Culture Catalogue: None for Me, Thank You
Oct. 22nd, 2025 01:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
genderjumperFor someone whose life has often been filled with alcoholics, poor coping mechanisms, and unlicensed pharmacists, I am actually rather terrible at recognizing when someone is under the influence, let alone has an addiction. I recently wrote here about how my fear of chemical dependence became my first step breaking away from the pitfalls of my family of origin, but it's been a recurring tension across many contexts throughout my life.
I literally grew up in bars. The two clearest things I was ever told about my mom's social life was that she had terrible stage fright and that she was a popular bartender. She met my father at a bar. She met my stepfather at a bar. She met my adopted grandparents at a bar (okay, technically that one was a "private club"). She stopped bartending less than a year before we started school, but she always kept her "vino" around to drink in the evenings. She also smoked Carlton 120s and couldn't function most mornings until she'd had her coffee. She cut back some when she kicked out my stepdad (years after I'd left home), but still met all her friends and boyfriends at the same bar. For all her commuting between a half-dozen or more Lancaster bars in my youth, she's only really been back to the one that is still white-owned, -operated, and -frequented. After her first serious boyfriend died around 2012, she seemed to start drinking again, but it was only after she started partying with Elvis impersonators this year that I had the pleasure of bailing her out of jail and picking her up from the drunk tank.
For my stepdad, it was beer and Marlboro 100s. They both favored Coors Light, but when money was tight he settled for Keystone. One night, when I was 15 or 16, he came home late and parked his 1970-something van on the curb and fell asleep in the driver's seat; swearing the next morning that he wasn't drunk, just tired, and maybe that was true. He only stopped keeping a beer in a coozy between his legs when open container laws became a thing. He, too, depended on coffee to wake up, and there was something profound about the way he would sit first thing in the morning: leaning his chin on his fists, nursing a mug at the dining table in the dark. He was always a little angry (except when he was jovial), always a little ragged, always a little sharp. Who could tell his intoxication levels compared to baseline? Not me. He once claimed he'd tried every drug there was -- and that was before I knew he used to sell them. He smoked up with his buddies until my mom made him stop, but I didn't realize they were not like other cigarettes. He hurt himself and acquired some chronic pain before I left home; while I have no idea what other painkillers he might have been on for the freewheeling 90s, the final straw for my mom was when he got caught using and selling pot out of the garage.
I used to joke that everyone else in my family smoked, probably even the dog. The first time my brother picked up a cigarette (that I know of), we were at our babysitter's house and an older kid from down the street had a lighter. My brother searched the butts in the yard, found one that wasn't terribly bent, and asked the kid to light it for him. He may have been trying to smoke a filter, but he couldn't seem to wait. Then somewhere around 8th grade, he was taking the hottest, steamiest shower ever and I thought I smelled something sweet coming from the bathroom. He became a daily smoker in high school and possibly drinker, too, but we'd go months at a time without seeing each other after he got kicked out of school. The year before I moved home, he drove me to San Antonio for my birthday. We ended up mostly leering at the performing bartenders at a Coyote Branded bar on the Riverwalk, but they refused to let me take my free birthday prize -- a body shot off one of the bartenders -- with Coca-Cola.
I had lots of other friends who dabbled in middle and high school. Smokers, mostly, or maybe social drinkers. My best friend from 8th grade once said he'd been huffing highlighters, but he was as flippant as he was focused so I could have just missed the joke. Most of the people close to me couldn't afford to buy anything themselves.
My first girlfriend in 7th grade had a mom who was addicted to crack and would often sell off their belongings. My first 8th grade "girlfriend" (they're nonbinary, we now know) shocked me on the way to Six Flags by lighting a cigarette on behalf of their ersatz stepfather. My high school sweetheart claimed to have been addicted to Aleve before we dated but never went into detail (she later went through so many antidepressants and antipsychotics that she lost the specific memories of our time together, just reappearing every few years on vibes). The person I "lost my virginity" with drank when I wasn't around, had a kitchen that smelled overrun with chemicals (she did live in a pool house), and popped St. John's Wort enough that I became afraid of it, too.
