Q on a double letter and the whole thing on triple word.  It was 76 points I believe.) early on, after which she was up by like 60.  I slowly caught up and took the lead by a couple of points in the low 200's twice, but she got the last 4 tiles and was able to beat me in a see saw conclusion.

Not that we're really worried about winning that much; we'll both take a longer word that opens up the board rather than adding an "s" or something cheesy to just get like 40 quick points.  So it's mostly for fun, but we both want to win at the same time.

Anyway, we didn't take a shot every single time someone got a 4 tile word, but we did quite a few times.  And we find it funny that our scores were almost the same when we were playing that schnockered, compared to totally straight.  The one consideration is that since we started drinking after we were already playing, we weren't really fucked up until near the end.  I was keeping score and writing down the words and the scores, and I'm not at all sure some of the math isn't way off.  The handwriting certainly is; about double normal size and very crooked.

Once we finished (the game, not the coconut vodka, or we'd be dead) it was off to bed for something resembling sex, mostly since we were just curious to see if I was indeed, as the famous song lyrics say, "too drunk, too drunk, too drunk, too drunk to fuck".  I wasn't, just too drunk to do it well. Let's just say that she got more out of it than I did. *cough*

There was a funny stagger into the bedroom before that, and I remember clinging to the door frame of the bathroom with all my strength while I used my other hand to brush my teeth, and the walls moved around.  Once in bed there was a long conversation about weird things that I don't really remember at all and Malaya remembers clearly, or so she's told me since.  Neither of us puked though, and neither of us had any sort of hangover the next morning, even.

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