There Are A Million Ways To Avoid Calling Yourself An Alcoholic

Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. And preorder Drew’s next book, The Night The Lights Went Out, while you’re at it. Today, we're talking about drinking, the suburbs, nice tomatoes, carnival ride horror stories, and more.

I was on vacation last week and took my youngest kid to Funland, an amusement park along the boardwalk. He wanted to go on the Superflip, which is one of those carnie-style rides that hangs you upside down and spins you around until you vomit black acid. It’s like going on a rollercoaster, without any of the fun rollercoaster shit. So I told the boy to go ahead and ride the Superflip on his own while I watched from the ground. That’s the fun thing about small amusement parks. If you’re in line or just in the crowd, you’re the audience for everyone who’s up on the rides about to die. You can see, in their eyes, the moment they realize they’ve made a terrible mistake.

Now, here is what I saw from the ground as my son got in line.

Before his group’s turn on this little judas cradle, another group of riders got on. I watched the Superflip spin around and twist upside down when, suddenly, a phone came FLYING out of the ride and landed on the pavement with a horrifying crack. It landed right next to me and I handed it to the attendant, mostly so I could take credit for being the person who found it. The ride ended and this one girl, who couldn’t have been any older than my own 15-year-old daughter, came out of the exit already in tears. I saw the attendant hand her the phone, cracked screen and all, and this girl looked like she had just been told her parents were dead in a car accident. She was fucking DEVASTATED. All her friends gathered around her in an impromptu phone vigil. Her face was beet red and stayed that way. I don’t think she moved from her spot for another half hour. Her buddies might have called for a very tiny ambulance to come take the phone to Applecare. I don’t know. My son, who loved the ride and lost nothing on it, wanted to leave Funland before I could get any closure to this tragedy.

Now this was exactly how I would react if my phone pulled a Conor Clapton off a roid-addled Ferris wheel. But it didn’t happen to me, so it was pretty goddamn funny. I hope that girl finds love with a new phone one day. I also hope that her folks sprung for the protection plan when they bought it.

Speaking of protection plans, let’s give a round of applesauce to Diana Moskovitz for filling in so capably a week ago. Alas, you’re now stuck with me and my bullshit yet again. I see you’re already as crestfallen as that poor girl on the Superflip was. Hang tight and we’ll get through this together. Or, more accurately, I’ll be fine and will continue to get paid while you do whatever it is that you do.

Your letters!

Adam:

I’m an outlier here because I quit drinking in the wake of a horrific injury that essentially forced me to do so. If that injury hadn’t happened, I’d still be drinking right now. I know it. Back in 2018, I had absolutely no desire to quit drinking at all. I figured I would one day retire to a comfortable existence of being pickled in brown liquor eight hours a day. Drinking was gonna be my retirement. Not every drinker quits drinking—most don’t—and I still believe that some of them don’t really need to. My wife drinks, like, two beers a week. I don’t think she’s in any danger of falling off the cliff anytime soon.

Despite drinking WAY more than her, I figured I was in similarly excepted company among those who didn’t ever have to quit alcohol. I stopped drinking for eight months after my DUI arrest in 2009, and I stopped drinking and driving entirely after it. I figured that was proof enough that I had a handle on my shit. As far as I was concerned, I wasn’t an alcoholic. I didn’t drink during the day. I didn’t rage out or turn into a serial groper when drunk. I wasn’t blacking out like I was back in my college days. No one staged an intervention for me. And I could power through any hangover so long as I had Advil and a shitload of water on me. I was drinking on my terms, baby.

But that wasn’t true at all. I still drank to excess every night I drank. I found reasons to drink around every corner, and I oriented my entire schedule around it. If I had to pick my kids up late from practice or a friend’s house late on a Friday night, I quietly bitched because it meant I couldn’t drink until, like, nine. Then I’d finish that errand and throw down two straight cocktails right when I got home, to make up for lost time. I took that preventive Advil every time I drank and my wife noticed. I wrote off entire Sundays if I’d been out the night before. I routinely lied to doctors about how much I drank because I didn’t want them to tell me to cut back. And I was getting fat again. These are not signs that you have control over your alcohol intake. Quite the contrary.

