Wine
makes you funny. Fact. Well, maybe not you, it may not make you
funny, bearable at best, but me, wine makes me funny. To me. To
others too, sporadically and not always for the intended reasons, but
mostly to me. Which is what’s important here. I can’t go round
trying to make you lot laugh, or thinking of little things that
entertain you, there’re loads of you for a start and you’re
awfully fickle. One minute a rape joke’s fine, the next the dead
baby joke has ostracised me. No consistency, very hard to read.
So I
concentrate on me, and wine makes me funny, or funnier, because if
you conduct a straw poll of me you will find there was a fairly
amusing foundation all along. Not humble or modest though, there must
be a different drink for that. Through the veil of the grape a
different world is witnessed, a lot of it made up of crisps and
giggling, but parts of it useful and unfattening, observed from a
distracted and slightly detached monitoring station that often gets
stuffy and makes your face go all pink. It, like many other alcoholic
beverages, removes the barrier between thought and speech, but unlike
it’s friends, wine allows the words to be comprehensible, carry
thought and weight, to be of use. Or it makes it appear that way, but
whatever, same thing.
I
like to do a lot of my stand up writing while I drink wine, I also
sometimes like to do some of my wine drinking while I write, so it
saves a lot of time to combine them anyway. Not usually the blogs or
scripts, or whatever else I’m piddling away at, they don’t seem
positively affected by a bottle of plonk, possibly because they have
a more rigid construct in my mind, possibly because I can never
remember what plot points I’ve created when I’m drunk. Who knows.
The mind is loosened, ideas flow with increased force, punchlines and
call backs appear out of no where, and vague narratives for longer
pieces flit into the brainspace. Makes me feel all useful.
I’ve
also found that wine makes an evening out on the tiles a lot funnier,
on the inside, but that’s another story. Rum has similar properties
to the product of the vineyard, it just costs more to get to the same
place and makes it all to easy to miss the turning and end up in
Wankered. Whiskey is another animal completely, sure, at first
everything seems alright, you want to chat and the topics are almost
unimportant, but after a while you’re screaming at some poor
bastard, eagerly and passionately taking the side of something that,
previously, meant nothing to you. Then you get cross. Then you fall
over and asleep. I suppose volume is an issue here, but I’m
ignoring it.
So,
booze is pretty good then, mostly. Yes – unless you are performing,
in front of a crowd of any capacity, at which point you start to
forget things, lose your composure, revert to ‘pissed twat’ mode
and start babbling. If you’re me. One glass of wine would be fine,
the problem is that at the exact moment you finish the last of that
one glass off, you have imbibed precisely the amount of wine that
makes you go, “I’ll just have another one.
That’s ok”. But it’s not. Idiot. Creative drinking: yes.
Performance drinking: no. Which brings me to what I suppose is my
point, if these things have to have points and can’t just be free
living, formless creatures that exist just to be: When drinking
socially, perhaps with a slant towards meeting new people, perhaps
people with breasts, is that not a performing environment? It’s not
really very creative, and I certainly feel like I want to be well
received. No pun intended. But, y’know, good reviews are good, no
matter what the environment, and throwing up into a skip while you
desperately try to regain control of your knees, well it isn’t. It
isn’t good. It’s just not
I
stopped drinking fairly early on the last time I went out. Partly as
an experiment and partly because I had started drinking fairly early
as well, because as we’ve established, I am a writer. If I’m
honest I stopped a little too early and without regular doses of
rocket fuel I flagged, my premature exhaustion aided by the fact that
all the water in my body was trying to escape from my every pore, but
I still had a good night. I danced, I laughed, I sweated, I danced, I
talked, I sweated, and I sweated. Crucially I didn’t make a cock of
myself in front of anyone – fancied or otherwise – didn’t eat a
burger the size of my head and didn’t feel dreadful for the
subsequent 48 hours. Lessons were theoretically learnt that night.
But for it to be properly scientific, I do need to compare those
results against statistics gleaned from a night of nauseating excess.
That’s how Einstein would do it. So on Saturday I shall attempt to
destroy my body with liquor, for the development of us as a species.
For science! Unless my mother is reading, in which case I’m
knitting some socks.
Basically,
I think I might soon be able to harness the true potential of
alcohol, and ride on it, like some sort of triple distilled, highly
flammable donkey. There must be a point at which the perfect state
becomes sustainable, if you can just stop in time and see it through.
The precise amount of confidence, the ability to dance, unhindered by
pretentious concern, the mental capacity to charm without leering. Or
at least to leer in a charming way, such that the leering goes mostly
unnoticed. Because that’s the dream, isn’t it, to remain
constantly drunk at just the right level, forever. Isn’t it? Yeah
it is. Shut up.
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