Arsenic for lunch

I don’t drink alcohol for the same reason that I don’t eat arsenic for lunch.

Let’s just get something clear right now - I used to drink. A lot. Probably more than you, ya’ pansy-ass lightweight. And while we’re at it, let’s get another thing clear - I’m not preacher, I’m not a born-again Christian and I am not in the habit of telling people what to do. But I don’t put that alcohol crap in my body anymore, and here’s why - that shit is pure evil.

So now that we have that all settled, let me ask you something, you ... you metrosexual, Details and Maxim reading, foo-foo juice drinking, urban desperado. Did you ever stop to think about what, exactly, alcohol is? Unless you actually paid attention in Chemistry class (don’t lie to me), then you probably haven’t, or even know what it is or why it has the effect on you that it does.

How alcohol is made is one amazingly complicated process, usually involving oak barrels, double distillation and secret family formulas. But that was something which rarely occurred to me. For many years I took for granted that booze just was. And why put any deeper thought into it than that? Booze was everywhere – at every party I went to past the age of 14, every bar, every wedding, every stolen get-together in the woods – alcohol was a constant. My mother and father drank it, as did my sister and pretty much everyone else in my family – and all my friends too. Basically, every single person I was acquainted with on Planet Earth would, at least occasionally, consume alcohol.

Special occasion? Let’s raise our glasses to a toast. Shitty day? Let’s hit the bar and tie one on. Got that promotion? Let’s go out and celebrate! Going to the game? Definitely going to have a few beers – Hey beer man! Two Buds right here! Nothing special happening whatsoever? Let’s grab a couple of beers because we’re not creative enough to think of anything else to do, and in America, that’s what cool guys named Steve and Jack do – they knock back a few cold ones, which just increases their coolness tenfold.

Never did I stop and think, “How did alcohol come to dominate our society in such the way that it does today? How did this stuff come to exist in the first place?” In that light, it seems odd that these details were completely ignored, since I would regularly put the stuff into my body. Steak, I knew was dead cow flesh. Vegetables grew, seemingly miraculously, from the ground. Fruit appeared on the branches of bushes and trees. Rice came from China mud. But alcohol is a whole 'nother story.

I once visited the Budweiser Brewery in St. Louis, which really isn’t so much of a brewery as it is a small city that produces beer. It was pretty fascinating to discover all the steps that went into making the stuff. You’ve got your malt, hops, water and yeast, and you throw it all together, let it sit around for a while, and viola! Drunk juice. But, of course, it actually more complicated than that. Certain ingredients have to be added at specific times and so forth.

How did anyone think of this? And when was the first drunk in the history of mankind?

It must have happened something like this - Joe Caveman was storing food for the winter, and he had learned that it was a pain in the ass to gather food during the cold season, mainly because it was fucking cold out there. And his cave was nice and toasty, with the fire providing a romantic backdrop for snuggling with Mrs. Caveman, after he finished dragging her around by her hair for a while. But there was also that whole thing of “not much stuff alive” during winter, and so, being the bright, enterprising Cro-Magnon that he was, he thought to himself, “Huh - when it’s warm, there is all kinds of stuff around I can eat, but when it gets cold, that stuff goes away somewhere. Why don’t I gather the stuff while it’s alive, and store it for later, when my nuts shrivel up?”

It was a great plan, but with one fatal drawback - no one told him about keeping stuff from going bad by freezing it, and anyway, Kenmore freezer units were hard to come by in those days. So he just put the fruits and berries it a ditch somewhere for later, but unfortunately, they went bad and started to get funky and stinky. But desperate times call for desperate measures, and thus, in the deep of winter one year, he swallowed hard, and, uh, swallowed hard.

And then a funny thing happened.

He started to feel different because dopamine was released in his brain as a reaction to the poison that entered his body. Yes, folks, the saying “What’s your poison” isn’t just something your bartender asks you. Alcohol is, in a very technical and literal sense, poisonous to human beings and probably most every other living thing. Our cave man friend also experienced many more things, most of them pretty complex and involving words like “Limbic system” and “GABA neurotransmitter” so I won’t get into those. Suffice to say that after alcohol enters your stomach, it goes into your bloodstream and is deposited in every organ in your body, doing much more harm than good.

But Stone Age Boy didn’t know any of that. He didn’t know that his body was releasing chemicals in his brain, designed to make him feel better, in reaction to the poison. Hell, he didn’t even know he had a brain. He just knew he felt differently and he kind of liked the way he felt. Thus was born the first raging alcoholic, soon to spawn millions others down the bottlenecked tree of life. Instead of reluctantly eating stuff that had gone bad because there was nothing else to eat, people started purposely letting food rot so they could catch a buzz.

And that, in a fermented nutshell, is the essence of distilled spirits - food gone putrid. It’s not this fancy stuff with clever names in bottles that some marketing genius designed. It’s not a “Good Call,” it’s not about a “Rocky Mountain High” and it has nothing to do with “The Finest Ingredients.” It’s about shit that went bad, like the broccoli in your vegetable crisper. Why don’t you just let a few ears of corn sit out for about three months and eat them next time you want to get your drink on. It’s the same damn thing. Think about all the money you’ll save!

Every so often, the alcohol industry will sponsor a study that suggests that a little drinky drinky every day is good for you. Seldom has a larger piece of bullshit ever been set down in Earth’s history. There may be some properties of wine and beer that have benefits, but what these studies conveniently leave out is that these benefits are readily available from 598,430,913 other edible items, which aren’t otherwise fatal when taken in large doses.

In light of this, it seems odd that people would drink as much as they do. Most of the boozehounds don’t know about that stuff and don’t want to hear it. But the sauce has, according to many, benefits – none more important than facilitating fucking. On the surface it’s hard to argue with that, except I have discovered that people still get horny and have sex when they are not drinking, thank goodness. And about the sex thing – you think that one in five sexually active single adults would have herpes (a conservative estimate) if they weren’t making intercourse decisions while drunk? Nope, they wouldn’t. One night of pleasure hardly seems worth a lifetime of painful red dots taking up residence in your groin area. So what if you wouldn’t get laid as often if you were sober? That’s why God created masturbation. There’s a reason that your arm is the perfect length to allow inappropriate touching of yourself.

And there’s other stuff, like your liver functioning like a Chrysler K car, your pancreas blowing up to the size of a tricycle, the dark circles under your eyes, the gin blossoms (not just a band, but a reaction to poison – see close-ups of Ted Kennedy). I’ll take vigor, thank you very much. It’s not about living to 100; it’s about feeling good and healthy today.

Think of the benefits - no more hangovers (worth the price of admission alone, if you ask me), no more panic attacks when flashing lights appear behind your car after a night out, no more uncontrollable projectile vomiting; going out to dinner at a nice restaurant costs half of what it used to, you don’t smell like an ashtray when you get home, you don’t have to pee every half hour and you can remember what you did, what you said, when you said it and who you said it to. I used to think that piecing together the previous night’s activities was fun, but that gets really old after a while.

So I don’t drink anymore and I’ve never been happier. Give it a try sometime, unless you enjoy being a dumbass that willingly shoves stuff down your throat that could kill you, night after night. And if you are one of those annoying people that “has a glass or two of Pinot Noir with dinner,” burn your copy of Sideways, stop being a pretentious yuppie, and pour yourself a glass of tap water.

Evan Redmon is an assistant editor for a scientific journal. He has lived in Washington, DC for most of his life, with seven years of college down the drain in Madison, WI and four and a half years of doing nothing in particular in Boulder, CO. He has visited 39 of the 50 states in the Union (excluding Alaska and Hawaii) and can be reached at evanredmon@yahoo.com.