How it progressed, III

So in-between my junior and senior years I was away from school and parents, in another state, in the constant company of serious drinkers. I learned to hold my liquor pretty well, I guess. I rarely drank to extreme excess, just the usual 3-5 oz. of hard liquor in the evenings, plus a bit of pot throughout the day. This was more or less functional drinking. When I had to do summer school to make up lost credits, I quit drinking, took up running and just smoked pot. When I needed to focus more on learning first-year French, I scored coke which really helped. But it was expensive and I couldn't afford to do it often, plus one of my deals went sour which stirred up problems with friends of friends, and thus the dubious associations I'd formed on my academic leave from college began to unravel.

I had the opportunity during that year to meet the famous Trungpa Rinpoche, the great teacher and unrivalled drinking prodigy of recent Buddhist history. I'd gotten myself invited to a cocktail party in his honor. I thought it would be cool to schmooze with all the drinking Buddhists and meet Trungpa, so I began to celebrate the night before with spicy shrimp and maybe a half-bottle of truly mellow whiskey. Then next day I was too hung-over to drive the 120 miles to make the cocktail party. Still, given the angry abusive behavior I witnessed among hard-drinking friends in that year, I was convinced that they, not I (the happy mellow drunk, or so I thought) had the real drinking problem.

I many times witnessed, for example, the swaggering grandstanding tirade, complete with claims of self-knowledge and enlightenment. Isn't that what we all want? It's what drunks often want to believe, because their drunkenness is an excuse, or rather an escape hatch, for profound insecurity. That is, for what my sponsor refers to frequently as "profound insecurity masked by a raging ego". For a while I found this sort of display seductive so I drank in order to participate in the raging mythos of the raging drunk, bursting at the seams with megalomaniacal ego, who picks apart other people's faults and resorts to rhetorical low-blows whenever it suits his agenda.

Incidentally, Mel Gibson isn't the only drunk who indulges anti-Semitic rhetoric when drunk and then wakes up, schmoozes with Jewish friends and seems to have no cognitive dissonance with what he said only hours before. If it's not anti-Semitism, it might as well be mysogyny, or homophobia, or racial bigotry of other forms. Alcoholic behavior is typified by acting-out of deep resentments, usually misplaced upon people or groups, in the form of tirades against real or imagined enemies. The alcoholic believes that only she is afflicted by her unique group of enemies, whom she paints one and all with the same broad strokes of rhetoric and logic as pathological liars, thieves, or as evil. In the worst case scenario this behavior spills over into senseless physical violence.