Mirror by the deinonychus diaphane

 

I think.

 

These were the only words I had down on my newly opened word processor file on my computer for the last, probably, ten, fifteen minutes. I have already finished my hot chocolate; it didn’t last long, but I’ve got the excuse that hot drinks get cold if you don’t drink them fast enough.

It always starts like this. I go to a pub or café, get a cheap drink, and sit down. I make sure the sitting arrangement fits perfectly my belongings’ need and reaching potential, because I don’t want to move from here until I can’t hold my bladder any longer; which will then be my go-time, unless I’m lucky enough to have the loos next to my table and/or there is virtually no one else in the room, so that I can leave my stuff unattended with my mind at peace.

 

I then open a document to write. Start writing. I tell myself it’s because of the self-inflicted peer-pressure. I need to get something done, because I know that I need to get something done because that’s the reason I opened a new document. It seldom works.. There’s always a good reason, of course. “Don’t feel like it” is a classic. The headache’s good too. Admin work is cheeky but never fails to eat up a few minutes to a few hours at times. I sometimes get carried away with the music in my headphones. Music that I put on, on purpose, to focus. Ironic. Sometimes the buzzing of people chatting drives my writing, sometimes it’s the silence, and sometimes it’s music. How do I know which one it is that I need at the moment? Easy. It’s invariably not the one I chose. Luck. Luck is a better indicator of my capacity to focus than any of my arrangements, and yet I keep on relying on them to get me through the pains of what I set myself to do because I want to do it.

 

This time is different though. Every time is different, but this time really is unlike other times. Beyond the previous excuses for my lack of commitment, there’s also live inspiration. This is when I am lucky enough to observe a peculiar scene unfolding in front of me, at the pub. Consuming stories through many means, I get used to expect exceptional events happening all around me; life is never boring. But it’s usually the opposite; life is boring most of the time, for me, at least. I can’t seem to find the pleasure in small things, I guess.

So when I find myself the spectator of a previously unperformed piece of story, I would say that it’s a good excuse to not write. Life can easily get fascinating with a little push, with a little outlier entering the scene; someone taking a detour in their ways to make the day just a little bit odder. This was one of those days.

 

Now, I need to clarify something here, because I feel that I’ve already oversold the story I’m about to tell. It’s nothing spectacular; it’s only unusual; something you might see in a film. In a way, this also helps in making such events less exciting; once it’s been seen in a (or several) films, it’s become a cliché. Therefore, even if you’ve never seen that sort of things happening to you or someone you know, or like me, someone you don’t know, but whom you witness out of pure chance, it’s already spoiled for you. It gets almost boring. Like life.

 

I’m quite self-conscious, and straight-out observing strangers feels rude to me, so I often go for the try-not-to-look attitude, which inevitably makes you look even more like you are spying on someone. So I check the environment for help. This pub, which I had never been before, despite having walked past it many times before, had these huge mirrors all around the room. Not just behind the bar, like most have; but on all of the walls; from a 5-foot up to 8-foot height. Not the most attractive design; felt a bit like a panopticon for drunkards. Not that they’d find any use in one of those; drunkenness being famous for inducing an alteration, if not an absence, of self-awareness. With this arrangement, I could see everything that was happening all across the pub without needing slightly moving my eyes from my computer, the perfect disguise. In these times, I like to take advantage of this wide lens to observe my surroundings, but often forget that other people can do the same to me; that being said, I’ve tried to catch people looking at me looking at others, but was never lucky. Probably because people don’t come to pubs to look at other people; also most people don’t go to pubs alone, at least, not in the ones to which I go. They must have better things on which to waste their time.

 

What happened — what I saw unfold by intermediary of the mirrors — is simply a man stood up from his stool at the bar, and started shouting. To anyone. To everyone. I don’t know, I couldn’t understand his inebriated gibberish. A scene. He made a scene of some sort. This shouldn’t be shocking. A pub is a place of drinking. People come there to get pissed, and do so wholeheartedly, and rather efficiently. And shouting is a normal thing to do when you are pissed. The issue was handled quickly and nicely by the staff.

