I am not a teetotaler.
I do not drink much. I may go months between having glasses of wine, longer still between finding myself at bars which have some interesting concoction, and ordering it out of curiosity. I get mildly inebriated, enjoy the sensation, and then taper off.
I’ve imbibed to excess two or three times, total, enough to establish that I don’t like it.
I in particular loathed beer.
Tried it a couple of times. Attempted to pick up the habit. Ultimately decided it was negative fun and stopped trying.
In college, if you drank beer, I had no problem with you.
What I hated, what I feared, even as a male back then, was the fetishization of beer.
I hated and feared guys who had their empty soldiers washed up and lined up around their dorm room like trophies.
Who decorated their walls with posters advertising various brands of cheap Domestic beer.
Who used the word “Beer!” as an exclamation.
I hated and feared guys who urged me to learn how to drink beer, to practice it, because, you know, it would make me really popular. Guys who said that drinking beer would make me a fun guy because it would give me the opportunity to sit around with other guys and drink beer. Guys who ultimately mocked me as a lightweight because I had decided I didn’t like beer. Not liking beer, these guys said, was my “whole problem.”
I saw so much, guys who bellowed in concert like gibbons, because they had beer and they could now drink more beer.
The praise of certain occasions that — gasp — brought in a keg!
I saw guys brag about how drunk they got their girlfriends. How “crazy” those girls got.
I heard endless bragging about how wasted they were, the hilarious anecdotes about barfing.
The day just before a major campus event where everybody got drunk in preparation, and I walked across the quad and started counting just how many people I saw prostrate in their puddles of barf, before it even started. In the space of one hundred yards I found one guy curled in a fetal position at the base of a stairway, abandoned by friends, his expensive concert tickets still clutched in his outstretched hand. Another guy violently upchucking in the bushes, while two of his friends laughed uproariously and chugged their own bottles. A third guy sprawled like a swastika on the walkway. You could track how close the event was, by how thickly they were scattered on the ground. I saw this, at four o’clock in the afternoon.
Beer I had no trouble with.
Beer culture was for assholes.
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