My best drinking story is that I had my last drink 14 years ago. ‘Nuf said.

My best drinking story is one told to me by my parents, because I don’t even remember it. See, it was actually my birthday party in which I got very drunk. Also, I was 2

So apparently these old boomers thought “Oh it’s only one tiny sip, she’ll be fine. doesn’t matter that she’s 2”, but they all had that same idea, and after a few “one tiny sips” I was one tiny drink toddler. Thanks mom and dad. Probably didn’t help my brain develop very well :/

Anyway, that’s the best drinking story I have because I don’t drink. Not even because of this; I just don’t much care for the taste or the feeling, so yeah

I was at a music festival, we were camped out across from a bunch of really obnoxious frat bro types. They weren’t causing any real issues and we were an decent terms with them as campsite neighbors, they were just really loud and obnoxious and had a different sort of energy than my group.

One guy in my campsite had one of the big 1 litre German boot glasses. Frat bros found out about this and wanted to give it a try, so we let them.

We watched them pour 2 12 oz PBRs into it (it will hold about 3), and fail to chug it.

I’m a pretty proficient chugger, so I decided to show them up. Filled the glass up with a considerably heavier beer, started to walk over to demonstrate how it’s done. As I’m walking out of our site though, it dawned on my already slightly innebrated brain that it had been a while since I’d chugged a litre, so I wanted to make sure I could still do it, so I downed a full test boot, immediately filled it back up, and walked over to demonstrate how it was done for our rowdy neighbors and executed the maneuver flawlessly.

So with 2 liters of beer in my stomach, I then went into my tent to have a little power-blackout to recharge my batteries for a night of debauchery.

I emerged from a blackout drunk sitting in a classroom; it was the last hour of the GRE (graduate record exam). I was reeking of alcohol and I remember feeling sorry for the poor bastards seated next to me. I finished and walked directly across the hallway to the bathroom and vomited a while.

I’d gone to a bar the night before for one dollar draft beer; I had $2, so 1 beer + tip. I don’t know exactly what happened but later heard people thought it would be funny to buy me drinks before the exam and I was too young/dumb not to accept.

The most bizarre part of the story is I scored a dead-average score on the exam.

So from ages 16 to about 22, I was the guy who would get blackout drunk and into wacky situations. This is one of them.

I had just moved to a little town in Ontario with some buddies from BC. We moved into our apartment on Halloween, and one of said buddy’s cousins was having a party. I tossed on my army jacket, put some blue hair gel on my head, deemed myself a punk and headed out with my 26 of Jamieson in tow.

The last thing I remember was telling the host “Nah, I don’t need a cup or chase, I’ll just keep drinking from the bottle.” Things got hazy, then suddenly I was in a holding cell.

Let’s take a step back for a moment. This wasn’t my first time inside a holding cell - but this was literally my first night as a resident of this place. I had only a vague sense of where my place was relative to the rest of the town. I did not memorize the address. I had no family or support network there, other than my two friends. And I had exactly zero knowledge of the journey from the party to the cell.

So naturally, I start screaming, asking why I was there and what I did, trying to squeeze through the bars, etc. etc. Cop comes by, says “If you don’t know why you’re here, that’s why you’re here. Just get some sleep and we’ll talk in the morning”. Still freaking out but recognizing there wasn’t much I could do, I passed out on the slab.

In the morning, the cops got me out of the cell, and explained that I had passed out on someone’s lawn on what I learned was the other side of town from the party. When they picked me up, I apparently told them I had no fixed address, and they took me in. As I was apparently very cooperative they handed me a ticket and sent me on my way.

So there I was - it’s about 7:00 AM on November 1st. I had blue-smeared, slept-on-a-concrete slab matted hair, I was in that nasty ‘still drunk but also hungover’ pocket, outside of a cop station with still no idea where I was relative to my place. So I just start walking.

Eventually, I make it to the centre of town. I notice a big gathering of people and stumble over to see what it was. Some guy sees me, and hands me a protest sign. After a few minutes, I realize it’s an anti-New World Order protest of some kind. I look around for some place to drop the sign, and see a sudden flash. Someone took my picture - and the dude was wearing one of those press passes around his neck.

My second day in town, and there was me - haggered, literal gutterpunk looking ass holding a protest sign at an unhinged protest, with a picture taken for the local newspaper. Neat.

