Now that I’m sober, they look quite different.
October 21, 2016 8:11 AM   Subscribe

 
My drunkalogue is a lot more prosaic than this Zagat's guide to LA hipster dive bars. "Hey look, it's the bus stop where I threw up in public and slunk home instead of going to work that one morning".
posted by thelonius at 8:56 AM on October 21, 2016 [10 favorites]


The Fox Theater in Pomona, California is now a fully restored Art Deco movie palace, but back in 1999 it was still undergoing renovations and there was exposed wiring and a constant swirl of dust that was probably 90% industrial carcinogens everywhere. I was twenty years old and attending a rave there. I had taken some ecstasy that I'm pretty sure was mostly DXM, and some acid that I'm pretty sure was mostly crank, and things had turned phenomenally shitty. I was bleeding from the nose for some reason, I had lost my friends, and had descended into a paranoid nightmare where the entire party was a sting operation where every single person there was an undercover cop trying to get me (specifically me) to slip up and admit that I'd taken drugs so that they could take me to jail and rape me to death.

I headed into the downstairs bathroom to try to get my head right. There was an inch of what I will generously term "water" on the floor, which was extra horrifying because (in spite of all their talk about love and unity) rave promoters are some of the most vicious capitalists on Earth. They'd turned off all of the running water so that if you didn't want to overheat and die you had to pay $6 for a bottle of Sparklets. So where was the water on the floor coming from!?

As I entered the bathroom there was one other dude in there. He took one look at me, looked around at our surroundings and immediately said, "If you're going to lose your shit, this is not the room you want to do it in." When I think of all the good advice that I've ignored over the years, that's the piece that first springs to mind.

Anyway, that bathroom is really nice now. It has an attendant and everything. Running water, too.
posted by Parasite Unseen at 9:17 AM on October 21, 2016 [25 favorites]


I much preferred this paean to dragging oneself out of alcoholism than that other one in which the writer disdained the women having fun and drinking cocktails at the other side of the pool.
posted by ejs at 9:37 AM on October 21, 2016 [3 favorites]


This one definitely had a wistfulness to it without the usually grinding of self hatred (both projected and internalized). Sounds like she's made it to a good and accepting place.
posted by drewbage1847 at 9:44 AM on October 21, 2016 [4 favorites]


My mom spotted Michelle Tea's memoir How to Grow Up on my bookshelf last time she was over and asked to borrow it, and I agreed, somewhat nervously. (A lot of it reads exactly like this; in other parts she talks about growing up working-class; living with drug-addicted twentysomethings and inadvertently cultivating a maggot colony in the fridge; blowing off a college course she was teaching to go to Paris Fashion Week; etc.) Anyway last night she called and said she finished it and I asked what she thought, and she said, "You know, she really experienced life and lived her life, and I admire that, because so many people don't do that." It was a surprisingly sweet moment.
posted by sunset in snow country at 10:19 AM on October 21, 2016 [15 favorites]


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