I used to drink a lot and then shoot people with my BB gun. There are a lot of people with little welt-scars on their fannies who have been more than happy to encounter me in my recent years without a glass in my hand. There’s something about alcohol and guns that goes so well together. I basically dropped both at the same time. The alcohol because it was giving me migraines and making me go blind, and the BB gun because I can’t go back to the big house. Not again. No way.

But…

My new migraine-specialist neurologist put me on this calcium-channel blocking voodoo drug last Thursday. It’s supposed to keep the arteries in my head from being twitchy (I still haven’t been given a good explanation about that “twitchy” business, but I think it’s just a fancy medical term for “You’re a mutant, and if you had been born a hundred years ago, not only would you have had great difficulties surviving beyond your first ten or so years because of natural medical complications, but you later would have been burned at the stake if your body didn’t kill you first” (to be followed by cries of “He’s a witch! He’s a witch!”)).

Well, thanks to this new pill I’m popping, I figured on Thursday night that I might be able to drink a little again. I miss drinking, you know? Most of you act like idiots, but you have drinking to explain it away. Me? I’ve been stone-cold-sober for the vast majority of the time that I’ve been publicly humiliating myself. It’s about time I had an alibi.

So, Thursday night, I went to my freezer. I had in there a bottle of some Fijian rum that Aydika and I brought back from our trip last year (the first time we got engaged – not to be confused with the following four). It’s thirty years old, and something about the taste tells me that it might have been bottled sometime before the Fijians really got the hang of rum. It tastes like they just filled a bottle with turpentine and then squeezed in the venom from a vampire sea rat for color.

I started off with a couple sips. Just to taste it. It was in that sub-freezing state that makes liquor run slowly, more like a syrup than a drink. And, for venomous vampire sea rat colored turpentine, it was pretty good.

Then I fired up Oblivion. Ran around. Stole some stuff from people the way you do when you’re playing a thief. Really quite fun, actually. There’s nothing like preying upon completely innocent people and taking them for everything they’ve got. I wish that could be my real job.

Oh, wait…

Anyway, so I was doing that, and I was, like, totally having a good time. But I was getting up every once in a while to have another sip.

And then I started getting up more often.

And then the sips turned into swigs.

And then the swigs turned into gulps.

And then it got a lot harder to get up, but through sheer force of will and the kind of perseverance that put man on the moon, I managed to return to the freezer.

Again.

And again. And maybe again again.

It had been years since I had been what I can only refer to as “blotto.” As of this morning, I can officially say that it has now only been days since I have been what I can only refer to as “blotto.”

As the night progressed (and, just as a side note, this is, like, the biggest way to be a loser – sitting around, getting drunk by yourself while playing RPG’s – if there’s a Loser Hall of Fame, then I’d like my rightful place in it, please), things got worse. My limbs became useless, and I think my judgment was impaired. I was going to test these assertions, but I couldn’t find any heavy farm machinery to operate in my apartment, so who knows. I didn’t even have any light farm machinery. It’s like I’ve somehow managed to live my life without owning a single piece of farm machinery. I should start a support group.

But, like I was in the middle of saying before interrupting myself with a useless tangent, I was playing Oblivion, and I was getting worse. All I remember is that the local law enforcement in every single city was after me, that I spent, maybe, thirty minutes running away from all the cops with great difficulty (I kept running into this tree, and it would take me whole minutes to figure out how to get around it), and then, right when I was at my most vulnerable, I sneezed (in real life – my character didn’t sneeze), my head flew forward, hit a bottle, the bottle went flying off into some corner of the room, and when I looked up after massaging my head for a minute, my character was getting mauled by a wild boar. I was a little too dazed from the turpentine and the bottle that attacked my head (it was probably defending itself against my sneeze) to do anything, and within seconds, my character was dead. After evading the cops for what felt like three hours, and after repeatedly circumnavigating that tree that kept getting in my way, I died by being snorted to death by a two-foot long little hairy pig thing. If ever in life there was a “Well, fuck this” moment, I had found it. I shut everything off by just yanking the power strip cable from the wall, stumbled to my bed, passed out with all the lights on, and then woke up the next morning smelling like someone had been trying to strip the paint off my face using gasoline.

Oh, how I miss drinking.

But I think I’ll probably leave it alone for the near future.