Are you fun to drink beer with or are you totally annoying? My wife said that I would have to be very tolerant of you monologuing but I think you would have lots of good stories. Besides, you are a smart guy, right? That's not a rhetorical question. Anyway, do your friends like drinking beer with you?
- BeerCurious
First of all, I would like to state for the record that my preferred adult beverage is tequila - preferably of a reposado tint, but I will suffer through an añejo or a blanco if somebody else is buying. These days, however, due primarily to a ruthlessly pessimistic prognosis regarding my liver health a few years ago, I mainly drink beer ... if I'm drinking at all. Fortunately it's not the shitty domestic 3.2 swill I used to have to funnel to get an effective buzz, but more complex, hazy IPAs and the like - the kind of craft brews that I spent the first 40 or so years of my life shitting on because ... well ... what self-respecting binge drinker lets alcohol linger on the palate unnecessarily? The idea of holding an alcoholic beverage in my mouth long enough to actually taste it seemed preposterous. Here's something I learned disturbingly late in life: Not everyone drinks to get drunk. It even feels strange to type that, but I have been led to believe it's correct. I had no idea my gastroenterologist would be such a Debbie Downer.
All of the preceding is to say that, in my opinion, I am definitely not as fun to drink with as I used to be. I can't imagine that in the last half-decade anyone has described a drinking sesh with me as "epic." Conversely, depending on your vibe, maybe drinking with me is a much more tolerable experience these days. I'm not sure anyone would describe me as a smart guy, but now that my thoughts are mostly unfettered by the haze of inebriation, they pour out of my head in a torrent. I sometimes have to catch myself and put the brakes on what I know will be a spectacular monologue because ... well ... there are other people in the conversation. Therapy! Huzzah!
Still, I wouldn't trust myself to give you an accurate assessment, so I enlisted the help of my drinking buddy Marcus. It was shocking. Here I was hoping for a scathing indictment of my contributions to humanity, but instead he wrote the following, which is, by even the most pessimistic appraisal, a solid C-minus. That means I graduate.