2. Awareness. The New Frontier.

 


Question: What is the next best thing to having a drinking problem?


Answer: Knowing you have a drinking problem.


Question What is the next best thing to doing anything about a drinking problem?


Answer: Being aware of it.


Awareness is the new frontier of humanity. It is the acceptable antechamber to the world of action. 


So I have left the comfy confines of my mothership Apollo Drunknik, where I mindlessly guzzled anything put in front of me. I am acclimatising in the “still having the odd beer” airlock, looking through the porthole at the alcohol free world. I can’t quite make out if it is a blisteringly scorched desert with very thin oxygen levels or a land of plenty with an almost limitless horizon. 



I am aware now the glass in my hand is my second or is my third? I really should be keeping count. I really should start paying attention. The trouble is it starts losing all its fun when you start to think about it. It is like when you start having sex for the first time and want to get it right.


I am trying to work out if this is the time where I drink exactly the same and just keep a log book or is it the time I begin to curtail the flow? If I am going to do this properly I need to take as seriously the act of giving up drinking as I dedicated to the action of drinking, or this thing is not going to work.  So I decide I need to take the Red Pill. The one that throws me violently out of the Pissupyourlegtrix world where I previously counted my alcohol intake in bottles and half bottles in to the bright harsh world of “a unit of alcohol”


Insert Darth Vader’s Imperial Theme here


I will show you fear in a handful of units of alcohol. 


I am beginning to understand the nature of what “a unit of alcohol” is and how truly depressing it is once you comprehend it. Just so you know one unit is 10ml or 8g of pure alcohol. Most of you will be aware of the ABV (Alcohol By Volume) of drinks. Most wines hover around the 13% ABV which means that 13% of the liquid is pure alcohol. What I would usually have referred to as “one of the good ones”.


For some reason if I went into a bar and paid £26 for a vile of pure alcohol equal to the units contained in a bottle of average white wine I guess it would raise some eyebrows. Dissolve it in a grape based liquid and match it with a food and it suddenly seems sophisticated. I’ll have weed pork scratching dusted with cocaine to go with it, fuck it lets get proper sophisticated-up.


I guess this is not the time to start raging over long standing and socially acceptable hypocrisies. That just makes me want to drink more and I need another reason to drink like Katie Price needs another boob job.


OK so I am now counting the units.


Captain’s log add two more in quick succession, and note that those two didn’t even wipe their feet. Shit I’ve just run out, now that is piss-poor awareness, I bang on the door of the spaceship “please I’ve changed my mind, let me back in, fill her up Scotty!”
Location: Manchester, UK

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