For a long time—in fact, until the moment I wrote this—I refused to brand myself as a recovering alcoholic. I had certain prerequisites in mind for the diagnosis, but those are all probably illusory. I just didn’t care to think of myself that way, even though there’s absolutely no shame in admitting it. Even though I got arrested, and went to AA, and centered my life around drinking, and may have suffered a near-fatal brain injury because of it. Whenever I told people I was an alkie, it was always in jest. But that was a defense mechanism. I was a legitimate alcoholic, which means that I still am. I’ve never said that before, but I think it’s time I stopped fucking around. I couldn’t imagine my life without drinking, which means I had no control over it. That’s an alcoholic.

Of course, now that I’ve quit booze, I very much CAN imagine life without it. If you want to point out that I’m in the green-and-sober crowd and that it harms my credibility here, by all means do so. But at least these days, I never have to take the preventive Advil, which my inner organs are likely grateful for. I never have to worry about feeling like shit when I wake up in the morning. Whatever yearning I had for booze when I first stopped has long since dissipated. I can hang out in bars without being self-conscious that I’m the only person there not boozing. When I was in New York a month ago, I ordered a virgin passion fruit cosmo at a bar and the bartender openly laughed at the order. I didn’t mind. It was a ludicrous order, but I still enjoyed my little mocktail all the same. Both my parents quit drinking after my accident and now they too feel a million times better. When you’re in the middle of drinking, it can be hard to envision a booze-free life being possible, and certainly not enjoyable. Then, once you’re in that future, it becomes both possible and all too obvious. Of course I feel better. Who the fuck wouldn’t?

This is long way of answering Adam’s question, because there’s nothing writers love writing about more than their own drinking habits. How will you know when you’ve reached the point where your boozing is no longer fun and it’s more sad and debilitating? You won’t. Not even when you reach that point where you feel like this isn’t fun anymore but you still drink anyway. You’ll need fresh eyes for a proper assessment, and those can be hard to come by since mankind is a drinking species. All I know is that I haven’t barfed in over three years and that’s a streak that I’m more than happy to maintain. You shouldn’t be spewing used beer at age 44.

Jack:

David:

I don’t miss ticket stubs. I'm not gonna collect them in a goddamn album. They're worthless. I used to save them but was never very diligent about it. I would throw one on my desk the morning after a concert, being like, “I should save this.” Then, over the course of weeks and months, it’d get buried under a pile of scanned forms, old greeting cards, scratch paper with forgotten passwords on them, and bills I forgot to pay. Then I’d uncover the stub on a clean-up day and throw it out. I already have memories and pictures of every concert and game I’ve been to, and those do the job. A little perforated stub I gotta keep track of does nothing to enhance them.

Now, going all-digital for everything clearly fucks over people who can’t afford smartphones, or the data plans that go with them. It’s the same way that ending cash transactions in the New York subway system fucks commuters over. If you have a smartphone, you can easily take for granted how many people don’t. And it’s not because they’re too old or too Amish to have one. According to the Pew Center, 15 percent of American adults don’t own a smartphone. That’s gotta be like, 7,000 million people. Give or take. Some of these people might wanna spend some of their tip pool money on a night out at the ballpark to watch their hometown pitcher strip down to his ballbag for a Spider Tack inspection, and they will be DENIED by the nefarious scanlords at the ballpark entrance.

This is happening everywhere. If you go to a restaurant, you need a phone to see the menu. If you board a plane, you need to show the QR code to the gate agent. Phones have become mandatory now, but they ain’t free. [Bernie voice] This is BECOSS … we have a society in which the one puhcent … believe … that they are the ONLY puhcent.

Be that as it may, though, ticket stubs are still garbage. You don’t need them. Throw them out. If you’re the type who simply must keep evidence around that you were THERE the night Lamar Jackson left a game to take a ferocious dump, you need to chill the fuck out. Most sports fans lie about that shit anyway, because it’s fun to.

HALFTIME!

Logan:

Suburbanites in Northern Virginia aren’t as friendly as you envisioned, you say?

