Gabrielle #11 – Project Mayhem

In which the menace becomes addicted to sobriety.

I took this at Glastonbury in, I want to say, 2017?

If you tend towards extremes in indulgence, you will tend towards extremes in abstinence. Any moron could tell you this, probably, but it's the sort of thing you have to find out for yourself. You can spend so long stewing in the consequences of your actions that drinking, snorting, fucking, whatever it is that's causing you grief, loses all shades of nuance. A half pint might as well be a drop of arsenic as far as its impact on your life is concerned, because a drink isn’t a drink anymore. It’s disaster. Same goes for sex, or whatever. Like a face in a fever dream, it rearranges itself from a benign presence into a malevolent force. Something once firm flips into a nebulous, but very threatening, bad thing. Follow that logic far enough and not doing the thing becomes a substitute for doing the thing. You are sober. You are a good person. You go to the gym and stay in most nights watching documentaries about Russian prison tattoos and avoid, avoid, avoid. 

And it works for a while. You feel in control. You are like, look how good I’m being. Surely, no one has ever been this well behaved in the history of human existence. I should draft a formal request to the Vatican for sainthood. This is – again fairly obviously but requires a rite of passage to be understood – unsustainable. After a while you start to feel washed out. Incomplete. You are a puzzle with all the edges deliberately removed from the box. You are a slingshot being pulled further and further back. You are trying to hold your breath underwater until you panic and burst, gasping, through the surface. In your mind there is only good behaviour (not doing the stuff you want to do, loads) and bad behaviour (doing the stuff you want to do, loads). There is no such thing as normal behaviour (doing some of the stuff you want to do, a bit). In your mind, it’s drowning or oxygen. You failed at not doing, so you embrace being the villain. You are very stupid.

This is different from dependency, you understand. I’m talking more about the thought process of your garden variety pissheads, your pains in the arse, your people with low impulse control, a massive ego, and a small army of insecurities. People like me. This is also a roundabout way of saying that I had a martini the other day and it was so immense it may have ejected me from a depressive episode. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The thing about getting drunk is it’s really funny. It was funny when I was a teenager, inventing elaborate schemes to get served at the Spar just to sit in a park and watch my friends kick each other in the nuts. It was funny when I was at uni, working at a chain bar that had a vodka luge on special occasions (Thursdays), its own line of thongs, and where I once watched someone off Skins fall down the stairs dressed like Stewie Griffin. It was definitely funny when I worked at VICE, and it's still funny now that I don't do it anymore. My mental health is kept afloat largely by a podcast hosted by the guys from Workaholics, in which they ironically drink BuzzBalls – a deeply evil liquid – and tell stories about tying one on and waking up in someone’s barn in the Ozarks.

Drinking takes on an even more feral dimension if you’re from the UK, where life is so frustrating and unmagical you learn to find comedy in the abject. It’s why every half-decent night out involves at least two of the anecdotes currently being used in a devastatingly counter effective anti-drinking campaign (“spent £100 on shots for people I didn’t even know” etc, alright legend). It’s why this photograph remains one of the most beautiful works of modern art. It’s why we’re so good at football chants. 

The kind of drunken excess you see here is partly a byproduct of limitations, both structural (11pm curfew for pubs, 6pm curfew for everything else, choice of two pathways: inner-city grind until your heart explodes or suburban death by nuclear family) and spiritual (epidemic of fugly interiors). But I fear none of that would change even if councils valued culture and nightlife, or the government was interested in building a society that revolved around anything besides money laundering. All the lingering effects of our feudal history could dissolve within a week, and we would still be a population of stunted genies who only come out of the lamp after three Madris and a bump.

The better you are at drinking, the funnier it becomes. By the same token, the better you are at drinking, the shorter its shelf life is. At some point you either call it quits and say it was good while it lasted, or you keep going at the same speed until it becomes extremely not funny extremely quickly. A few of you have emailed me about this (reminder that I set up an email address where you can send me feedback, requests, confessionals – some of you have seriously weird issues, it’s awesome). It’s a common dichotomy: the oscillation between the euphoria of the sesh, the recovery period of guilt and shame, and the desire to do it all again. One reader described it as “the psychology of restriction vs mayhem,” which is a good way of putting it.

