The Hour with The Power!

I’m getting a visual migraine. Pretty sure these are psycho-somatic, something I heard Michelle got, and so now I get them too when the situation arises. Either way, it’s getting hard to see. I can still write though. That’s good.

Last week (ye gods, has it been over a week already?), coming home from a Mets game, I got to the new South Ferry train station and observed the new escalators. They’re impressive, in a low-key sort of way. Until someone goes to use them, they run at a very slow pace, saving energy. Then when someone walks up, they increase speed to draw the person or people up the stairs. There’s a metaphor in there. Maybe a song.

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Last Tuesday night, I got together with a few of my friends and played a game, a drinking game. A Power Hour to be exact. This is, for those who don’t know, when you drink a shot of beer every minute on the minute, for an hour straight. If my math is correct, you end up drinking seven and a half cans of beer in an hour, getting you quite drunk. That, of course, is the whole purpose of the game. It certainly worked, but that’s not what this is about. This is about doing it on a Tuesday night.

On the surface, and pretty much every level below, this seems like a bad idea. I had gotten up pretty early for work that morning, and would be doing the same on Wednesday. On this particular week, I had quite a lot to do at work to boot, so the ability to focus would be useful. Besides, drinking on the weeknights is something I generally try to avoid, as I worry it will lead to just drinking all the time, something I feel I may be in danger of doing. Plus, if this was just a one-off desire to cut loose and get wasted, why? Was there something wrong, something stressing me out that drove me to want to do this so much I had to convince my friends to do it with me1?

I think, and I emphasize “think” because I feel I know myself far worse than I used to, that I wanted to do this so much to prove a point. You see, sure I’m 28 years old, sure I’m holding down a real job-type job, sure I pay rent. But you know what? That rent’s baby rent, I live with my folks, all the separate entrance in the world doesn’t change that. I’m not married, I don’t have kids. I don’t have pets. I don’t have a house, or a car, or a cell phone. I don’t even have a credit card. All I have is my rent and my student loans. If I lost my job tomorrow, while it would obviously suck huge, I’m not in a position where my life would spiral out of control. There is no reason for me not to cut loose, except life, or societal pressure, tells me not too.

You see, at 28, people have real substantial lives. Families. Responsibilities. Some of my friends have them. I think I got carried along in that. I get older, and think that I have to act or behave in a certain way, a way befitting my age, because that’s what everyone else is doing.

The retort I hear ringing in my head already2 is that this was just some desperate salvo in the face of growing up, then. That I should stop trying to live in the past and at least act like I’m an adult.

I am an adult. I don’t have to act like it, it’s just what I am. What I’m getting at is that the other stuff is an act. All that baggage, the burden of responsibility, the pressures of work, that’s the act. And it’s not a simple act either. It’s like I’m one of those South American frogs they talk about in Jurassic Park. The ones who start acting like females, then moving like females, then pretend to be females, then they actually become females. All that responsibility, all that worry, all that keep-treading-water attitude that we all take on hardens, it calcifies around you and then it’s what you actually are. That’s what I was fighting against last Tuesday.

So… here’s to drinking games on Tuesdays. To staying up ‘til 2am playing video games. To doing whatever it is you do – You know what? This is too hokey, even for me. That’s why I wanted to drink last Tuesday though.

The writing got rid of the migraine. Huh.

1. They’re glad they did!
2. Whenever I debate with myself, I always picture people I know (or knew) talking to me, never my own voice.