Black-out:  A momentary lapse of consciousness, such as an aviator often experiences coming out of a steep dive.


I'm pondering the black-out today, a concept that has always intrigued me.  I personally never experienced the black-out although I know a lot of people who had them.  I was more of a brown-out drinker, a grey-zone kind of guy.  The more I drank and the longer I stayed at it the more fog the fog machine pumped out.  I forgot a lot of specific details and events blurred together until they were pretty goddammed blurry but I never forgot whole evenings or woke up driving a car in a faraway country.  Sounds pretty scary.


I think what piques my interest is that people always seem to do a lot of really bad stuff in black-outs.  There is a total exclusion of any good stuff.  People are always sharing tales about waking up in strange places with strange people or coming to in jail or in the hospital, sporting a lot of gruesome wounds and shiners.  They regret the things they've done and what they might have said.  There's a lot of shame and remorse.


Here's what I want to hear some day: "I woke up from a two day binge and I was painting my neighbor's garage."  Why don't we walk around and pick up all of the litter in our neighborhood in a black-out?  I mean, at least I'd liker to get some chores done when I'm in a black-out.  If I'm not going to remember what I've done then I'd like it to be a little unpleasant.   I would PISSED if I had sex in a black-out, an event that happened so rarely when I was drinking that I'd like to have remembered it in exquisite, techni-colored detail.


Seems kind of suspicious.