The Therapeutic Drunk — One Angry Waitress

Recently, following a particularly boozy Saturday night I puked in my boyfriend’s slipper. This is the sort of action, when you’re accused of it, that will make you assume that your significant other is joking. He was not, nor was he terribly impressed with me. On the upshot, I then knew what to get him for Christmas.

It will sound defensive to claim that I go long periods between nights like this, but it’s true. It’s as if I allow myself to forget, over a span of six-or-so months how bad hangovers really are and then come six am I hear what I’ve come to think of as the voice of god, assuring me that, “There is no rest for the wicked,” after which there is no chance of falling back asleep and having a decent day.

Some months ago, a friend told me that there is a sense to a therapeutic drunk, but I really can’t see it. If there’s something magical about waking up, realizing that I attempted to make toast smoothies at one in the morning and then had to throw the blender out, then I must be missing it.

I suppose it’s a hazard of a job where you still run into people from the high school in your home town and they tell you that they’ve gone onto a very successful career, to own property and generally have the appearance of having their shit together. Meanwhile you just want to know what they want to drink and your only claim to fame is that you still weigh the same thing you did in high school.

As they tell you about the tribulations of condo fees you find yourself wanting to make a half serious joke about the sense behind living in your car in the summers. There should be little shame then in wanting to wash this memory away with a mickey of Jägermeister while sitting in the dark on a swing set near your boyfriend’s home.

I like to worry about a lot of things, one of which is whether I am going to be in my late forties still sitting around the bar at work drinking with a bunch of 20-year old’s (though one regular tells me frequently that I am not just on the cusp of realizing how much I actually do like blue eyeshadow and going to work in a pancake house. It is, not surprisingly, this same regular that shows up often with black eyes) and wondering why we have so very little in common.

Something about working in the bar makes it acceptable to stay up until three am on a Tuesday night, never have anything in savings and be leery about signing a lease that spans more than six months. Basically, it makes becoming an adult seem like a superfluous thing—or at least this is what I tell myself when I finally remember to do my taxes sometime in May.

These are excuses I realize—but when you’re coming around the corner of the end of your twenties, wondering if you’re too old to attend raves (you are, or at least I certainly am)—still holding onto the notion that one day you might grow up to take care of yourself and maybe a pet too, they’re awfully nice things to cling to.