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(Please see Legal, if you haven't already.) People are always asking me, "Blade, I've recently come to loathe humanity, how can I learn to drink alone?" Well, fortunately, drinking alone (or "liver punching" as us Oregonians call it) is an easily acquired skill with the potential to profoundly enrich your life.
Now I'm well aware of the potential health risks associated with heavy drinking of the unsociable variety, but I think it's important to put those risks in perspective. After all, many of the so-called "healthy" sports such as snowboarding, biking, or sailing can lead to serious injury or even death. We accept those risks when pursuing such activities largely because the activities give us a feeling of enjoyment that we find lacking in our non-sporting life. It isn't that we're unaware of the potential to be buried by an avalanche, or hit by a truck, or eaten by a pod of orcas, it's that we feel the pleasure we derive is worth the risk.
When facing the choice of whether or not to drink alone, it's only fair to evaluate the question with similar intellectual rigor. Now I personally don't enjoy snowboarding, bicycling, or sailing enough to risk my life and limb pursuing them on a daily basis, but I am truly passionate about the bottle. Does it give me a feeling of enjoyment that I find lacking in my sober life? Absolutely. Is the pleasure derived worth the potential risk to my health? Again, I'd have to say yes. While it's entirely possible that alcohol will hasten me to an early cirrhotic grave, at least I will have enjoyed those drunken years leading up to the grave.
A snowboarder who recently died in a backcountry avalanche here in Oregon was quoted by his friends and family the very day he was killed as saying, "If I die on the mountain, at least I'll die doing what I love." Well, if I die of alcohol poisoning from finishing off this 1.5L bottle of rotgut whiskey in front of me, at least I'll die doing what I love.
For those of you wishing to learn more about how to hit the sauce sin amigos, I've provided the essential steps to drinking alone below:
Step One: Be Alone
The first step to drinking alone is, not surprisingly, figuring out how to actually be alone. If you have a roommate/s, it's best to start a huge fight for no reason. One tried and true technique is to get right up in his face and accuse him of being racist (no matter which race he actually is). When he tries to defend himself against the spurious charge*, immediately switch to passive-aggressive tactics and say things like "Shhh… use your indoor voice" and "Don't get your panties in a bunch, tough guy." With any luck, he'll storm off in a huff and you can re-key the locks while he's gone.
Spouses and significant others may pose more of a problem. If they aren't heavy drinkers themselves, it's generally best to simply break up with them or file for a divorce. In years past, I rather naively recommended the combined use of riot-strength pepper spray and surprise stun gun attacks to the genital region. However, experience has shown that this "hands-on" approach almost inevitably leads to an "intervention" with sobbing family members and weird Mormon co-workers who claim to be your friend (as well as up to six months tossing salad in the county jail). Trust me on this one, a simple "It's not you, it's me. I just fucking hate you, you butt-ugly ass clown" is definitely the way to go.
If your spouse or significant other is a heavy drinker, I would also suggest an immediate break-up/divorce—after all, who wants to be married to a drunk?
Step Two: Safety First
Once you are alone, it's important to take a few safety precautions. First and foremost, you need to make sure you have laid in at least a three-year supply of your alcoholic beverage of choice (who knows how long this solo binge is going to go on?). The choice of libation is a deeply personal matter, but steer clear of fancy cocktails (ideally, you want something that you can swig straight from the bottle after you've collapsed on the floor and lost all bladder control). Half-gallon plastic jugs of cheap bourbon or vodka are ideal choices, but any of the more flammable brands of mouthwash can serve in a pinch.
Another key safety precaution is to make sure all your firearms are secure. Like most Americans, I generally keep a fifty caliber machine gun strapped to my back, a .45 automatic duct-taped to each ankle, a sawed-off elephant gun shoved down my pant leg, and a brace of dueling pistols in the fridge. Of course, handling firearms while you're eight sheets to the wind can be extremely dangerous, so it's essential to make sure all your various guns are loaded and cocked BEFORE you start drinking. You don't want to be caught awkwardly fumbling with the slide or safety when the pink elephants kick down your front door.
Step Three: Practical Matters
Make sure your TV works. After all, drinking alone without CSPAN-2 is just depressing. Also make sure you have a working phone with the numbers of your family members, Exs, co-workers, and boss programmed in for speed dial—you never know what you might want to tell them after six hours straight of hitting the sauce.
In addition to cable TV outages, malnutrition can be a serious problem for binging alcoholics. Unfortunately, food tends to slow the speed at which alcohol is absorbed into the blood stream. One compromise is to stab a basting syringe through your upper rib cage and inject grain alcohol directly into the heart muscle, while simultaneously eating a Cobb salad. Of course, such intracardiac injections should only be administered under strict medical supervision, so please watch a few reruns of ER before attempting this.
Step Four: Advanced Techniques
Clog the toilet and see how much water you can flood the apartment with before the downstairs neighbors come knocking. When they do come, apologize and tell them that the problem's fixed. Now try clogging all the sinks as well as the toilet!
I also enjoy hucking things out of my five story window and trying to hit the pedestrians below. Remember to stock up on old car batteries!
* If your roommate is, in fact, racist, you seriously need to rethink your living arrangements. In the meantime, accuse him of secretly being whichever race it is he hates the most.
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I personally like to buy huge metallic tubs of honey-roasted peanuts and eat them whole, pausing only to suck the savory-sweet coating off of some of them. Wash them down with a 1.5 liters of Old Grand Dad (comes in a great plastic bottle), and with 45 minutes, I’m peppering my roomate’s tv with peanuts traveling so fast, they can break glass.
I’m just saying, I think it’s part of the experience.