Eventually I find my house. I walk in, and my buddies are like “Holy shit, what the fuck happened?”. Apparently, I got so drunk I fell off the porch and was just generally being a fool, and got kicked out of the party. These guys then took me to try and get some pizza in me at some place. At a certain point, I just dropped my piece on the floor, left the building, and the rest is history.

I don’t talk to those guys anymore. I don’t drink whiskey from the bottle anymore either.

What’s funny to me is that this isn’t even my first unhinged drinking story from that place - I found myself on the wrong end of a 12 v. 3 brawl at a chain pizza restaurant over someone calling my buddy a chicken nugget, the day we went to sign our lease - but that’s a tale for another day.

Weed’s soooo much better, kids.

Well here’s my worst: I relapsed after having dropped my tolerance and the EMTs scraped me out of a ditch and took me to my job, although thank God I don’t work in the ED. Apparently I said something to the effect of “just let me die” which wound up getting me a babysitter (suicidaldrunksitter?) and wound up having to talk to a pgy-2 who very clearly (and nervously) recognized me. Fortunately my hospital is relatively with it on the evidence-based-practice even in behavioral health so he knew to wait until I was sober again to do a full assessment, because that would’ve been a whole week down the drain in grippy sock jail.

When I was eight my family went to this BIG party at another family’s house. They had these racks of pop/soda that were kind of big bottles to me at the time…probably 16 oz. Many flavors and my favorite was root beer. I was stupid enough to drink two bottles which was enough to make me puke.

Yes, at 8 I went to a house party, drank too much root beer and puked. I cannot imagine what others at the party thought of that.
You would think I had learned my lesson but I did the same thing at the same house party the next year.

All of which was just practice for drinking actual beer in college…and beyond.
I did finally learn my lesson in my 40s and stopped drinking alcohol. And root beer.

I apparently scaled a parking garage, climbed in at the third story and peed against a car when my concerned friends came to get me. I have no recollection of the actual climbing or peeing. This was back when I was about 16 years old and just old enough to be drinking lots and lots of beer…

Oh and I ate a full bowl of ‘mon cheri’ chocolates while watching TV when I was about 4 or 5 years old which made me very very drunk, when my parents went skiing while thinking I was asleep.

Parents and grandparents always offered me and my siblings sips of whatever drink they were having. Always tasted nasty.

Then as we hit adulthood we realized that booze tastes great, they just always bought absolute trash wine and Coors.

Late edit to wrap up the story: now, we get to pick the wine for gatherings.

One time I was at a work buddies place after a party when things were cooling off.

The poor guy was born with spinal bifida, so had ‘seen more operations than you’ve had hot dinners’, sort of thing… He showed me the scars up his back which was from multiple attempts to improve his spinal alignment as he grew, and it was like a whole lot of ladders, cris-crossing up either side of his vertebrae. It was at that point I got really queasy, which may have been brewing for a while?

So he handed me this big glass vase in case I threw and we waited by the bench for a few minutes. I remember tucking it under my chin and holding it in my hand and looking at the floor…

I came to on the floor, surrounded by broken glass with a cut across the bone between my left eye and temple. He saw me when I fainted, falling and had the presence of mind to grab my hand as I fell, so I twisted and dropped it sideways. I still don’t know if that line occurred to him afterwards or not.

I spent the next week or pretending to myself I’d been in a knife fight or something equally lame, but it was all rather fortunate, really (being a 20y/o douchebag and all).

I still wonder how that dudes doing, he was neat…

Back in my first year of university, we went on a three day trip to London. The trip itself was a yearly tradition for the History department and everyone in the freshman year went.

An urban legend had been spreading of a student who got so drunk on absinthe that he was caught in the bathroom at 4AM writing messages in his own shit on the walls and mirror. My university almost got barred from that particular hostel.

Several years after graduation, I meet somebody who studied at the same university and did the exact same degree as me, but five years prior. It happened during his year and he slept in the bunk next to the guy who did it.

At first I was about to scroll to the next topic because this doesn’t apply to me, I’ve never drank in my life. But then I thought, “Hey I could live vicariously through you guys for a minute on this typical socially-bereft lonely Saturday night. I shall read these stories.”

While drinking at night with my buddy and his friend they decided it would be fun to start punching each other. No I’m not kidding they weren’t even fighting or anything just typical young adult male macho bs just wanted to see who could take more punishment. They tried getting me in on it lol nah no thanks. Had to hold my buddy up as we drunkenly wobbled home.

