Ergh.

I have noticed since I quit drinking how the active alcoholics in most families seem to drive the agenda. I don't know why it took me so long to pick up on this. When I was drinking I would have been happy to have dinner with Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan and Vlad the Impaler as long as the alcohol was flowing. I didn't go anywhere if I couldn't drink as much as I wanted to and if I did, I made your life miserable. It had nothing to do with the people; it had to do with the drinking. This is why our acquaintances get more and more distasteful the longer we drink. Decent, normal people don't enjoy being around us after a while.

When the drunk hosts a family event, which they like to do because it puts a legitimate face on drinking and drunkenness, the alcohol is center stage. The turkey and the Christmas tree and the American flag play second fiddle to the alcohol. I remember showing up at a Memorial Day barbecue a few years back at an alcoholic relative's house. This dude had wine and a bar stocked with all kinds of hard liquor. He had a Margarita station and coolers full of beer and ales. The appetizers consisted of a prepackaged, unappealing cheese ball, and saltines. I rooted around in the cooler for something to drink, finding only one kind of soda, containing both sugar and caffeine, which I try to avoid, being a total hyperactive. That stuff makes me thirstier.

I drank tap water with an ice cube I fished out of the bottom of the cooler.

Eventually we got around to eating. Drinkers like to postpone the eating as long as possible. Food harshes the buzz. At that point I was damn hungry and resentful at having to sit around watching people drink. There were no distractions: music or TV or games or anything like that. Why bother? The booze was flowing. The activity was sitting around, talking and drinking. It wasn't very much fun. And this wasn't bad drinking; there weren't any fights or people falling into the coy pond or anything like that. Just steady drinking.

It was about this time that I started to make the calls explaining that as a recovering alcoholic I had to limit my exposure to drinking. I suggested that it was a lot easier for us to tolerate alcohol in a larger context: a glass of wine at dinner, a beer at a football game, a cocktail at a jazz club. I don't even see this kind of drinking any more. To a person everyone was respectful and kind while quickly putting me on The Shit List, I suspect.

I was careful not to accuse anyone of being a drunk or a bad host. I tried to be clinical about it but people that drink too much give The Stink Eye to people who abstain. I remember early in my sobriety when I wasn't so forthright getting stuck at a bar for a going away party. There was a guy at my table who was clearly alcoholic. He asked me a few time whether or not I ever drank. You know the type: "You mean you never drink?" Like the phrase "I don't drink" implies that I do indeed drink. This dude kept ordering rounds for everyone. I kept accumulating little shot glasses of liquor at my place which I would push into the center of the table from time to time. He ended up drinking them, probably. He had skin in the game; he wasn't going to waste good alcohol.

I'm done with this. It helped me to see it in black and white.