The Renaissance Man
Drinking Made Easy
by William Chelsea
Adulthood for most guys started when you either banged your first chick or sipped your first beer. Now, the Renaissance Man hasn't been sifting through your garbage or anything, but we'll hazard a guess that the beer came first. And more than likely, as the suds kept coming, the opening credits of your adulthood skipped a couple frames and you wound up fast-forwarded to the next morning with your face magic-markered and half your hair cut off. Pictures of swear words shaved out of your hairy ass probably even made the rounds on the Internet. We know your pain and humiliation. After all, we've drawn our share of Sharpie tattoos and buzzed our share of scalps in our day.
But now, in an unprecedented moment of maturity, it's time for the Renaissance Man to stand up for the little guy who, in his drunken unconsciousness, was duct taped to a dining chair and is unable to stand up for himself. It's the only right thing to do!
(And besides which, we lost a bet. Damn you, Sammy Sosa!)
What follows is our secret to staying sober in the face of alcoholic debauchery. So get that beer bong out of your mouth and pay attention. This might save you from accidentally bedding an ugly chick one day.
Pick Your Poison
Let's not beat around the bush here: alcohol is poisonous. But the thing that actually gets you drunk isn't so much the alcohol itself as it is the first byproduct of alcohol metabolism, a little chemical demon called acetaldehyde.
Alcohol is to acetaldehyde what pre-Federline, schoolgirl Britney Spears is to post-Federline, redneck Britney Spears: they both start off well but quickly go downhill after a few tweaks here and there.
After your liver converts alcohol to acetaldehyde, it further converts acetaldehyde into acetic acid, which is harmless. But if acetaldehyde begins to build up faster than your body can metabolize it and it overflows into your bloodstream, that's when drunkenness occurs.
Acetaldehyde puts the "toxic" in "intoxicated". It goes straight to your brain and messes with your nervous system, giving you that hung over feeling the next morning while your body continues to purge the backlog of acetaldehyde from the night before.
Eat, Drink, and Be Merry
So, the underlying key to staying sober enough to enjoy your friends' drunk-ass antics is to control the acetaldehyde content in your bloodstream, which you can do in variety of ways.
Before you start gulping down every fruity liquid in sight that has an umbrella in it, make sure you pad your stomach with a safety net of starchy foods like fries, bread, rice, or pasta. These things will help cut off the inevitable deluge of alcohol at the pass and absorb it harmlessly, Atkins be damned.
Alcohol is a diuretic, meaning that it will induce you to piss like an out-of-control firehose. Once you "break the seal" and take your first post-alcoholic whizz, you'll begin losing water and minerals faster than you can take them in. So in addition to food, also remember to take in generous amounts of regular, non-toxic drinks such as water, juice, or Gatorade (unlikely, we know, unless you're boozing it up at a Pacers-Pistons game). Otherwise, dehydration will be the bitchslap on top of the kick in the nuts of severe drunkenness.
Choose your hooch like you would choose your cooch: nothing too cheap and suspicious and nothing too... uh, red. Darker beverages have a multitude of other hangover-inspiring toxins that you'd want to avoid. Perhaps the worst of these drinks is red wine, an exclusive source of tyramine, which would be the ear chomp that accompanies the aforementioned bitchslap and kick in the nuts.
And lastly, try and pace yourself. Of course, how drunk you get depends on how big you are and your natural ability to process alcohol. However, on average, a human liver can successfully process about one beer every sixty minutes. So if you can accept being a called a pansy, stick to that ratio and you should come out at the end of the night as the last man standing. Girly man, perhaps, but the last standing nonetheless.
Assume the Crash Position
You're no boy scout; you're a bad muthafucka. We know this because you're reading Soak Magazine. And because you're as bad as you wanna be, we can also be pretty sure that you won't take too much of our wussy preventative advice. It's okay. Being a magazine columnist is a thankless job, we've come to grips with it. So, assuming that you've read up to here and yet still crawled home as drunk as Lindsay Lohan's dad, for the final part of our public service (and the last condition of our bet—damn you, Sammy Sosa!), the Renaissance Man also has a few tricks for post-partying damage control that we can share with you, you ungrateful bastard.
Really, there are only two things that a guy who's drunk out of his mind can take care of before passing out once and for all, and those are, again, at the risk of repeating ourselves: 1) drink something—water, juice, Gatorade—as long as it's non-alcoholic and you drink a lot of it. You'll be surprised by how much you'll hate this but do it anyway, dammit. You'll need to replenish your body's electrolytes and keep yourself hydrated.
And 2) take a couple of multivitamins, which you would have hopefully prepared somewhere handy in a fit of uncharacteristic forward planning. Avoid any and all other kinds of medicine, even your old standbys, Aspirin, Tylenol, and/or Advil. In case you've never heard of Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, or shit, even River Phoenix: drugs and alcohol can and often will be fatal. That includes your friendly neighborhood headache medicine.
Once you've covered these bases, take careful (wobbly) aim at your bed and try to drop your body into it. Chances are good that you'll miss like Shaq shooting a free throw, but who cares? You'll be gone before you hit the floor anyway.
The Morning After
Well, what else can we say? After what you put yourself through the previous night, you're lucky you didn't puke out your stomach lining and die in your sleep of internal hemorrhaging.
Probably the best advice the Renaissance Man can give you as you come down the home stretch is to take a couple of more multivitamins and eat whatever fruits or salad-type vegetables you might have lying around the house (although by "lying around" we don't mean like under the couch or something), and, again, drink lots of juice and Gatorade.
It also goes without saying that you should try to weasel out of work (if necessary) using whatever means necessary. Describe your vomit to the department secretary if you have to but stay home and stay in bed.
(Oh, now you're liking our advice, are you?)
Well, if you can follow all of the Renaissance Man's wisdom and not just that last paragraph, you'll soon find yourself on the road to recovery.
In time to do it all again next week, that is.
|
|