I met my friends playing EVE online and if I have soul mates they are a bunch of overweight neck beards and one gimp with cerebral palsy.

Fast-forward 10 years we don’t play EVE but we still drink and take vacations together and away from kids/spouse/responsibility.

We decided that a fishing trip is in order but this time freshwater not salt or deep sea. We all fly to Tahoe for a fun week.

2 days in and I get a call from my partner and we have a really shitty connection because it’s still the dark ages of 2g. They let me know that they are buying a car… I’m like WTF can’t it wait until I get home from vacation… Nope Mother in law wants to get her child a gift so either they buy the car that day or no car.

At this point I’m thinking “guess we spent to much on a wedding because clearly my marriage is over” but thankfully the frustrations of trying to calmly and logically explain why this violates the boundary of the marriage is lost to the frustration of AT&T 2g. Partner gives up turns off the phone and I go inside assuming I just got signed up for years of maintenance and insurance on a vehicle I had no say in… So it’s drinking time.

We have a charter for the afternoon. We decided to fill the cooler. This is not your normal cooler this is one that could double as a coffin or maybe a refrigerator. If it was all Indiana Jones had in the Crystal skull he probably would have still survived the nuclear blast in it. This sucker is so huge we probably put 10 cases of beer and then filled the rest with ice.

We show up at the dock with our 8 ft long cooler and the deck hand and captain look at it and say “we have a cooler on the boat you don’t need to bring that”. To which we replied that the cooler was for the beer not the fish. We open the lid to show them and you would think that The Golden light from the suitcase in pulp fiction illuminated our stash of booze from inside of this cooler. The captain in the deckhand immediately knew what kind of charter this was going to be.

As we’re loading onto the boat they’re telling us the horror story of the family charter before us that caught nothing and had Karen on board. She apparently could find no joy and no fulfillment in her experience and for her child. When we opened that cooler the captain and the deckhand knew that fish or no fish the journey was the experience.

Cooler in place, gimpy friend with cerebral palsy carefully moved onto the boat, the first beer cracks and then the second and then the third and by the time most of us are starting our fourth beer we cast off from the dock.

It doesn’t take long until we find a halfway decent spot to fish and the first trout comes out of the water it’s immediately cleaned and eaten raw washed down by more beer. Fishing continues drinking continues as we’re nearing the end of the day. The sun is starting to set over the mountains the idyllic scene is coming to an end. We have at this time consumed about half of the beer that we brought and most of us have no idea what sea legs are.

On a whim the captain suggests that we find deeper water and see if we can catch anything different and he tells us a fishing tail of a Mackinaw they’ve been hunting. Since this white whale sounds right up our alley and again we’re there for the journey we reel in all of our lines and switch out the weights for heavier duty and deeper waters. Whatever God smiled on us from inside the cooler shine down again on the crystal clear waters of lake Tahoe. Our gimpy friend, the one with cerebral palsy, might as well be a good luck charm as he always seems to catch the best fish. His poll starts to wiggle, he sets the hook, and promptly loses all of his strength. One of my friends grabs him in a giant bear hug and holds him while he reels in this fish from over 150 ft below us in the depths. The Mackinaw comes up and flashes silver as it breaks the water, it’s swim bladder expanding and the fish in shock. Suddenly the line goes slack and the hook falls out.

The captain seeing what has happened immediately calls out “pull the lines” our years of drunken EVE combat has prepared us for this very moment, instantly the entire boat goes from relaxed jovial laughing and very very drunk to sober and 100% business. All of the lines are reeled in The captain goes full throttle swinging the boat around while the deckhand scrambles to get a net and catch this Mackinaw before it can recover from its shock. As the boat slows in the engine is cut the deckhand leaps over to the bow barely holding on and scoops this mythical Mackinaw out of the water.

There’s no moment of celebration there’s just quiet repose. When the captain and deckhand look at these middle-aged fat neck beards with their friend who has cerebral palsy. They realize what has just happened and that this random boatload of weirdos and nerds followed orders, sobered up and did exactly what was needed to win.

At this point the charter is over but the journey has more to go they take their time getting back to the dock while we quietly celebrate. All the fish is cleaned and what’s left of the beer is pushed to the side. We return to our cabin, we fire up the grill, and the Mackinaw takes its place of honor as first onto the grill and first to be eaten.

Drinking copious amounts and using a vape pen do not make for a good combo. I wound up under the table being violently ill during a game night and everyone was dutifully ignoring me.