Yum Yum and Drinky Poo

Drinking on election night, I learnt something.  I really like the taste of beer.  I mean, really like it.  It’s so yeasty and comforting.  I thought that after a prolonged …. let’s call it a sabbatical… from beer-drinking that I would grow unaccustomed to the taste that I had to acquire over that first year at university.  I was wrong; liking beer, for me, is like falling off a bicycle.  Unless I fight against the forces of nature and balance myself perfectly, it just sort of happens. 
 
There I was after a showing of the Mikado (it’s not a musical, it’s an Operetta, don’t you know), in a pub that I basically bullied my friends into going because they were totally going to go home.  One, because his wife said so and the other because he was being a dick.  I scolded the latter for being a dick and the other one I just said "whoopachang!" which is onomatopeoic depiction of a whip cracking. Magically they changed their minds.  And thus we went to a bar, and played Simpsons pinball and Time Crisis II and pool.  Normally these things occupy me but for some reason, staring at their beer glasses with the foamy white ring that pronounces each gulp you take from the glass, I just kept remembering how much I like the taste of beer.  I just wanted it… inside me… so badly.    
 
 Bryan became a non-drinker after some kind of stomach problem kept him away from it for a while and he decided he liked sobriety so much he voluntarily joined the club.  This pleased me.  I expressed my desire for drink to him and he said "I think you should only drink on election nights, and make that your election night thing."  He was trying to dissuade me from it in a positive way but I could tell he was thinking I was a twat for even considering it.  If I wasn’t so self-absorbed, this would affect me and I would have heeded his warning.  
 
So I drank and drank, and faster than everyone else because they clearly don’t understand the true value of the flavoursome brew they were nursing in front of them.  I had a lot of fun and was all happy happy cheerful, which is only more disgusting because why should I need to drink to do that?   I played terrible drunken pool, but much better than sober pool of course.  

As an aside, one of the best pool shots I’ve ever seen was played by my friend Crystal after I had to actually hold her up while she lined it up, otherwise she was so drunk she was going to fall over.   

Then it was closing time, but I only started drinking at about 1am, so I was having none of it.  I actually convinced my homebody friends, who were only staying out under duress, that we should walk to Iain’s house via the national park.  They actually came with.  We made it all the way up to East Lindfield.  This makes no sense to anyone else, but that’s a long way to get these people to walk (4.4 km / 2.7 miles), and so it’s quite an achievement in itself.  I wanted to keep walking but they made us get a taxi from there.  That was kind of good because the taxi driver put this Chinese 2-string violin music on which he then gave me a business card for so I can ring him some time to order a copy. Then I walked halfway home from Epping.  Again, with the locations that are not relevant to anyone else.  The point is I walked another 3.3km (2 miles) until the street lights turned off and I remembered I had to be up early to do shit. 
 
This is very stupid.  Apparently I can’t even drink just once without it becoming irresistible again.  Every time I go to a pub now, it’s going to be tempting again, until I make myself re-forget the glory of beer.  This includes Tuesday night trivia and most weekends.  Why would I do this?  I completely didn’t need to drink again.  

And I’m such a total idiot when I do drink.  I want to stay out forever no matter what I have on the next day and I insist that everyone else does too.  I went to the disabled bathroom at the train station and fell over… which I thought was funny because I was drunk and drunk people like that kind of retarded shit.  I got home at 6:30am and did drunken laundry ; I forgot to use laundry liquid.  I was way too effervescent and enthusiastic; it was annoying.  And potentially causing strife with someone’s wife by doing the "whoopachang" noise is just not acceptable.  Oh wait… I did that before I got drunk.  
 
The only good thing I can say about it is that I was starting to yawn and get tired until I drank a lot. Don’t ask me how that works.
 
The next day, I was trying to play with the Palex in the backyard but a bunch of relatives come over and distracted him.  I wasn’t feeling hung over at all, but because I only got 2 hours sleep, I ended up falling asleep in the yard for a few hours and got sunburnt on a little patch on my back.  Serves me right.
 
The point of this drivel is that no matter what I think I’ve figured out and got right, there’s always a probability… perhaps even an inevitability that I will fall off the goddamn bike. It makes self-improvement seem pretty damn futile on one hand, but quite crucial on the other – if I don’t daily try to talk myself out of all kinds of absurdity I would be a complete mess.  Not many people would look at my life and think I’ve got it together or that I’m going anywhere, but it’s a miracle given the depths of inanity I have demonstrated being capable of.