When you're in a relationship, the excitement dies off after about a year. Right then, you know whether you're going to make a go of it, or whether you're going to struggle on for another year, picking pointless fights before cheating on each other, swapping smoking gun STDs and eventually moving out. Now, I've decided I'm marrying Booze, but I fucking hate her friends. They don't love her like I love her, and we both want Booze to dump the other lot.
Booze comes with baggage: The black dog hasn't left my side since I was fourteen. When I wake up I feel guilty, regardless of whether or not I made a dick of myself last night (I did - I just don't know how yet). I don't know what it's like not to genuinely despise myself.
Don't feel sorry for me though. I despise everyone else, and most of all the people that ruin booze for me. Why do I hate them? Because they seem to be having such an unjustifiably good time. I'm the one that supports Wetherspoons in the hard times, Sunday at 10am. I'm the one that catches a cab to the off licence to make sure I get there before it shuts. Who are these fuckers pushing my pub buttons?
The Summer Drinker
These are the tanned bastards with the smiles on their faces. The people who say no to the third pint without looking like they've missed out on a Sure Thing. They order lager tops and bottles of white wine. They're happy. There is nothing more difficult for a proper drinker than to deal with someone who's content with their lot. It's a completely different mindset. I don't know if I loath them because they show me a lack of self-doubt I'll never know, or because I can't bear to be around people who tolerate existence basically sober, people who've missed the point utterly. I'd like to think I'm showing them the way life should be. I'd like to.
The Outside Drinker
I'm not a lizard. I don't long for the sun like I'm cold blooded. I understand coats. Despite this being England, which is basically cold for nine months of the year, there are people who get a wide-on for sweatiness. People who want to live their life like they're on Jamie and Louise Redknapp's beach breaks, cooking until they're charnel. For the two minutes they're not on a trashy beach in Turkey, offending decent people with their self-regarding hedonism, they're outside the pub introducing themselves with the line, 'Oh, I'm in TV. What do you do?'
The Weekend Couple
They only come to read the papers, and they take up an objectionable amount of space. They're light drinkers, functionless loved-up mass in the room. They've got nothing in common with the consistent booze user. Booze means eye contact and transitory illicit frisson followed by regret, but they came to the pub together, and they'll leave together. Worse still, leaving sober, because they read the paper from cover to cover, without raising a single objection to the weekend tat, taking a full hour and a full pint. A full pint that will taste like a rancid farm by the time they finish it. Maybe they'll pretend to really enjoy the locally-sourced sausages. The ones that don't taste like sausages people actually like, because they have too many herbs in them, included in the gastropub full English. This isn't existence, this is a fucking lifestyle with leisure options.
The Post-Work Friday Drinker
Booze is one of the few important things in life. For me, it goes: Eric Cantona, Phil Brown, Booze. I couldn't choose in which order. It's not something to share with people who don't matter. So why do people go for a drink with the people at work? From Monday AM - Friday PM, you loath those cunts and their zesty abuse of photocopier protocol. Don't let them ruin booze as well. There are a few ways this is going to go, none of them good. A) You'll shag someone you don't like. You can do that without having to see them every day thereafter. B) You'll try to shag someone you don't like and get turned down. You can do that without having to see them every day thereafter. C) You'll be honest. Do you think any of these is a good idea? Moreover, do you want to drink with someone who will abandon drinks with their friends to drink with you on a Friday? Imagine the state of their lives, their psychosis.
No good can come of this.
