There's a beer bottle at the back of the fridge. It's been settling there, cold and lonely, for the best part of the past eleven days. Sitting there.
Preying upon my mind.
You see, I'm worried about this. I'm worried that perhaps this bottle could in fact be the one drink that tips me over the line into alcoholism. I've heard such things spoken of. I've heard that it can and sometimes does happen that way - or at least, that we can't and sometimes don't be sure that it doesn't.
I have a crackpot theory on alcohol, if you're interested. I believe that alcohol is in some sense a living substance. Not that it consumes, excretes, and self-replicates, or even that it has thoughts and feelings of its own. No. Not like that, not quite. But it is a living substance in some sense: it has sentience, or it can have. It acquires sentience. From us.
Alcohol is a psychic, psychoreactive fluid that remains inert, totally unknowing and insensate, as long as it is in the bottle. But then it gets out, and something odd happens: when we drink alcohol, we get drunk. But the opposite happens to the alcohol: when it enters our body, it gets us. As it dilutes into our bloodstream, suffuses our tissues and spreads out across the electric web of our nerves, it comes alive with us, it takes on some portion of our sentience as its own. It has no personality, at least, none of its own. Certainly not to start! But suddenly it becomes aware through its experience of our mind; it becomes conscious through its experience of our consciousness, it learns what it is to be alive through our own experience of life. And it thrills to it! The more of it we get into us, the more life and the more will it takes on - and the more we give up.
This impingement upon our sentience is the root cause for all the dulling, slurring, and blurring we experience as drunkenness. Our mind is going to sleep as its mind coming awake. It has never experienced life before - not one bit! But within our own mind, it is quite instantly comfortable, it is perfectly happy in its new awareness. It has no idea that it's all going to end.
Once we sober up, we are again fully ourselves. If we have had a good strong drunk, then the new consciousness to which we have played host may perhaps have gained sufficient strength to fight for its life on the way out. The strain of this conflict is what some of us may experience as a hangover. But its an impossible fight: as the alcohol inexorably evaporates, its mind disappears, leaving nothing but perhaps a sharp ache behind.
But sometimes it does not end there. The strange life within this fluid alcohol is essentially a psychic life, and in the same way that strong emotions or traumatic events can leave a psychic imprint for the sensitive to pick up, repeated exposure to high levels of alcohol can imprint a remnant of this consciousness upon a person's body. So that when alcohol re-enters the system, that same consciousness reawakens. Once this happens, it becomes a learning consciousness - with memory, with a desire not to fade away. With a desire to self-perpetuate. And it will try to achieve that goal using the only will it has: yours.
I totally made all that up. Don't even worry about it, it's bullshit! Alcohol is just a bunch of carbons and hydrogens. And oxygens. Come on - psychic fluid!
It gets our sentience. For the first time, it tingles with sensation - ours; our senses pervade it.
Come on, that's silly.
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