Menace to Sobriety
The new wellness fad that sells redemption without sin and recovery without suffering
Only in Liverpool would one encounter a Nietzsche-quoting vagrant.
Swaggering amongst the old-world grandeur of Lime Street station with a litre of Tesco Essentials whisky in one’s stomach on a Tuesday mid-morning suggests a peculiar grasp of the human comedy few ever cultivate.
Scanning the crowd outside the station, this roving siren clocked me smoking a cigarette:
“All right there, lad. Could I—no, may I—nick one of those off of yiz?” No older than thirty, her cheeks had that borrowed quality. No suspicion of fat or muscle.
As she sauntered down the steps toward the neon guts of the city, two Jehovah’s Witnesses gawked at evidence of man’s fallen nature, thrusting a copy of The Watch Tower into her tawny midriff.
“God?” she said. “Love, I don’t know how to tell you this. Don’t take it personal. Buh, God is fooken dead.”
Modern sensibilities baulk at exacting terms such as vagrant or alcoholic.
According to a team of social workers no doubt familiar with our Nietzschean barfly, she’s not homeless but unhoused. She’s not an alcoholic but a person suffering Alcohol Use Disorder. The prevailing wisdom settles seasonally upon acceptable labels. The new and acceptable casts off the old and unacceptable into the spin cycle of acceptable-unacceptable terms. Soon enough, vagrant will return bleached white and lemon fresh, as the acceptable term of the right-thinking.
We now live in a culture that sanitises the severe and monetises the mild.
Recently, I met a different type of drunk—the Sober Influencer. Listen to his tales of debauchery and recovery. He once, in his dark days, drank so much that he couldn’t remember getting home—a feat most achieve by their 17th birthday. It was then, he reveals with a heavily pregnant pause, that he hit rock bottom.
This self-confessed former booze lord adopts the unequivocal argot of the alcoholic. They haven’t ceased drinking. They’re ‘clean and sober.’ They aren’t avoiding booze for a while. They’re ‘on the wagon.’ The well-rehearsed lines spill between perfect teeth. On cue, his face shifts from contrition to despair to redemption. At his worst, he drank heavily on the weekends and even some weeknights—a behavioural pattern once known as ‘youth.’ He’s here to redeem you and to show you the light, for just £12.99 a month recurring.
I’m not a doctor or a biographer. When you grow up around the real thing, you can sniff out the counterfeit from a nautical mile away. My father drank. He drank in the shed. He drank in the car. He drank in work. He drank as if severed cleanly at the neck. My father, for all of his drinking, never drank enough.
As Scott Russell Sanders puts it, children of alcoholics develop an uncanny ability to read faces and uncover motives hidden behind words. A 22-year-old likening their binge-drinking days to the depths of alcoholism doesn’t ring true.
But what was once a rite of passage is now rehashed for content. Sobriety, once a private struggle, is reborn as public performance. A doctrine of struggle for those with an austere record of struggle.
Whether any of these lucrative fables are true is, of course, none of my business. According to sober influencers, my nightly bottle of red, fortified by a few generous gin and tonics, is textbook alcoholism. After I hit rock bottom, redemption and well-renumerated evangelism—complemented by fat YouTube cheques and merchandise sales—awaits.
Why not? Influencing is awash with cash. And to be frank, I am better positioned to talk about old Mother Ruin. The problem? My drinking is medically excessive but socially acceptable. Never once have I started a fight or fallen out with a friend or stranger whilst under the influence. I do all of that whilst sober.
Here’s the rub. The voracious God of Content does not sleep. The aspiring influencer cannot, either. Every hour, he must offer his god a sacrifice.
Besides, I cannot just stop drinking. I drink for medical reasons. My body doesn’t naturally produce its own red wine. The French Protocol, two glasses of red wine daily, keeps the cogs in my brain from rusting shut. Without this essential lubricant, my brain mortifies into an inglorious rump of meat, and Uncle OCD shuffles me down to the bike shed for a spot of non-consensual buggery.
Online, I scoured for gaps in the influencing market. It proved arid. There are influencers for influencing influencers. Soon, The Economist claims, we may reach Peak Influencer.
The key to successful and lucrative influencing, I thought, was to ape the redemption narratives of religious creeds. Hmmm. But the modern consumer, his wandering brain vagrant and rewired toward novelty, doesn’t do sacrifice. He doesn’t do suffering. What’s needed, I thought, is a belief system in which one can, quite literally, drink one’s drink and have it, too.
Bingo! After traipsing through thickets of influencing videos, the gold-threaded path to despotic luxury presented itself.
Intermittent Sobriety is the revolutionary new movement in which one sometimes drinks and sometimes does not. It’s fucking for chastity. It’s waging war in the name of peace. It’s sobriety for people like me—people who take a dim view of sobriety.
We talk in an exclusive argot. My ‘Sober Windows’ are between 2 a.m. when I go to bed and 6 p.m. when I down tools for the day. I’ve set responsible Booze Boundaries. I vow to never let the tasteless varieties of white grapes ever pass my lips. With Intermittent Sobriety, I can feel better than lesser mortals—twenty-four hours daily. During Sober Windows, I’ll pity the boozers pouring poison into their slavish faces. During Playtime Periods, I’ll scoff at the sad, sexless scolds nursing their shitty soda waters.
And so, is God dead? No, God is not dead. He’s busy—busy fixing a stiff G&T, depressed at the fallen, self-addicted state of his children.
Let’s hope your new unhoused friend suffering from alcohol abuse disorder doesn’t find herself “justice experienced” (my current favourite) at some point in the future.
Ah, me the life of the alcoholic's progeny is not easy. I should know. My mother's idea of breakfast was vodka with a tablespoon of grapefruit juice. When she had had enough, she passed out along with what I thought was astonishingly convenient amnesia of whatever she had or hadn't said or done the night before/the day before/five minutes earlier. But her wit was second to none. Well I remember, back in '69, her loud Declaration under the influence of Godknowshowmany bottles of booze, that she didn't "understand how some fat little junkie became a national heroine". She was, of course, referring to Janis Joplin.
What I really can't stand is heavy drinkers appropriating the well earned title of alcoholic. To be a real alcoholic one must not necessarily have drink one's way into prison, the nut house or death. Indeed there are far more dry drunks out there effing up the world than drunk drunks. Dry drunks are alcoholics trying to attain nirvana by not drinking. Or maybe they're just sick of being in prison or the nut house, being sacked, writing off cars and driving their loved ones crazy. Without their medication, they are raging, roaring control freaks who think they're being reasonable when they, for example, strangle their husband because they can't stand his aftershave or the way he eats, or the way he talks, or the way he breathes. Without drinking they're just as likely to end up in aforesaid prison or nuthouse unless they begin to treat their actual problem which hithertofore they medicated with Tesco ( or Lidl, or Aldi) vodka.
But my mother isn't the worst alcoholic I ever met. That would be love of my life number 6, who, I'm very embarrassed to relate, use to decant his Netto gin into old Gordon's bottles. Sad old fart. Its not as if he was fooling anyone because tight bastard that he was, he never shared his booze with anyone.
The worst