I won a preview copy of The Brothers McMullen on VHS after entering a raffle at a fundraiser for someone's friend with cancer. I later learned they'd had to scramble for it when they found out a teenager had won it, because my prize was supposed to be a case of beer. A later night, I took my friend to an 18+ bar and he got wasted getting free drinks from an older woman. I made him walk up the stairs of the parking garage, possibly in retaliation for having to answer, "Was she hot?" over and over again. And since I didn't drink, I'd only go to stripclubs that were BYOB and all-nude (don't get excited, it only happened twice); we tried to take IBC Root Beers in to rent a BYOB tub, but they made you drink their sodas instead. For fundraisers in high school band, we worked concessions at the Ballpark in Arlington; once you were 18 you could be entrusted to serve alcohol under the supervision of certified parents. As a successful student, DARE asked me to come speak to elementary school kids along with a cop; I was white and nerdy and knew these mostly Black and Latino kids had no reason to want to be like me, but what I remember most is the cop telling us before we went in, "If they ask you if you've ever drank or taken drugs, be sure to say you never have. And if have, lie." My first year of college, I acted in a police training video, wherein I sprayed a group of younger teens with actual cans of beer. I, of course, was committed to the bit, but my costars were just there for the gig and told me I was "lucky" because I could easily steal sips of the warm, skunky Budweiser.
My college sweetheart presented a challenge; not only was she completely unfazed by her parents' enthusiastically high-proof cocktail hour every night, but she balked at my strict abstinence. Her mom also encouraged her to take St. John's Wort, but I'm not sure how long it was a thing. She got drunk with her high school friends when we spent our first New Year's apart. No one believed me when I said I could taste the cooking sherry in her mom's spaghetti sauce. After we moved to D.C. together, we'd have CONVERSATIONS about whether she could keep a bottle of wine sitting in our dining room (a wine rack, no less, built into a larger serving hutch I had helped pick) or serve alcohol to others (at the implosive Halloween party that kicked off my quarter-life crisis). This was the peak era when I felt like there was something wrong with me for not drinking; though I relaxed about her drinking over time, I still never budged about my own. I liked going to parties, but since no one ever took me up on my offers to be designated driver I learned to read the crowd by volume. Could I tell you whether an individual person was drunk at any given moment? Almost certainly not. But I could tell you when the party was most relaxed, most talkative, most fun, and was the first to notice if the loudness crept past some constant line where conversations ceased to cohere and the risk of fights or messy bathrooms increased exponentially. At that moment, I'd look at my college sweetheart and she (who'd graciously kept it to one, maybe two) would look at me, and we'd start saying our goodbyes. After broke up, I left DC and she returned to NYC, and she got to live the drinking life she'd always wanted. It would not be the first time I'd feel some kind of way about someone who was happy to hold back in my presence but then seemed to let loose as soon as I was gone. She's admitted to it getting out of hand a time or two, but her baseline is pretty close to her parents' and she sees nothing wrong with that.
When I got back to Texas, I made some friends who drank more like connoisseurs; they'd all met as UU Pagans and seemed to value erudite sips of mead or some such over getting hammered quickly. Hardly anyone ever noticed that I didn't drink, and skipping the joint they'd pass around just meant more for them. Drinking was a bigger thing when I worked at the haunted house; the final party we had at the leaders' lakehouse, the wife was visibly -- to me, which is saying something -- plastered, and kind of gawked at me between unsolicited flirtations. That old dating partner from 8th grade and I also finally figured out how to be friends when their close friend got trashed while hosting a big fundraiser for breast cancer research; we took turns watching her all night.
