You meet them out there, in the quiet, desperate wasteland of modern dating. They’re a new and particularly resilient strain of the human animal. The ones with the clean cars and the clear eyes and a whole goddamn, beautifully curated museum of their own past traumas that they’re just dying to give you a tour of.
I was on a date the other night with one of them. A woman who was boring in a way that was almost a work of art. A masterpiece of mediocrity. She talked about her past problems with the quiet, detailed, and completely passionless precision of a goddamn accountant reading an audit report. An hour into this beautiful, ugly, and completely honest interrogation, I was ready to chew off my own leg to escape.
So I did the only gentlemanly thing a man in my position can do. I suggested we get a drink. A quiet, respectable, and completely necessary act of self-preservation.
And then she said it.
She looked at me, her face a perfect, beautiful, and completely fraudulent mask of gentle superiority, and she said, “I don’t need alcohol to have a good time.”
Christ. It wasn’t just a statement; it was a goddamn verdict. A quiet, polite, and completely soul-crushing judgment on my own beautiful, ugly, and completely necessary need for a little bit of social lubricant.
I just looked at her. I didn’t get angry. I didn’t get defensive. I just gave her the truth, a simple, beautiful, and completely honest little piece of it.
”You don’t need running shoes to run,” I told her, “but you wear them anyway.”
And in the quiet, beautiful, and completely uncomprehending silence that followed, I saw the whole goddamn story of our time.
They think it’s a virtue, a sign of a superior character, to be able to endure the quiet, grinding, and completely soul-crushing friction of human interaction without a little bit of help. They think they’re running a marathon barefoot, and they’re proud of their bloody, calloused feet. They don’t understand that the rest of us aren’t trying to prove a goddamn point; we’re just trying to get to the finish line without screaming.
The running shoes, the alcohol… they’re not a crutch. They’re a tool. A piece of technology. A beautiful, simple, and completely honest admission that the road is hard, and the journey is long, and a little bit of padding can make the whole goddamn thing a little more bearable.
And after nine years of my own quiet, respectable, and completely miserable sobriety, I can tell you this with the beautiful, ugly, and completely honest certainty of a man who has seen both sides of the goddamn desert:
No good story, not a single goddamn one that was worth telling, ever started with a man eating a salad.
No. A good story starts with a bad decision. A quiet, beautiful, and completely irrational “fuck it.” And that “fuck it” is almost always preceded by the simple, beautiful, and completely honest sound of a cork popping or a bottle cap hitting the floor.
”We were drinking…” That’s the “once upon a time” for every story that’s worth a damn. It’s the starting gun for the beautiful, ugly, and completely necessary chaos that we call a life.
So you can have your “good time.” You can have your quiet, respectable, and completely forgettable Tuesday night. You can have your clean, well-lit, and completely passionless conversation.
I’ll take the drink.
And I’ll take the story.
Because at the end of it all, when you’re lying on your deathbed, you’re not going to be counting the number of “good times” you had. You’re going to be counting the scars.
And a good scar always starts with a good drink.
