Month: January 2012

Singing the mangy blues

My Fellow Inebriates,

Unless some bad shit has happened to you in the dating-and-mating department, Valentine’s Day signifies romance (or if you’re married like my mum, an excuse to gorge on chocolate). It’s hard not to catch the love bug, wafting as it does on social media, advertising, and television. Which means I’ve been looking around for Dolly.

I like Dolly; she’s a sweetheart, and she has a convenient bear fetish. Unfortunately there is a constant influx of new bears at this house, and she’s taken a liking to the newest.

We call him Fluffy, betraying not just a lack of imagination but a hint at the term “fluffer.” Yes, this comes from jealousy, but Fluffy is really, really fluffy. And Dolly likes that in a bear.

I found this out when I started sniffing around about her Valentine’s Day plans. Dolly came up with this chestnut: “I’m washing my hair.” I said her hair was perfect without washing, which it is. It is clown-red with just a few bald patches from the kids’ rug rethinks, to quote Martin Amis, and it’s never been barfed on. She said very pointedly, “I like the way my hair smells when it’s washed. Clean things smell good, LB.”

And then she indicated Fluffy, over in the corner, nonverbal as he has been since he arrived from my granny’s estate. She took a deep breath and smiled.

Because Fluffy smells like fabric softener. He used to live in Granny’s room where she chain-smoked until her last days. When relatives removed her belongings after she passed, they must have soaked him in Tide and Fleecy to remove the cigarette smell. I think these chemicals must have damaged his brain too, because he doesn’t communicate. He just watches TV or stares at the wall, his floral essence wafting throughout the room.

What a dangerous thing it was to suggest Fluffy smells a little feminine.

“At least he doesn’t smell like rancid sourdough starter, Cutty Sark and persecution,” she said.

We don’t even have any Cutty Sark. The cupboard is bare.

Got no liquor, got no company, got no girlfriend.

Oh wait—there is a bit of Malibu left.

My typing: giving my mother’s life meaning

My Fellow Inebriates,

My mum was doing storytime with the kids tonight and ducked out to fill up their water cups. When she came back, they were in bed together eldest reading to youngest, all by themselves.

This is a breakthrough for my mother, who likes to conserve her parenting energy. With a literate six-year-old so much is possible…Miss P can read her own stories, choose her own videos on YouTube, determine her own cold medicine dosages, find wine bottles for yours truly—the list goes on and on.

Not that my mother dislikes reading. She loves reading (just not out loud, or kids’ books, or when she could be on Facebook).

She didn’t say she was sad they were becoming independent. But I think she was a little. And perhaps a little regretful about not having read quite enough to the kids.

I urged her to have a drink—to celebrate P’s reading, and to dampen that still distant but fast-approaching feeling of not being needed.

She said of course she felt needed. “Who the hell is going to do your bloody typing, LB?”

How safe is that drink? Lift-off drinks…and their scary side

My Fellow Inebriates,

My dad drinks rocket-fuel coffee for breakfast. I’m talking five espresso shots in a mug with honey every morning, after which he asks himself if he should switch to decaf.

I usually miss this ritual because I don’t get up until later, but last night I didn’t manage to drag myself to bed and instead passed out on the couch, which made me easy prey for the kids, who pounced on me in the morning.

After an hour of their abuse I realized how exhausted I was—how mangy and straggly, how lacking in energy. My dad’s nuclear-strength coffee suddenly looked good, and what bear can resist honey?

Holy f&*#^*# crap, people!! What kind of voltage is my dad administering to himself? I needed a freaking defibrillator after drinking his coffee, and now I’m wondering if my dad isn’t secretly super-human.

Among all the mental fireworks, a lightbulb went off in my head—I could drink a lot more alcohol if I ingested caffeine along with it. With a caffeine boost I wouldn’t pass out so easily and I could take my alcoholism to a whole new level.

It’s not a new idea, of course. Combining uppers and downers is a way of life for many people, some of them deeply psychotic. A range of alcoholic products appeal to this niche market (as well as teenagers) by combining booze with ingredients such as caffeine, taurine, and guarana. Phusion Projects served up this magical combo for several years in its Four Loko product until it was banned in several states, prompting the company to rejig the recipe and ditch the stimulants. The FDA sent a warning letter to three other companies adding caffeine to booze, citing the beverages as a “public health concern.” Health Canada is even more emphatic about the dangers of combining alcohol and caffeine.

I feel deeply psychotic myself after sampling my dad’s coffee, and drinking alcohol strikes me as a natural curative. What’s the problem?

  • According to the FDA, “caffeine can mask some of the sensory cues individuals might normally rely on to determine their level of intoxication.” Cues such as passing out.
  • Teenagers comprise a huge market for energy drinks and gravitate naturally to the alcoholic variety when they’re loitering in the liquor store parking lot looking for someone to boot for them.
  • Last year 16 Canadians were hospitalized due to heart palpitations, seizures, and strokes brought on by energy drinks. Of the 79 adverse reaction reports filed, half were deemed serious and four life-threatening, plus there were two deaths. Nine cases involved alcohol, but which cases and what the impact of the combination was hasn’t been reported.
  • A Dalhousie University study shows that when students combine energy drinks and alcohol, they double their alcohol intake. Wow! That’s exactly the effect I was looking for when the lightbulb flashed this morning and my one or two neurons decided booze and stimulants were better than Fred and Ginger. Health Canada says no, LB, no!

It’s probably a good thing these combo drinks are off the market, because I would go ahead and drink them in massive quantities, and my little furry body would probably disintegrate.

Paul Chiasson, The Canadian Press

But in the certifiable absence of common sense, what’s to prevent me from buying some Red Bull and mixing it with alcohol? “Good taste,” says my mum, whose car window was once smashed by a hooligan who pitched a Red Bull at it from a moving vehicle. Pregnant and emotional, she stood wailing on the sidewalk beside the shattered glass, vowing hatred against Red Bull simply because the perp was long gone and she had no other target for her outrage.

Could I order the recipe at a bar?

It depends where you live. Some states have banned drinks like the Jägerbomb (Jägermeister and Red Bull), as have some areas of Australia. Canada classifies Red Bull, Monster, and Rockstar as foods and Jägermeister as alcohol, warning against the upper/downer mixture, but ultimately it’s up to the consumer—who usually turns out to be a young party animal whose cerebral cortex hasn’t developed the capacity for sober second thought. These are totally my people! But I don’t want to steer anybody toward bad choices. Personally, I don’t enjoy impulse control at all, so don’t heed my ideas. Here I defer to the government and advise picking either the energy drink or the booze.

You know which one I’ll pick.