Then there was the karaoke scene. Rockstar Karaoke -- with a live band, the first in Dallas -- played in a variety of bars and tested their own tolerances with how many hot college girls would get plastered and butcher classic songs in front of a couple hundred people. I got very chill about being around drinkers, whether I knew them or not, but I also worked out my longstanding fascination with one-night-stands: despite being kind of hot shit at the time, it never happened for me. People speculated it was because I didn't drink and that made me less trustworthy, but I eventually noticed how many hookups could be tied to drinking and low self-esteem. I got drunk-kissed several times, but I never pursued the matter because I was seeking adventure and connection rather than distraction. Well, I say that. Three times, I almost hooked up with someone but something always intervened: one person I drove home, but she was wasted and reminded me of my high school sweetheart and I didn't want to dehumanize her by conflating her with someone else. Another person was in my car before we realized that neither of us could host; she arranged to get dropped off at a friend's house. The third person gave me her number because I had to drive a friend home; then I almost immediately lost the number and had to seek her out on MySpace; then she revealed that she'd been in a fight with her boyfriend and was trying to make him jealous, but things seemed better and she was going to try to work it out.
Unlike my college sweetheart, most (though not all) of my early dating partners back in Texas seemed happy to drink less when I was around. I even dated my first fellow teetotaller. But a recurring pattern did emerge: people who would drink very little or none while they dated me, even enthusiastically, only to start being very public about the amount they drank on social media once we broke up. I did date a lot of people on some spectrum of hedonism over the next ten years, though, and had to make peace with lovers and friends who were potheads, lushes, and even a bartender or two. I considered sipping champagne when I played "best man" to my "best friend"'s wedding, but no one brought it up and I only had water within reach during my toast. He later became a cop who needed a drink every night when he got home; that's not why we're not friends any more, but it didn't help.
There are more stories, but they start getting too contemporary so I think I'll stop there. With one notable exception, which I've written about elsewhere, from there it's mostly been a sociological observation: U.S. drinking culture from the 1980s through the Pre-COVID era.
I literally grew up in bars. The two clearest things I was ever told about my mom's social life was that she had terrible stage fright and that she was a popular bartender. She met my father at a bar. She met my stepfather at a bar. She met my adopted grandparents at a bar (okay, technically that one was a "private club"). She stopped bartending less than a year before we started school, but she always kept her "vino" around to drink in the evenings. She also smoked Carlton 120s and couldn't function most mornings until she'd had her coffee. She cut back some when she kicked out my stepdad (years after I'd left home), but still met all her friends and boyfriends at the same bar. For all her commuting between a half-dozen or more Lancaster bars in my youth, she's only really been back to the one that is still white-owned, -operated, and -frequented. After her first serious boyfriend died around 2012, she seemed to start drinking again, but it was only after she started partying with Elvis impersonators this year that I had the pleasure of bailing her out of jail and picking her up from the drunk tank.
For my stepdad, it was beer and Marlboro 100s. They both favored Coors Light, but when money was tight he settled for Keystone. One night, when I was 15 or 16, he came home late and parked his 1970-something van on the curb and fell asleep in the driver's seat; swearing the next morning that he wasn't drunk, just tired, and maybe that was true. He only stopped keeping a beer in a coozy between his legs when open container laws became a thing. He, too, depended on coffee to wake up, and there was something profound about the way he would sit first thing in the morning: leaning his chin on his fists, nursing a mug at the dining table in the dark. He was always a little angry (except when he was jovial), always a little ragged, always a little sharp. Who could tell his intoxication levels compared to baseline? Not me. He once claimed he'd tried every drug there was -- and that was before I knew he used to sell them. He smoked up with his buddies until my mom made him stop, but I didn't realize they were not like other cigarettes. He hurt himself and acquired some chronic pain before I left home; while I have no idea what other painkillers he might have been on for the freewheeling 90s, the final straw for my mom was when he got caught using and selling pot out of the garage.