So that’s it. That’s what happened. It’s nothing really exceptional.

But it got me thinking. About alcohol. About its effects. About its reason of being. About its legality. Especially compared to other less potent drugs that are illegal.. I’m not getting into these ones, but it’s just fun to think about the contrast.

 

I’m not against alcohol. I’ve had a quite boring relationship with alcohol. Got my first taste around age 11 like most catho kids; but I didn’t pick up the booze from there more easily. Though I get tipsy very quickly, it takes a lot — a great lot — for me to get properly drunk.

Got properly drunk only once: at a poorly planned Halloween party. Guests were supposed to arrive around 9pm, so that I’d have time to make myself something to eat before the drinking began, but instead showed up from 6pm, leaving me bored, hungry, and empty-stomached. Add this to drinking games, and countless shots of tequila; I puked twice in the kitchen sink — empty-puked, since I hadn’t eaten anything, which made things much less agreeable than they already were. But again, that’s the worst that I ever had, so quite boring compared to people accustomed to the drink. At one point, for a few weeks, loneliness drove me to crave for a drink; but I didn’t indulge in it, and it went away after a while. Finally, a few surgeries prevented me from drinking my 10 units (?) of alcohol I drink in a year for a few weeks. Not a big loss.

 

It’s at the last house party I went that I changed my mind on alcohol. Got a few ciders not to arrive empty-handed — lame drinks, but it’s the only alcoholic drinks that have the slightest flavour in the UK, unless you go for cocktails; and you might as well bring the stuff you’d be drinking. After finishing a couple of them, I got bored, so I decided to up my party game, and went for a shot of vodka — shot that I eyed, so was somewhere between a single and a triple. I drank that in a couple of sips, and then I thought to myself: there you go, you’re getting yourself drunk now.

I wasn’t. That was nothing, but the mere idea of drinking just for the sake of drinking felt very pathetic. Really? You just numb yourself by destroying your brain cells. Cool. What was that for? Having a good time? Not having a bad time? Alcohol just makes you feel more like you already are. If you’re happy, you’ll feel happier, if you’re angry, you’ll feel angrier, and if you’re sad, you’ll feel sadder. Alcohol is no cure. It doesn’t help with anything, it’s just a distraction from yourself. And why would you get away from yourself?.. Ok, stupid question. But in the end, you’re still you. No matter how much away from yourself you can get, you’ll always go back to yourself. You can’t help it. If there’s a problem that makes you want to get away from yourself, it’s within yourself that you need to start changing things, and not trying to get you in a state that actually prevents from dealing with these problems.

 

So that was my self-rant regarding alcohol. Drinking just for the sake of drinking is sad. So when I saw that guy, completely out of himself (pun intended); I felt disgust. To be fair, I also felt empathy, it’s not like alcohol isn’t addictive, there’s a reason why people can’t quit it, it seems to replace parts of themselves, and when they stop it, they’re just left with only a incomplete version of themselves; which must feel extremely alienating, ergo the going back to their medicine. Nonetheless, it’s pathetic — not because of the scene caused, on the contrary, I’m all in favour of disavowing social conventions, and being more honest with the human experience as it comes to us on the moment (with the only limit where harm is caused to someone) — no, it’s pathetic, because it’s obvious that alcohol is the reason that person can’t handle themselves; it’s obvious that drinking yourself away won’t fix what’s broken in your life. Alcohol, when not handled with sensibility, is an impediment. It’s an extra problem that you inflict to yourself. It’s a distraction from your getting better; from getting what you set yourself to get to make your life the one you want. It’s a simple matter of cultivating a habit of self-respect, and not to crack easily in the face of the curved balls that life throws at you..

 

And that’s when I realised that I had written I think over an hour ago, and that now I had to pee.