Audio By Carbonatix
I didn’t get out last weekend, and I doubt that you did, either, because we are apparently under biological attack. I don’t know for sure where this bug came from, but it’s probably hell. The bug ravages your body until you’re so sensitive that even your hair hurts and you must forgo any sort of grooming. The thought of food makes you want to yak up your toenails, since you have nothing else left in you to throw at the toilet.
On the rare occasions when I feel this bad, it’s usually because I earned my punishment with overindulgence the night before. Overindulgence during which I’ve neglected to follow the rules.
Unless you’re a true professional, you may not have noticed that you automatically choose different adult beverages for different situations. You would never dream of drinking screw-top wine at a romantic dinner with your significant other, for example. And a truly classy guy would even try to make the right choice of white or red based on the menu. This is important, because he needs the right bottle to lower her defenses enough so that he doesn’t have to actually get on his knees and beg for sex. But the rules are getting more complicated these days, because those “experts” known as sommeliers (French for “pretentious wine snobs”) are now telling us that screw-top bottles are probably the best way to store your favorite vintage. I don’t know about you, but if all wine starts coming in screw-top bottles, I won’t know what to buy. I’ll make the nice gesture of bringing a bottle of wine to a party, and when it gets passed around, everybody will start yorking like they were doing shots of ipecac.
Or like I’ve been doing for the past 24 hours. In order to avoid such situations — and assuming you survive whatever plague has laid us low — I urge you to keep this handy guide from the Institute of Drinking Studies on hand should you ever venture out for another night of drinking.
Beer: The standard by which all other buzzes are measured. This buzz is highly versatile, and if all other options fail, you can always count on it. Ideally, though, this is a guy buzz. Beer is how guys get in touch with their feelings (if they have any), and it allows them to display said feelings without shame. The institute recommends beer for any stereotypical guy activities such as a barbecue, watching a game, or a reunion of close friends who haven’t seen each other for anywhere between last night and twenty years; six beers each, and everybody’s caught up. The best thing about beer is that no matter how many a guy has, it’s typically a good-natured drunk. The worst that can happen (especially if he drinks American “beer”) is that he wakes up with a railroad spike through his head and whines like a two-year-old all the next day.
Bourbon: Any booze can make any guy act like an idiot, but for unadulterated chaos, the institute recommends bourbon. In fact, we have banned bourbon from official functions because it tends to make our associates do dangerous things like slap complete strangers (women) on their rear ends as they walk by with their boyfriends. So our official recommendation is to only drink bourbon at the beginning of the night “to warm up.” (If you’re like us, four doubles later you’ll be so warmed up, you’ll wonder where the hell you are.)
Gin: We recommend you stay away from this one entirely, because it’s a mean drunk. You may wake up the next day with no friends other than your cellmates.
Tequila: Here at the institute, we recommend tequila for its highly social buzz, spread through the ingenious application of body shots. It’s like spring break in a bottle. If you hook up with the right crowd of attractive young ladies, you may get lucky enough to encounter strange navels or cleavage. We do recommend, however, that you check ID and obtain written informed consent before engaging in any lurid displays — otherwise, you may later find that they occurred under duress.
Wine: Face it — nobody in your circle really likes wine. Guys only drink wine for one of two reasons. First, we are forced to attend some function where we’re expected to act like adults until we’re able to sneak away and drink beer. Or second, a guy drinks wine in order to please an attractive person of the opposite sex. This is because wine is a horny buzz, a sleeper buzz that you don’t recognize until you’ve polished off two beers and it’s too late to stop things. By then, your heads are spinning and your inhibitions have been checked at the door. In other words, wine is the great equalizer that gives a guy a fighting chance to sleep with someone way out of his league.
Oh, one other time a guy will drink wine: when he and his buddies get together for a Three Dog Night. That’s when they each drink three bottles of Mad Dog 20/20 brand wine/transmission fluid and end the evening baying at the moon like a pack of rabid dogs.
And begin the next day feeling just as bad as I do now. — Patrick Osborn
