stop drinking only water, and use a little wine because of your stomach and your frequent illnesses
I recently bought a t-shirt with the dates "1162 - 1227" written across the chest. These are the birth and death years of the founder of the Mongol Empire, Genghis Khan. Apart from the fact that I shouldn't really be wearing t-shirts at my current age, this seems like a very nerdy purchase, appropriate for a role-playing game enthusiast or the kind who frequents Renaissance Fayres. However, it was a totally random choice. Despite pretending that I wholeheartedly reject throw-away, consumer-junk, late-capitalist, American-crap culture, I find it difficult to be seen at a public event wearing the same t-shirt more than once. I had an event to attend; I thought this t-shirt was cute; it wasn't expensive. So I bought it.
I have no special interest in Genghis Khan, although I did recently see the movie Mongol with Asaph and his mother, who was visiting from Israel. It was a tad too long, but the battle scenes were exciting, and I enjoyed hearing the sound of the Mongolian language. Like Turkish and Swedish, Mongolian is one of those languages that would be nice to just play in the background, like music. I could lie on a couch and listen to people in the same room having conversations in Swedish or Turkish (or, now, Mongolian) for hours, although it might be difficult to arrange this, what with the fall in the value of the US dollar. Genghis Khan was played by a Japanese actor, so I assume that his voice was dubbed, unless they had Tadanobu Asano learn Mongolian for the role, and then passed off his accent as the way the Mongols talked back in 1162.
After seeing the movie, I researched Genghis Khan on the internet, since I like to check for historical inaccuracies. I came across this odd quote attributed to him:
If there is no means to prevent drunkenness, a man may become drunk thrice a month; if he oversteps this limit he makes himself guilty of a punishable offence. If he is drunk only twice a month, that is better — if only once, that is more praiseworthy. What could be better than that he should not drink at all? But where shall we find a man who never drinks? If, however, such a man is found, he deserves every respect.
I wonder if I get drunk thrice a month and am therefore guilty of a punishable offense? I'm sure any punishment meted out by Genghis Khan wouldn't be fun.
I have very mixed feelings about alcohol consumption, although, to be fair, I have very mixed feelings about pretty much everything. (Except for berries. I am unequivocally pro-berry. One of the saddest things I remember reading when I was doing internet research about the Khmer Rouge was learning that picking your own berries could lead to execution, since that was considered private enterprise.)
A boring variant of alcoholism runs in my family, so I have always compulsively monitored other people's drinking. Then, when I finally started drinking in my late 20's, I had to compulsively monitor my own drinking as well, which was and is exhausting. That being said, I find myself feeling suspicious of those who don't drink. As the humorist Julie Hecht, whose style I often attempt to copy, writes in one of her short stories:
Suddenly the bottles appeared. Some requested wine, others whiskey. The moment of asking for bottled water was coming up. People don't like the one who asks for water. There's always the split second when they wonder if you're a former alcoholic. They can't imagine any other reason for declining alcohol. For example, it's a drug and it causes a drugged feeling.
For many years I was afraid of having a drugged feeling, so I didn't drink. Also, I thought I was too good for drunkenness; I felt it was beneath me. But then I was about to turn 30, and I realized that life was meaningless, and that I was careening towards its inevitable end, so I started. So all of my throwing up from excessive alcohol use occurred not in high school or college, but while I was employed with my current employer. It's really shameful, although, to be fair, I have been working here for 10 years.
The variant of alcoholism that runs in my family is not the spectacular form that many non-heterosexual men and celebrities and non-heterosexual celebrities succumb to, with really messy scenes and running into traffic and waking up in other people's children's beds. It's the kind where those afflicted just drink every day and it seems somehow wrong, but there are only occasional upsetting incidents caused by the near-constant drugged feeling. How do you tell someone in their 80's that drinking is going to ruin them, when they've already had a pretty successful and fulfilling life? It seems a bit silly by then. Although I read that the Right Reverend Gene Robinson checked himself into a rehab center in early 2006, after deciding that he was relying too much on drinking wine to deal with the stress of being hated by the conservative members of the Anglican Communion, after his ordination as Bishop of New Hampshire. But I guess he was only 59 and also had to set an example of extreme virtue, to give that angry Nigerian bishop less ammunition.
