[24] alcohol

My roommate J. and I got up early this morning (seven hours of sleep on a holiday weekend: not okay) to drive to a nearby city to watch a football game. Not, I will note, to watch the football game from inside the stadium, oh no. We drove to a nearby city to watch a football game at a bar. Useful.

The friends we were meeting drove in from Gone West on a party bus. I had never been on a party bus before, and I assumed it would be a full-sized bus of the Greyhound sort, but it was not. It looked like a retirement home bus - you know, the short white ones? I am also pretty sure I took an identical bus from Arusha to Nairobi once. 

Except on the inside this bus only had two benches along the sides, facing each other, with a bar at the back. Apparently party buses are the one exception to the open container rule.

We met the bus around 11:45 am, and they had been driving and drinking (not the driver) since 7 am. It might be the drunkest I've ever seen a person before noon. (Or... not. I retract that comment. I suddenly remembered the field in which I have been making a living for the last five years.)

Before things were over, one girl had been puking for over an hour, the cops had been called on one guy (he decamped to another bar before they arrived), and two couples seemed on the verge of breaking up. And that was just the people with whom we arrived.

I remembered why I really don't like drinking that much. 

Which is not to say that I drank much today, or that I didn't have fun. I did have fun watching the game and talking to people. I had to drive back to Universe City, so I had a drink and a half at the beginning of the game and then nothing more. Club soda and lime, baby.

It's just that watching other people drink themselves into oblivion looks miserable, and nothing I have experienced while drinking has ever made me feel differently about it. (I have a recovering alcoholic friend who says, when I say things like this, "Yes, and you aren't an alcoholic." Which is true. I recognize that there is frequently more going on than what I see, which is: excessive drinking is tedious.)

Not to mention the hangover, which one does not even have to think about if not drinking or only having one drink.