To be serious for a moment

My uncle is a recovering alcoholic, but to say it has affected me would be a bit of a stretch.

I still have a bit of a hangover from last night.

My stepdad is an alcoholic and my husband has tendencies, as his dad was one. Life wasn’t great as a kid, but it could have been a lot worse. As an adult, I find that I’m not very tolerant of my husband when he decides to have a little too much. His personality changes and he becomes someone I don’t like too much. I’ve never had the craving for it myself, and I can go long periods without even having a social drink, so I can’t understand the phyiscal or psychological need for it. There was never any physical abuse connected to any of them, but the mental abuse could get pretty rough sometimes. As an adult, I’ve tried not to dwell on it, but occasionally something will happen that triggers the old anxiety responses. I don’t have anything against anyone drinking casually, though. Alcohol in society is a fact of life and there’s no point in getting on your soapbox about it. Prohibition proved that.

I’m convinced a close friend of mine back in England is an alcoholic. His Dad certainly is, I’m worried that behaviour has started to rub off.

My name is Otto and I love to get blotto.

I use alcohol to unwind. My Significant Other has used tranqs (Lorazepam) to calm down from anxiety attacks (fortunately very infrequent now). I “self-medicate” with alcohol, as one doctor has described it to aforementioned SO, and saw nothing wrong with it in moderation. It’s been pretty stressy in the past year, booze did help. I am quite capable of putting a bottle of wine away by myself. In fact if a bottle of wine is open, it tends to get drunk. Said SO can’t drink now due to even small amounts of alcohol waking her up in the night feeling miserable, so I don’t drink wine at home now as she feels left out and has been known to persuade herself to have “just one”. I can do that, let it go, though I do feel the urge to have the stuff I sublimate it with a glass or red or white grape juice in a wine glass, that helps a lot actually, you can fool yourself.

I will drink beer at home, the SO hates the stuff so feels no urge to drink it, but no more than two bottles. I’ll drink more in a pub, but now tend to space the beer with pints of coke or orange juice/lemonade. I’ll have a bottle of wine in a restaurant, but rarely more than half a bottle. Well, moderately rarely. Well sometimes. Look it’s more a guideline than a rule.

> Just watch The Jeremy Kyle Show or indeed Coronation Street to see how much alcohol is being used to control our lives (soaps including drinking in almost every scene is in itself another government psy-op IMO, much like the BBC allowing Who to return, tasking RTD with influencing a huge audience in regards to aliens in contemporary Britain, for when the truth is revealed in 2012.).

Also, was that a joke? If not, I’d lay off the sauce…