Experimenting on foods.

[Zombie_61]

In The USA, this is a weekend of partying. Drinking, eating, dancing, and more drinking. As everyone could imagine, that translates to drunken violence. Which is cultural. People in The USA love to get drunk and fight. We're celebrating a battle which was fought in another country, in a war which they lost...​

For many Americans, yes, it is. Or, it is if they live anywhere near the U.S./Mexico border. And you're right, most Americans will take up any excuse to drink themselves into an unconscious mess...well, the Americans I've known, anyway. Except for myself--I've never really acquired a taste for booze. Just so no one misunderstands, I'm not a teetotaler or morally opposed to alcohol; normally, I'm just not in the mood for it and would rather have a good cup of coffee or a diet soft drink. And even on those occasions when I DO want an alcoholic beverage I'm usually in the "one and done" camp. Maybe "two and done" if the first one got good to me. But that's it. In fact, the last alcoholic beverage I drank was about a year before the last turn of the century; the very tail end of the 1900s. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

[Fifty150]

I'm not a teetotaler or morally opposed to alcohol; normally, I'm just not in the mood for it

A younger version of me drank heavily. It was a social activity. It was just what I did with friends. Go to a ball game, have a few beers. Go out to a night club, have a few drinks. There's a BBQ, have a few of whatever is available.. Finish classes for the day, beers in the parking lot. Go to dinner, there's wine. Go on a date, have some cocktails. Go fishing, there's always beer on the boat. Hunting trips always involved beer and hard liquor. I didn't just have one or two. I routinely drank a lot.

So what happened?

I didn't go to a program, or anything like that. No rock bottom moment, where I woke up in a foreign country with a girl I didn't know........ Actually, waking up in a foreign country with strange women did happen. More than once. It just wasn't a life changing or rock bottom moment where a light bulb went off.

The real story is just sad, and boring. My drinking buddies grew up without me. They married and had kids. Now activities involved their children. BBQs had juice boxes instead of 6 packs. They couldn't leave the kids at home to change their own diapers, so I had nobody to go to the bar with. We still went to ballgames........ little league games where there's no beer vendor. We still went hunting, but one of the guys thought that drunken target practice wasn't something that we should do in front of the children. Dinners at kid friendly restaurants didn't have great wine lists; so I wasn't about to waste money on bottles of cheap wine.​

That's my boring life story. I didn't find sobriety. It happened by accident.



But I'm still eating midnight noodles. One of my favorite midnight snacks. Instant noodles and eggs is what street hookers eat.

 

[Zombie_61]

A younger version of me drank heavily. It was a social activity. It was just what I did with friends...​

This was me after high school. Hanging out with "the guys" after work, downing liberal amounts of beer in an empty parking lot after sundown simply because we were all bored. Sometimes we'd go to see the new movie(s) that had just premiered, but mostly we just got together and talked for a few hours while we drank. Thinking back on it now it sounds rather boring, but it was our way of getting through life.

So what happened? My drinking buddies grew up without me. They married and had kids...​

This. Well, not quite; ONE drinking buddy got married before the rest of us. Don't know if they ever had kids, because not long after they got married they moved to another state, and if any of my idiot "friends" heard from them they didn't bother to tell me. Some time after that, I was the drinking buddy that grew up. Met the woman who would become my wife, stopped hanging out with "the guys" and spent most of my time with her. We said our "I do's" about a year-and-a-half after that; she was 21, I was 20. And we spent nearly 41 years together as husband and wife. She started having problems with her memory more than a few years before, was eventually diagnosed with "Early Onset Alzheimer's Disease", and she died 11 weeks before what would have been our 41st Anniversary. Ain't life grand?