Joseph

2/26

People drink until they black out, in my opinion, to feel death. To experience death; utter, black, formless, sensation-less oblivion. Death, I feel, is just like not being born yet. You don’t remember it, but it still happened. It’s not like the 1970’s never happened, but all I experience of it are echoes. To me, the seventies were one ten year long drinking binge, and I sprung from and am still living through the hangover laden aftermath.

I’ve only blacked out drunk three times. The first time was fun: the first time I ever drank anything alcoholic, let alone hard alcohol. We had the remains of a bottle of 151 rum and a bottle of Everclear to the three of us. I remember knowing something was up when I almost fell over trying to tie my shoe. Later, I hit my head hard on a rock because I was rocking back and forth on the ground in order to follow the wild tilting of the earth. Then, death. I woke up in my sleeping bag, my wet shirt on the sand next to me. Drag marks led to my sleeping back. Apparently I spent the rest of the night making “walrus noises”. That was fun.

The other two times weren’t fun, because I can’t be sure what I did and how I acted. I don’t know what kind of drunk I am, so I don’t trust “blackout me”. I don’t trust “dead me”. The last time I came to with sticky green stuff on my arm. I don’t like being dead. One difference between death and getting blackout drunk: your experience varies based on whether your friends were with you. Death is the absence of memory.