St. Patrick’s Day is supposed to be a hard drinking holiday for serious drunks.  I’m not talking about frat boys with a Keggerator and a chip on their shoulders.  Serious drinkers buy whiskey by the case for home consumption.

Inevitably, St. Patty’s Day turns into a slop fest for the disingenuous among us.  The faux-Irish pile into bars for Kegs and Eggs – the only day they ever wake up so early – strung with green beads and shamrocks and “Kiss Me, I’m a Dipshit” t-shirts.  They’re as “Irish” as it gets!

And none of them have ever heard of James Joyce.

I loathe people who have no sense of self beyond some cookie-cutter cartoon impression of ethnic identity.  Especially when the best traits they manage to distill out of that identity are poverty and a drinking problem.

Pretending to be Irish is bad enough.  Pretending to be a drinker is nearly inexcusable.  Drinking is a skill one can only acquire over time.  It requires that you evaluate your drinking and apply the lessons learned.

Amateurs write off all the evils of drinking on the drink.

That’s how Prohibition happened.  Demon Rum!  As you can imagine, I’m not much for Prohibition, so I’d really appreciate it if the Chesters of the world didn’t ruin my fun by fucking things up.

So let’s examine the “skill set” of a professional drinker to see where amateurs go wrong.

1) Read Thyself - Amateurs don’t know their body.  They drink anything that comes along, they buy things that don’t mix well, and assume that a slice of cold pizza at 3 AM is all they need to fix it.

This is why amateurs wake up 4 hours late for work, covered in their own vomit.

Drinking large amounts of anything requires knowing how your body will react to it.   If you sense that you need to “adjust” mid-binge, then do so.  Alcohol takes time to set in.  If you’ve just put down three shots in five minutes, have a glass of water.

2) Function While Impared – Big will tell you that I can order drinks in sign language.  It hides the fact that I may no longer be able to speak straight, or at all, and allows me to continue drinking well past any logical cut-off point.

Hack, Big and I have also developed the ability to maintain some semblance of bearing.  This is crucial.  When it comes time to deal with bouncers, bar staff or other patrons, they should not have any idea how drunk you really are.

This does not mean that you should be able to ride unicycles after chugging a liter of vodka.

It means you should know well enough not to sit your drunk ass on the unicycle.  If you limit your drinking activities to simple functions, like ordering drinks, then it becomes more difficult to gauge your sobriety.  Namely, you shouldn’t be stumbling around, trying to hurl darts at the wrong wall.

3) Pace -  A professional drinker knows intuitively how fast they can pour things into their body while maintaining the necessary brain-stem functions.  Like putting money into the juke box, and ordering more drinks.

Just like professional fighters, professional drinkers have weight classes.  Drinking a lot means drinking a lot FOR YOUR BODY.  Even a great drinker, at 150 lbs, will have nothing on Andre the Giant (a notorious drunk who wrestled occasionally).

Much of what you hear when people tell you how much they can drink is an outright lie.  The rest is simply false.

Alcohol soaks into the body at a relatively fixed rate.  However, the body will react if you impose sudden overwhelming demands on it.  If you pour 3 shots of 99 Bananas in your gut on a dare, the spincter that leads to your large intestine will go into spasm and close.  Then your stomach will secrete mucous heavily to slow the rate of absorption into your bloodstream.

This is why people will tell you that shot of 151 didn’t really do anything.  Later, that same asshole will be curled up in the back seat of a cab, trying to eat their cell phone.

4) Tolerance – Hard drinkers are tolerant of alcohol at a physiological level.  Tolerance happens in stages, and it’s not the point of pride that those guys from Phi Kappa Douchebagga want you to believe it is.

Stage 1

When the body is first exposed to alcohol it doesn’t know what the fuck is going on.  Drinkers feel euphoric, they lose control of themselves easily and will often misplace their virginity and their dignity.  Over time, cell membranes toughen and cells learn how to function during exposure to alcohol.

Stage 2

Alcohol is a funny thing.  It’s the only drug that also happens to be food.  Alcohol as your know it is technically beverage alcohol – ETOH.  Ethanol.  Ethanol is a sugar alcohol (glycerol), and it metabolizes into sugar acetaldehyde.

In case you were wondering, the commercial that claims “Bacardi and Diet” has no carbs is lying.  (* edit: Sort of.  Alcohol has a calorie density of 7 calories per gram.  Carbohydrates are 4, Fat is 9.  It ain’t making you skinny.)

Once the body can function without alcohol killing cells outright, the cells then learn how to use alcohol for fuel.  In this stage, alcoholism is setting in.  The first few drinks give you a sense of vitality.  Your accuity may even increase slightly (especially if you’re hung over).

Stage 2 drinkers don’t brag about drinking huge amounts of booze.  They just do it.  Not because it’s impressive, but because they need to.  Over time the body begins to need alcohol as a source of fuel.  This is the beginning of a very slow end . . .

Stage 3

At this point the frequent (or constant) presence of alcohol in the body begins to wear at a person’s health.  This steady buzz is called Plateau Alcoholism.  They become protein deficient as their appetite wanes and their body comes to be heavily dependent upon alcohol.  Recovering alcoholics crave sweets.

Hardcore alcoholics keep a bottle in their car because they’ll fall asleep if their supply of alcohol goes away.  Alcohol is literally the fuel that keeps them running.  Of course, the thing that propels an alcoholic also kills them.

By Stage 3 tolerance begins to diminish.  Organs function poorly as enzyme and hormone levels change.  At this point, a drinker can only handle small amounts of alcohol at a time, metered out over the course of the day.

Most amateur drinkers will never get to this point.  After one hangover too many they sour on the whole experience and grow a normal life.  They have debt and a significant other.  They may even go on to demonize the “ills of alcohol” – a wonderful drug they never properly learned how to control.  Of course, a Stage 3 terminal alcoholic never learned either.  They simply managed to keep it up a lot longer.

That about covers it.  Any questions?