I used to joke that everyone else in my family smoked, probably even the dog. The first time my brother picked up a cigarette (that I know of), we were at our babysitter's house and an older kid from down the street had a lighter. My brother searched the butts in the yard, found one that wasn't terribly bent, and asked the kid to light it for him. He may have been trying to smoke a filter, but he couldn't seem to wait. Then somewhere around 8th grade, he was taking the hottest, steamiest shower ever and I thought I smelled something sweet coming from the bathroom. He became a daily smoker in high school and possibly drinker, too, but we'd go months at a time without seeing each other after he got kicked out of school. The year before I moved home, he drove me to San Antonio for my birthday. We ended up mostly leering at the performing bartenders at a Coyote Branded bar on the Riverwalk, but they refused to let me take my free birthday prize -- a body shot off one of the bartenders -- with Coca-Cola.
I had lots of other friends who dabbled in middle and high school. Smokers, mostly, or maybe social drinkers. My best friend from 8th grade once said he'd been huffing highlighters, but he was as flippant as he was focused so I could have just missed the joke. Most of the people close to me couldn't afford to buy anything themselves.
My first girlfriend in 7th grade had a mom who was addicted to crack and would often sell off their belongings. My first 8th grade "girlfriend" (they're nonbinary, we now know) shocked me on the way to Six Flags by lighting a cigarette on behalf of their ersatz stepfather. My high school sweetheart claimed to have been addicted to Aleve before we dated but never went into detail (she later went through so many antidepressants and antipsychotics that she lost the specific memories of our time together, just reappearing every few years on vibes). The person I "lost my virginity" with drank when I wasn't around, had a kitchen that smelled overrun with chemicals (she did live in a pool house), and popped St. John's Wort enough that I became afraid of it, too.
I won a preview copy of The Brothers McMullen on VHS after entering a raffle at a fundraiser for someone's friend with cancer. I later learned they'd had to scramble for it when they found out a teenager had won it, because my prize was supposed to be a case of beer. A later night, I took my friend to an 18+ bar and he got wasted getting free drinks from an older woman. I made him walk up the stairs of the parking garage, possibly in retaliation for having to answer, "Was she hot?" over and over again. And since I didn't drink, I'd only go to stripclubs that were BYOB and all-nude (don't get excited, it only happened twice); we tried to take IBC Root Beers in to rent a BYOB tub, but they made you drink their sodas instead. For fundraisers in high school band, we worked concessions at the Ballpark in Arlington; once you were 18 you could be entrusted to serve alcohol under the supervision of certified parents. As a successful student, DARE asked me to come speak to elementary school kids along with a cop; I was white and nerdy and knew these mostly Black and Latino kids had no reason to want to be like me, but what I remember most is the cop telling us before we went in, "If they ask you if you've ever drank or taken drugs, be sure to say you never have. And if have, lie." My first year of college, I acted in a police training video, wherein I sprayed a group of younger teens with actual cans of beer. I, of course, was committed to the bit, but my costars were just there for the gig and told me I was "lucky" because I could easily steal sips of the warm, skunky Budweiser.
My college sweetheart presented a challenge; not only was she completely unfazed by her parents' enthusiastically high-proof cocktail hour every night, but she balked at my strict abstinence. Her mom also encouraged her to take St. John's Wort, but I'm not sure how long it was a thing. She got drunk with her high school friends when we spent our first New Year's apart. No one believed me when I said I could taste the cooking sherry in her mom's spaghetti sauce. After we moved to D.C. together, we'd have CONVERSATIONS about whether she could keep a bottle of wine sitting in our dining room (a wine rack, no less, built into a larger serving hutch I had helped pick) or serve alcohol to others (at the implosive Halloween party that kicked off my quarter-life crisis). This was the peak era when I felt like there was something wrong with me for not drinking; though I relaxed about her drinking over time, I still never budged about my own. I liked going to parties, but since no one ever took me up on my offers to be designated driver I learned to read the crowd by volume. Could I tell you whether an individual person was drunk at any given moment? Almost certainly not. But I could tell you when the party was most relaxed, most talkative, most fun, and was the first to notice if the loudness crept past some constant line where conversations ceased to cohere and the risk of fights or messy bathrooms increased exponentially. At that moment, I'd look at my college sweetheart and she (who'd graciously kept it to one, maybe two) would look at me, and we'd start saying our goodbyes. After broke up, I left DC and she returned to NYC, and she got to live the drinking life she'd always wanted. It would not be the first time I'd feel some kind of way about someone who was happy to hold back in my presence but then seemed to let loose as soon as I was gone. She's admitted to it getting out of hand a time or two, but her baseline is pretty close to her parents' and she sees nothing wrong with that.