I spent the bulk of my childhood living in the burbs, and I’ve lived in the D.C. burbs for 15 years now. Every pop-culture portrayal of the burbs remains stuck in the 1990s, like American Beauty never reached its end credits. So yeah, your expectations were warped from the get-go. If you thought you were wading into a surreal territory where everyone is superficially pleasant but is actually part of a secret society of child-molesting weirdoes, you’ve spent too much time watching the “Black Hole Sun” video. You should know better. You lived through the Trump administration. You know that keeping a mask up is a thing of the past now. In the modern burbs, there are no pies on your doorstep. Bob next door isn’t bending over backwards to invite you into his golf foursome. School redistricting meetings are racial holy war. And any murder committed two counties over IMMEDIATELY triggers angry demands for the local police department to buy more plastique explosives.

That’s all there from the start. Anyone who wants to do the John Waters thing and pretend the suburbs are still a haven of phony, uptight squares who fan themselves at the sight of a dimebag hasn’t lived in the burbs since the advent of color television. I get pissy whenever I see that shit in movies or on TV. And that’s not because I want to defend the honor of the suburbs, but because it’s such a hacky way for any writer or director to announce themselves as insightful and rebellious when they’re neither of those things. It’s a cliché, and it ignores all of the interesting ways that the suburbs have evolved since that one Arcade Fire album dropped. The food is better here now, but the drivers are all still psychopaths. There are less white people here now, but segregation within the burbs is still rampant. My wife and I are friends with our own neighbors, but none of it was instant. It took some effort. There’s no more Leave It To Beaver shit here. But there ARE 50,000 more cops than necessary, Teslas with BYE GAS vanity plates, and a lingering threat of realness in the Whole Foods parking lot. But the Thai food is SENSATIONAL.

Michael:

Yes.

Mike:

Oh have you stepped up to the fabled San Marzanos, which are phony but also still pretty good? Don’t feel bad about that shit. It just means you enjoy nicer things. I just started wearing nicer shirts every day, because I looked and felt better in them. This is the same reason I buy the same notorious cans of Cento maters that you buy. NO DIGITAL STUB NECESSARY. The dad in me scoffs at paying more than three bucks for anything, but I’ve been training myself to let those miserly ways go. My wife and I bought a nicer minivan than our old one, and that’s been a huge improvement. I started drinking Spindrift instead of normal seltzer, and now I feel like I own my own private island. And I buy the organic strawberries because they taste better. All that shit has been worth the money, and I don’t feel guilty about it. Just because you can find something for cheaper doesn’t mean you NEED to, nuh mean? You can live well. Given how shitty the world can be, treating yourself is one of the better forms of therapy out there.

Mike:

Excuse me but that barista’s name is Gunther and judging by his appearance at the Friends reunion, he’s most definitely a celebrity. People in the audience were SUPER horny for their Gunther fix. Actor James Michael Tyler—who plays Gunther—may be able to hit the grocery store unnoticed every so often. But when a Friends nut spots him out in the wild, he’s FUCKED. He’s gonna lose a solid 20 minutes of his existence dealing with that fan, and I guarantee he runs into those kinds of people more often than he prefers.

That’s the difference between being TV famous and being any other kind of famous. When you were a bit player on a TV show that just happened to be watched by 20 million people every week, you’re gonna be more famous than, like, David Brooks. It’s a lock. When millions of people can recognize you out on the street, and when they go home and tell their loved ones YO I JUST SAW WHATSHISFACE FROM FRIENDS, you’ve made the cutoff. You are famous. Just like Ernie Johnson. Just like Flo. Sometimes I wonder when Flo is walking around the airport if people who see her sigh and go “Oh Christ, you again?!,” but they don’t. They’re like, “Holy shit, Flo! I love your ads!” even when they’re lying. That’s the difference. That’s when you know you’re a star, baby.

Bob:

It’s the latter. Every dog owner thinks their dog is exempt from all the usual dog laws (leashes, curbing, not biting people, etc), and that mentality can rear its head in all kind of fun and EXTREMELY FUCKING OBNOXIOUS ways. However, you’re talking about dog owners congregating for a few hours in the late afternoon in the middle of a densely populated area. They’re not doing this at 2 a.m. while you’re trying to doze off at a cabin by the fucking lake. That would be rude as shit. If you still can’t tolerate them, I suggest you buy your own dog, bring it to yappy hour, and command it to eat all the other dogs.

Or you chill the fuck out.

Email of the week!

Brian:

I believe him, and I’d try to get him some help.