Caveat Emptor:

Drinker Beer-ware

Mary Huerter

It’s easy to think of as an age limit. It starts to seem like that awful kind of authority that is inflicted upon the powerless for no reason excepting the ability to inflict authority. Feels like the big bad moral majority just trying to stop your innocent fun. Really, what’s the harm? It’s not like you’re driving or anything. It’s not even like you do it every day – not even every weekend.

Now is where you begin to catch on and I acknowledge that I’ve only got you for one, maybe two, more sentences before you realize that this is the same old “horrors of underage drinking” story, roll your eyes, and move onto the four-page spread on prom dresses in the middle of your Teen Cosmo.

Please, though, keep reading. I need you for just a little bit longer before you can accurately anticipate the rest of the story and stop reading. This isn’t about under age drinking.

This is about grown-up drinking. Real drinking. Much bigger problem than underage drinking.

The world of drunks, losers, secrets, fights, alienation, child neglect, occasional meetings, nasty divorces, bad sleep habits, lost jobs, money problems, liver failure, chronic headaches, mood swings, shady acquaintances, bad smells and diets that will never ever work—just to name a few.

That is a big and far from complete list of really bad news. It is also, coincidentally, a list of is things that aren’t usually associated with teenage drinking. Teenage drinking usually gets a much more far-fetched and fluffier list. It’s a list of bad grades, permanent records, car accidents, upset parents and bad boyfriends. It’s a stupid list. Everybody knows that.

It doesn’t take a genius to see that you can drink every Saturday—even every Friday and Saturday—even every Friday and Saturday and sometimes during the week – without any problem.

You don’t drink and drive, you do your homework BEFORE you party – no problem. So you vomit before you fall asleep and you hurt all over when you wake up; you don’t know where your money goes; you can’t remember where those bruises came from – it’s tough to say all that isn’t worth the stories that you’ll have forever.

That’s no problem. No matter what they say, you know as well as I do – and if they gave it any thought, as well as they do – that there’s no difference between your recreational drinking and the MGD that your parents guzzle at barbeques, block parties and dinner outings. It’s pretty clear that the only difference is an arbitrarily assigned and poorly enforced age limit – which, for many of us, proves far more attractive than daunting.

It’s hard to accept an unjustified hypocrisy. I’ll help the grown-ups out by trying to justify it from a point of minimal hypocrisy. It would be great if kids just didn’t drink. The only reason I say “kids” is because many a drinking grown-up is too “settled in their ways” to bother with. Kids are what’s important.

I’ve never been one for teaching old dogs any tricks at all, anyway.

It would be great if everyone was capable of entertaining themselves and interacting with others without the easily amused and inhibitionless veil that follows an aquafina bottle full of kool-aid flavored liquor-cabinet cocktail. However, that’s an ideal, and like most ideals, it’s hardly worth considering.

Regardless of myriad “legitimate” statistical references to the contrary, it seems that it is the rare high school student who doesn’t find herself spending at least one fateful night trying hard to feel their face as they lie on the dirty linoleum of an unfamiliar bathroom floor.

All that can be hoped for is that before we start relying on alcohol – at first as “something to do” on the weekends, then as a way to “get away,” and, inevitably for some, a way to “get out of bed every morning” – we make ourselves mindful of the risks.

If you remember neither of the car accident statistics, the lethal blood alcohol concentration, the litany of legal consequences, nor what it feels like to wear those strange goggles, you will be fine. There is only one thing you need remember.

You have to remember the only real risk, that is to say, you need to make yourself aware that alcoholism is a lonely life of sorrow and pain for yourself and all that you hold dear.

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