When I got back to Texas, I made some friends who drank more like connoisseurs; they'd all met as UU Pagans and seemed to value erudite sips of mead or some such over getting hammered quickly. Hardly anyone ever noticed that I didn't drink, and skipping the joint they'd pass around just meant more for them. Drinking was a bigger thing when I worked at the haunted house; the final party we had at the leaders' lakehouse, the wife was visibly -- to me, which is saying something -- plastered, and kind of gawked at me between unsolicited flirtations. That old dating partner from 8th grade and I also finally figured out how to be friends when their close friend got trashed while hosting a big fundraiser for breast cancer research; we took turns watching her all night.
Then there was the karaoke scene. Rockstar Karaoke -- with a live band, the first in Dallas -- played in a variety of bars and tested their own tolerances with how many hot college girls would get plastered and butcher classic songs in front of a couple hundred people. I got very chill about being around drinkers, whether I knew them or not, but I also worked out my longstanding fascination with one-night-stands: despite being kind of hot shit at the time, it never happened for me. People speculated it was because I didn't drink and that made me less trustworthy, but I eventually noticed how many hookups could be tied to drinking and low self-esteem. I got drunk-kissed several times, but I never pursued the matter because I was seeking adventure and connection rather than distraction. Well, I say that. Three times, I almost hooked up with someone but something always intervened: one person I drove home, but she was wasted and reminded me of my high school sweetheart and I didn't want to dehumanize her by conflating her with someone else. Another person was in my car before we realized that neither of us could host; she arranged to get dropped off at a friend's house. The third person gave me her number because I had to drive a friend home; then I almost immediately lost the number and had to seek her out on MySpace; then she revealed that she'd been in a fight with her boyfriend and was trying to make him jealous, but things seemed better and she was going to try to work it out.
Unlike my college sweetheart, most (though not all) of my early dating partners back in Texas seemed happy to drink less when I was around. I even dated my first fellow teetotaller. But a recurring pattern did emerge: people who would drink very little or none while they dated me, even enthusiastically, only to start being very public about the amount they drank on social media once we broke up. I did date a lot of people on some spectrum of hedonism over the next ten years, though, and had to make peace with lovers and friends who were potheads, lushes, and even a bartender or two. I considered sipping champagne when I played "best man" to my "best friend"'s wedding, but no one brought it up and I only had water within reach during my toast. He later became a cop who needed a drink every night when he got home; that's not why we're not friends any more, but it didn't help.
There are more stories, but they start getting too contemporary so I think I'll stop there. With one notable exception, which I've written about elsewhere, from there it's mostly been a sociological observation: U.S. drinking culture from the 1980s through the Pre-COVID era.
no subject
Date: 2025-10-23 10:39 am (UTC)I am glad to only feel like I “need” a drink when I need a cheap, effective muscle relaxer, and even then I try stretching and breath work first. I guess, yay for coping mechanisms that are less hard on my liver and kidneys? And I’m glad you decided to try out other methods that work in your life than booze, pills, and cigarettes. It has made you more interesting, certainly, and possibly healthier as well.
no subject
Date: 2025-10-26 08:37 am (UTC)I am always a yay for coping mechanisms that are gentle on our bodies.
And I'm grateful you find me interesting. My life is better with you in it!
no subject
Date: 2025-11-29 07:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-11-29 10:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-11-29 11:34 pm (UTC)