I’ve always craved extremes. I love getting fucked up and I’m class at it, which is a dreadful combination. My tolerance is high and all I ever want to do is throw my head back, listen to low bass at a high volume, and sit on someone’s lap. You don’t need to be steaming to do any of that, but it helps. For me, it was like putting blinkers on a horse. After exactly two and a half drinks, I would be off. No more of that exhausting thinking or self-awareness for me, thanks. An Iron Dome of banter would close over my brain and nothing could stop me from having the craic. Any bad vibes would simply bounce off me and become someone else’s problem. If something unpleasant happened, I found a way to shrug it off. If the venue closed, I found somewhere else to go.

I could never understand people who get upset (have normal if outsized emotional responses to things) when drinking. It felt nonsensical, like growing wings and complaining that your feet hurt. Being sad and using your brain – isn’t that what the rest of life is for? The evening is closing in. Grab it with both hands, idiots, don’t you know you’ll be yourself again soon?? In all my years of drinking, I can count the number of “bad nights” I’ve had on one hand – and one of them was at a psytrance party in Bristol, so there’s only so much that could be done.

Of course I can see now that I didn’t love getting licked as much as I loved feeling immortal. In the faded unreality, anything could happen, and it often did. It was an easy, always attainable fix for the lack of freedom I felt in every other aspect of my life. Hindsight is 20/20, but people don’t question things when they’re having fun, do they? I spent like 15 years stumbling in at dawn – eyeballs fizzing, head emptied out – and it never gave me anything other than a good laugh. Or, failing that, at least a good story.

Another from Glastonbury 2017. State of us. We hardly stand a chance.

When I stopped drinking last summer, the vibes were off. Everyone I know seemed to be in crisis. The last of new media was crumbling, like the Roman Empire for people who remember where they were when they downloaded LIVE.LOVE.A$AP. The last time I got properly drunk was at an “RIP VICE” party in a dilapidated boy’s club in East London filled with bad taxidermy and fire hazards. It was one of those nights where everyone was gagging for something to happen but the spark never caught. People milled about, talked shop, smoked cigs in the rain. A fittingly anti-climactic ending for company that had been flogging its own corpse for years, really. Though a large part of the trouble was that the building manager was there and insisted on playing his own music off an iPod on the first floor. I remember queuing for the toilet, grinding my teeth with a thousand-yard stare, while Leonard Cohen’s “Hurt” floated out of the speakers. A suicide note at the funeral. You have to laugh.

When I came to it was 6AM in a stranger’s kitchen. A bunch of lads I’ve never seen before were slumped on the couch, listening to a house mix on NTS and fussing over a huge cat that had been introduced to me earlier in the night as “Gaddafi.” They call this a textbook “moment of clarity.”

Now, about the martini.

I broke my sobriety streak in February during a trip to New York with my husband, who is one of those amazing people who always knows exactly when to go home. I had one vodka martini – dirty, obviously – and it hit like a certified banger you haven’t heard in years. I immediately started smoking and searching for bars in Google maps that were open later than the one we were already in, which was tailor-made for being loose: heavy red drapes, haze swirling in the glow of the table lamps, a woman on stage in a gold lamé gown singing Thai pop songs between drags on a Lost Mary. It would have been criminal not to have a drink in there. Same goes for the dive bar called Horses & Divorces where I sank two bottles of High Life reading The Lover by Marguerite Duras and then left my passport on the floor. I’ve done this a couple of times since – had one drink in a choice environment, just to see. I imagine this experiment would be more dubious if I hadn’t spent six months berating every aspect of my personality, but so far having a bit of wiggle room has yielded positive results.

Not drinking slaps. If you’ve never gone more than three months without drinking, I’d recommend it. You can learn a lot about yourself. Principally your capacity for self-discipline, which is the second most useful quality to have if you’re prone to feelings of depression and helplessness (the first is being able to drive). But you can take it too far and it becomes another way of beating yourself up, plus you won’t even have any stories to show for it. I’m reading Choke at the moment and one of the characters, who’s a sex addict, says: “Sobriety is okay enough. But someday I’d like to live a life based on doing good stuff instead of just not doing bad stuff.” It’s all very that.

Is it dubious to make life choices based on perceived “vibe shifts” and character dialogue from the guy who wrote Fight Club? Perhaps. But what else are you going to do? Nothing? Sit in your flat and go mental watching Adam Curtis documentaries? Therapy, forever?

A friend of mine has a mantra that I’ve stolen: “everything with intent.” It’s annoying, considering things all the time. It’s basically stop, look, and listen for over-30s, but you’d be hard pressed to find a better guiding principle. It’s the difference between oblivion and a vodka martini, at any rate.