Reflections on not drinking

This quiz thingy is even more shit than most of the quizzes you get on the goddam hinternet. Here's the results:

You're a Wild Drunk

You can get enough drink. Seriously, you'll just go puke and start pounding them back again!

No, seriously - your quiz is shit. Any quiz that doesn't produce a result describing me as a happy drunk is very poorly constructed. Famous for it, so I am. My line manager described me as the happiest drunk she'd ever seen. I can well believe it because when I'm drunk, I'm not so much happy about it but fucking ecstatic. And I never puke.

Recently, however, I haven't been drinking for reasons I mentioned earlier. Since I was an embryo the last time I went without a drink for nine goddam days, the revelations have been coming thick and fast. Here are some of the advantages of not drinking:

1) You save dosh. Rising food prices? Pah! I get to the supermarket checkout and exclaim, "Is that all?" - this on account of the fact that me trolley isn't overflowing with the usual selection of delicious beverages. Taxi? No need - I'll drive home.

2) You feel healthier, have more energy etc. On account of your liver getting a holiday, your skin looks up to 71% more radiant. Presumably if one kept this up, you'd even live longer.

3) You're less inclined to break or burn stuff when you get home.

4) You feel marginally less stupid. Think about it this way: you tend to do and say really fucking stupid things when you're really drunk - but what I've noticed is that if you're slightly pissed a lot of the time, you tend to do and say things that are slightly stupid.

The disadvantages of not drinking are manifold but can be, I think, reduced to this: you're sober all the time - which is really, really, really, really shit. To see how the utilitarian calculator that is my soul has weighed-up the costs and the benefits, you have to picture a big set of scales. Now picture a big fucking elephant sitting on one side. That'd be the disadvantages of sobriety. Then a snowflake falls on the other side of the scale. That would be the advantages. Because like old age, sobriety has nothing going for it at all - not a damn thing.

It's not like trying to give up smoking where after a couple of days you get a glimpse of a different healthier world before your will-power crumbles. No - you get a glimpse of a different world all right. 'Tis a world of heart-breaking desolation my friends.

Happy, well-adjusted people who "don't need to drink to have a good time" are now even more incomprehensible and scary to me than they were before - especially if they have jobs in government. These crossword-completing freaks really have to understand that they are a deviant minority and that most of us are just not like them.