Before reading this, consider reading part one which is below.
Before I move on, I must thank my family, especially my mum and dad, for their steady presence and tireless support. The number of phone calls from the police, psychiatrists and hospitals is the kind of burden no child should ever have to place on their parents, yet they handled it with calm and care. I say “child” because that’s exactly what I was at twenty — emotionally immature and overwhelmed — and even now at forty-three I often feel as if I have some growing up still to do. Whenever I landed in serious trouble it was almost always linked to drinking: episodes that included suicide attempts, extended periods of major self-harm, or repeated hospital stays. Through all of that my folks would drop everything and come running, time and again.
Does alcohol help creativity: Yes — but only up to a point. When used with a sensible dose of responsibility and a clear sense of when to stop, a few drinks can lower the guard and open up ideas. The more I drank, though, the poorer the standard of work became. The first six-pack of beer often helped immensely, loosening things up and sparking momentum, but once I drank beyond that and became truly intoxicated, everything fell apart. It’s similar to how alcohol affects mental health: it can work wonders at first, lifting mood and easing anxiety, but it drags you down quickly when you overindulge.
I used to host art nights in my old man’s garage that would run all night. I’d have half a dozen people over, supply the canvases and paints, and we’d all get our kicks from drinking beer — and there’s a fair chance other substances were involved; I’m not completely sure. We would create until the sun came up, and some genuinely good work was produced, not just by me. In those instances, alcohol helped greatly and the loose, communal atmosphere was fertile for ideas. Those gatherings were the exception rather than the rule. Most nights when I got totally pissed, canvases ended up on the fire or smashed to pieces. Art supplies are too costly to waste like that. I even left a heap of canvases that didn’t work out in the hard rubbish out the front of the house; they all disappeared the first night. I wonder whether they now hang on someone’s wall, or whether they were simply painted over.
About twenty-something years ago I received a drink driving offence. It is something I remain quietly ashamed of to this day. What an embarrassing and humbling ordeal it was. I have no time for people who drink and then get behind the wheel, and I certainly understand the risks involved. Here’s the thing: I was pulled over and recorded a reading of 0.07. That night I simply miscalculated my drinks — we’re talking one beer too many. The legal limit in Australia is 0.05. Had I been living in the USA, I might well have been tested and sent on my way, depending on local rules. The process of getting my licence back was unnecessarily drawn out and punitive. Loss of licence for six months, a fine of over five hundred dollars, a court date, an interlock device installed on my ignition for six months, compulsory drink-driving education classes, another court appearance — and after all of that I was eventually returned my licence but was required to remain at 0.00 for the following six months. That does not even cover the inconvenience of relying on lifts from others and repeatedly having to explain why I could not drive. A very valuable lesson was learned that night and throughout the ensuing twelve months of my life.
Hangovers. For me, they were reason enough to stop drinking. I can remember when I was younger going out and drinking heavily all night, then trying to wake a couple of hours later for work—if I slept at all. As I got older some mornings I literally felt like death; the room would spin and every movement seemed to demand effort. I’m lucky to have had only a handful of headaches in my life, so that wasn’t the main issue, but the nausea and lethargy were killers that turned simple tasks into mountains. The night before I would tell myself I’d be fine after a few hours’ sleep or I’d go straight into work after leaving Crown Casino. Mornings rarely matched that confidence, and promises made in the haze of late-night revelry seldom survived daylight.
I should have been fired from every company I worked for over the years for taking too many days off because of my drinking problems. I wasn’t. My performance at work was poor at best. I would often knock off early just to get my next fix of booze because we all know what “hair of the dog” is all about. Often I would go out again on a work night and the cycle would continue, a repeating pattern that ate away at stability and reputation. In later years I started drinking in my car on lunch breaks—three-pack VB longnecks, the equivalent of a six-pack of stubby bottles—consumed within the hour I had. Someone under me once raised the issue, and nothing was ever said or done about it. That didn’t stop my lunchtime routine.
“Under me”—that’s the other thing: I was manager of the fresh produce department at Coles, with about a dozen employees reporting to me. If I’d played my cards right I could have climbed the corporate ladder and landed a well-respected, well-paying role in the company. Instead I was demoted and demoted until I was packing shelves, my responsibilities stripped away as consequences quietly accumulated. They didn’t fire me outright, but they made life hard. I quit. I walked out. Once again, alcohol had sabotaged things for me. It destroys anything that’s good, slowly or suddenly, and leaves very little behind.
It seems to me that our social acceptance of alcohol is wildly out of proportion compared with other drugs, many of which cause little or no real harm. These substances were made Schedule I drugs in the early 1970s under Richard and Nancy Reagan; that was half a century ago. Since then, scientific research has been severely constrained by the powers that be, making meaningful study almost impossible. Only limited work has been done on psychedelics and hallucinogens such as psilocybin mushrooms, LSD (acid), ayahuasca, ketamine, dimethyltryptamine (DMT) and even MDMA (ecstasy), despite promising results — for example, marked benefits for war veterans with PTSD and people with otherwise untreatable mental health problems, often with striking success. I’m going off the top of my head here, but what I’m trying to say is this: if alcohol were a newly discovered drug today, it would likely be made illegal immediately. Just look at the damage it has done to individuals and society. “I guess it’s okay to drink your drug,” as Bill Hicks put it. Alcohol kills more people than all illicit drugs combined. Most psychedelic substances are nearly impossible to fatally overdose on — a heavy dose may take you somewhere intense for several hours, but you typically come back intact, and often with beneficial insights. I suspect the ruling classes prefer these drugs to remain illegal because they can open people’s eyes, and the last thing governments and the puppeteers want is an army of free-thinking individuals; that’s a genuine threat to entrenched control. Alcohol, by contrast, dulls thought and makes people easier to manage. Drug use remains a major taboo to this day — it’s extraordinary. I could keep going, but much of this has been said before; I’m not claiming to present anything radically new.
How do I feel about my recent diagnosis of kidney disease? Ripped off! I have always drank a lot, but I have an uncle who once told me everything would be okay if you stuck to beer and stayed away from hard liquor. He was a couple of decades older than me and had drank more than me. He would even brew his own kegs. Turns out this was a fallacy, dear uncle. I’m still reasonably young and should have years of moderate drinking ahead of me, so I’m struggling with the idea of losing that. I’m still wrapping my head around the whole reality of never being able to drink the way I used to again. Maybe this is what I needed and God provided — he works in mysterious ways, doesn’t he? There are a few YouTube channels that I’m dedicated to watching every day: podcasts and videos of people who drink liters of vodka a day and have done so their whole lives. We’re talking volumes I could never manage. If my drinking patterns resembled theirs it would be easier to make sense of the predicament I find myself in.