Days Without Alcohol 19
With my new found obsession with alcoholic abstinence I have started to notice the booze casualties in the everyday world who I would otherwise have ignored. I see old, lonely men with gnarled, beetroot coloured faces and sad eyes walking down the street towards me. I wonder if am looking into my own future and then I wonder how much older than me these guys really are.
Today I was on a bus at about 7pm and there was a woman of about 30 sleeping across two or three pull down seats near the front. She was snorting and snoring and pissed off her face, with a not insubstantial beer gut peeking out from under her T-shirt. I wondered, in fact, if she might be pregnant, but one would hope not given the state of her. There were damp patches around the crotch of her track suit bottoms. In a packed bus it was massively unpleasant for everyone else to have to stand and be near her, and also very sad. She didn't look like she was homeless and nor did she appear to be an office worker who had overdone it after knocking off early on a Friday afternoon. But when you get into this kind of state, then clearly alcohol is a problem.
Of course four hours later and she would have fitted in just fine with the lunatics shouting and spewing and jumping out at strangers (I passed the same spot that happened this afternoon and there was a poster right beside where I had been standing warning people not to get into fights due to alcohol - how ironic if the burly woman had smashed the idiots head right into that), but being passed out on a bus, having pissed yourself whilst people are just trying to get home after work - it's probably time to take a look at the way your life is going.
This all sounds sanctimonious I know, but I suppose I am just trying to make the point that we tend to ignore these consequences of our drink-based culture and also to live in an imaginary protective bubble, thinking it's never going to happen to us. I kind of assume I am never going to be one of the purple faced men with a WC Fields nose and nothing in my life but a can of beer and some urine soaked sweat pants, but it wouldn't take much to push me into drinking enough for that to happen. I still think I am 20 in my head and thus impervious to the ravaging effects of booze, but being sober and suddenly noticing this vast underclass who someone slip between the cracks when I am not paying attention.... well it's almost enough to make me turn to drink!