I know that alcohol use and/or abuse wrecks a lot of lives. I stole a magazine from a friend's vacation house that had a profile of some writer in Arkansas who had stopped drinking at age 40 and had completely changed her life for the better. She was not afflicted with the boring form of alcoholism; she had many crazy stories. The article was accompanied by a list of questions to help you determine if you were also an alcoholic, so I cut that out to put on my refrigerator, next to a photo of young man with an Apollo's belt that I use to make myself feel bad for eating. But based on the list of questions, I couldn't imagine anyone was not an alcoholic, since they included: "can you drink more now than you could when you first started drinking?" and "do you ever regret anything you say or do when you drink?" and "do you enjoy drinking?" I did notice last Lent when I limited my alcohol consumption to up to two glasses of red wine on Saturdays and Sundays only (with a few days excepted, since you can't keep every day of a Christian fast, or you get too proud) that I said and did as many embarrassing things as ever, but I couldn't use drunkenness as an excuse, so in a way it was worse.
I know that many people are helped by 12-step, total-abstinence programs, although they have enormous failure rates. It's hard to imagine that our society couldn't come up with a better solution to this issue, but I guess we are good at not coming up with good solutions to problems.
But, then again, what's wrong with drinking to numb the pain of our miserable existence? Life can be awful. Some things are very hard to face with an unclouded eye, as I learned recently while attending a very crowded outdoor dance party held on a pier with no trash receptacles while as sober as a Muslim convert from Mormonism. I don't think I will have the strength to do that again, what with the sight of many men over 25 who were shirtless and smoking and sometimes also even chewing gum. Who can be expected to remain sober in such circumstances, even though I allowed myself the luxury of inappropriate attire for a man my age, in the form of gym shorts that were criticized by my Turkish friend, who comes from a good family?
Then there is the whole in vino veritas issue. One time I said to my therapist that I needed to stop drinking so that I could make sure I never say what I really think or feel, but this triggered a broader conversation.
One thing I have noticed is that non-heterosexual men who do not drink alcohol and who are not recovered alcoholics tend to be sexual compulsives.
Asaph doesn't really drink. But this is common among persons from the Middle East. I read in a travel book about Tel Aviv that it was a sign of the city's cultural sophistication that one rarely saw a drunk person on the street. Of course, one could easily say the same about Riyadh (الرياض, literally "gardens") or Baghdad or Tehran. I've argued before that interest in drinking alcohol declines the closer you get to the equator. If Muhammad had been born in Iceland, I imagine that Islamic law might be a bit different. My Arabic teacher reiterated how alcohol consumption is expressly forbidden in Islam the day we learned how to write the letter ح, which is another Arabic sound that is very difficult to pronounce (the Israelis pronounce their version of this letter -- ח -- as a "voiceless uvular fricative, due to European influence" as I read on the internet, and this is another of the millions of reasons why Israeli Hebrew is so much easier than Arabic, a voiceless uvular fricative being the sound you make to clear the skin of a popcorn kernel from the back of your throat, while ح is pronounced like the sound you make while suddenly being interrupted during Lamaze class). In any case, one of the example words we had for ح was حشيش, or "grass" but also "hashish", and my teacher, who I always assumed was extremely puritanical in all respects, stated that some Islamic scholars think that hashish consumption is not forbidden, although he made it clear that he had never even smelled the odor of hashish smoke. I wanted to say, "So Islam is like the Rastafari movement in this respect," but I knew that would only be seen as needless provocation, and as the Rastafari movement is a misunderstanding of Christianity, I could have started a discussion that I would have really regretted.
At the end of a recent visit with my parents in Ohio, I was riding to the airport with my mother and father, and my nephew Zack, who we brought along for added cuteness. We were discussing the fact that Munich had fallen from number one to number two on Monocle magazine's quality-of-life index. From the back seat, Zack yelled, "Munich?" My mother then explained, "It's a city far away in Germany, and your daddy has been there." Indeed, one of two times my brother crossed the Atlantic involved a visit to Munich, in 1987. Then my mother added, "They have a lot of beer there." "Do they have milk?" asked Zack, concerned.
Oh how the sweet innocence of his question pierced my heart! The purity that comes out of the mouth of babes and sucklings! Yes, poor Zack, they have milk! How could my mother have tainted his ears with talk of beer, that wicked beverage which befogs the mind?
Then again, Zack's father, my brother, my mother's son, is of such substantial presence that he could drink beer all day long without any evidence of intoxication. Also, German beer is delicious.
Damn alcohol! Damn mixed feelings!!
Berry?







