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Alcohol: The Healthy Alternative to a Boring Society

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by Jason Roth

Bored with society? Sick of mind-numbing small talk consisting of Bob and Sarah's trip to Paris, whether it's going to rain or not this weekend, and do the fucking Yankees really have a decent back-up pitcher?

Then try alcohol. The stupider you are, the less stupid everyone else seems. Or, just as good, the less you actually give a shit.

Alcohol is the miracle drug. The same person that makes you want to slit your wrists in boredom when you're sober becomes the hit of the party. In fact, all you need to have a party is alcohol. No alcohol? No party. A party without alcohol is a bunch of boring people standing around while you nod your head and think to yourself, "I'd rather be sitting at home by myself thinking about how boring these people are." Your own thoughts about boring people are actually more interesting than the boring people themselves. Trust me, I'm conducting the experiment right now and I can see the results.

Why is this, you ask? Because amongst boring people, you have two choices. First, you can participate in the conversation at the level determined by the mindless flow of the conversation (a flow which can probably be graphically represented as a flat line by a researcher in the field of chaos theory; believe me, you don't need fractals for this shit), and second, you can drink yourself silly until your level of consciousness becomes closer to that of those around you.

There is no third option. Someone who's optimistic, naive, or more likely, was raised by apes from birth, might assume that steering the conversation to a higher level might be possible. Feel free to attempt this if you think it can be done, but you'll have more success trying to ride one of those midget clown bicycles with a blindfold and your hands duct-taped behind your back. Inertia might carry you a few inches, but eventually reality will kick you in the ass with its huge steel-toed boot.

There is only one subject I've found so far which comes closest to solving the "How do I spend more than five seconds with these fucking people?" problem. And that is...

Movies. Everyone likes movies, and once in a while, due to the laws of probability (or statistics, or whatever field likes to try to predict this kind of shit), a boring person will have stumbled upon a movie whose merits exceed that of a Rob Schneider/Adam Sandler "guy who dies and comes back as a six-year-old girl who can talk to animals and is sent to live with his rich uncle while working undercover with the FBI and falls in love with the girlfriend of a pompous, yuppie prick that evidently has so little taste that not only will she fuck the pompous prick, but shit, she'll even take Rob Schneider or Adam Sandler" movie. You know, that kind of movie.

Once in a while, you can actually bridge the gap between the perceptual level of pretty dresses, sports pages, and "I love what you've done with your hair", and the conceptual level of character, plot, and no, I am not talking out of my ass, ethics. A decent movie can actually serve as the basis for a human conversation. Once in a while, I even try to slip in a heretical question like "Why did you like that movie?" And sometimes, I even hear something other than "I don't know, I just liked it."

But this conversation thread will not last, unless you talk so loudly and quickly that not a single person is free even to enter into it. But then, if you're just going to talk to yourself, why not get the hell out of there and do it in the comfort of your own home? Or at least do it while walking down the sidewalk with the rest of the people who are bored with society, so you can achieve the dual purpose of having an intelligent conversation and seeing the amusing looks of passers-by who are convinced that you are clinically insane. (It's ironic that talking to yourself at a party will get you rude looks, whereas talking to yourself on a sidewalk will often get you spare change.)

So, the whole movie idea will only postpone the inevitable. Eventually, conversation will deteriorate back to the level of an infant who hates his job, eats too much, and only wishes he could remember what it was like to sleep with his wife before his world came to a slow, boring halt, and he became a zombie wandering the Earth like a bedless, wireless version of a coma patient.

Enter alcohol.

Alcohol solves all the problems of a boring conversation. On the most basic level, it gives you something to do with your hands. It also gives you the mild satisfaction of witnessing the immutable laws of nature, insofar as it allows you to recall that the act of lifting your hand will, in fact, cause the glass of beer to reach your mouth. Of course, after testing and re-testing this cause-and-effect phenomenon, you may become less successful in achieving the goal. I.e., you might get so drunk that you pour your beer all over your fucking shirt.

Furthermore, the act of drinking alcohol can plug up those initial lulls in the conversation, when you're wondering who or what convinced you to come to this thing in the first place, or when the annoying bitch in front of you will stop talking about her fucking cat. In other words, this pre-buzz drinking enables you to partake in simple, yet effective, goal-directed action. The thought-process is something like the following:

I'm holding a beer in my hands. I wouldn't mind having a sip of this beer. Now, if I raise this beer to my mouth, I could have a sip of the beer, and that would be good. Therefore, I'm going to raise the beer. There it goes. The beer is coming up towards my mouth. Almost there. Just about. Getting closer...

Mmm. Beer.

I never said the goal-directed action was anything like discovering a continent or building a fucking rocket ship, but Jesus Christ, it's better than nothing.

Arguably, the best part about alcohol is that once you finish what's in your glass, you can have more. An empty glass of beer is only a glass waiting to be filled. (No one can accuse me of being a pessimist, that's for damn sure.) If you want to be really crazy, you don't even have to fill your glass with the same thing. Sure, some people would advise against mixing your alcohol, but I say go for it. Beer, then scotch, then Jagermeister, then Blackhouse, then something with a fucking umbrella sticking out of it, whatever. Switch glasses, use the same glass, drink half of one thing then toss it for something else. It's up to you. (In a free country, as at a party full of drunks, you're free to commit just about any act of asinine nonsense you want to.)

Do you see how interesting and entertaining this can be? And all throughout the process, you're gradually forgetting about how boring all these people are. And, since presumably they're all also drinking, the boring people are becoming interesting and entertaining themselves. The important thing to remember is that our standards of "interesting" and "entertaining" change when we talk about drinking. By "interesting", we are not referring to unique observations about philosophy, and by "entertaining", we are not referring to witty remarks about politics. Rather, we're talking about slurring words, more frequent references to one's boss as a "fucking moron", and if we've really struck gold, a woman's shirt being thrown off while its owner dances around on top of a flaming bar while her soon-to-be ex-boyfriend yacks up Tequila and beer nuts in the bathroom. What was once "boring" has now become a drunken scene of anarchic absurdity. In other words, a thing of beauty.

I'm not sure if you would find "boredom" listed as a social disease in one of those big psychology reference books. But if it is, there should be one prescription of choice.

Booze.

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