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Oh yeah if you black out from drinking you absolutely shouldn’t drink. That’s horrifying for me to imagine. Just flip the light switch but your body keeps doing things.

It’s really fucking awful, and frightening. I don’t drink heavily anymore because of it. Luckily I can have enough to just relax and chill out these days, and that’s all I want out of alcohol now.

Someone much younger than me, with a much higher tolerance, said she *wanted* to black out, to see what kind of person she was when she wasn’t at the reigns. I have never blacked out and didn’t regret it, so I really hope things turned out well for her. Blew my goddamned mind tho.

It’s really cool that you’re showing that as normal and not some moral failing. Like I know its a “naw duh,” minimum, but so many people miss that mark.

any chance the bar with the link to the next episode could be duplicated one more time after the reader comments? I usually read the previous day’s comments all the way through before going to the new page, and it sometimes takes a lot of scolling to get to the link.

I don’t think so. The site runs on very old, very broken, code that barely functions at the best of times. I can ask someone who knows better though.

I’m getting a weird thing when I try to go to this website and shortpacked.com. I have to click my favorites multiple times to get the link to finally work. Not sure if it is on the websites’ ends or mine.

It’s normal for me & you’re the first one bringing it up. I would suggest clearing your cache just as a baseline & seeing what happens. I didn’t realize Shortpacked still updated. You might ask Willis, but as far as I know he never answers anyone.

Willis posts the occasional toy review and a new comic once or twice a year. So it’s still active, for a very generous value of “active”.

Yeah, being an angry drunk is not … rare. I’m one of those, which is why I don’t drink. As I tell people, alcohol reduces inhibitions. My inhibitions are there for *your* protection.

Unfortunately, unlike Ed, I fully remember the incident that led to my decision to not drink anymore.

Applause for the phrase “my inhibitions are there for *your* protection”.

As someone with anger issues and has spent my whole life getting them as under control as possible, I love that phrasing as well. I’ve never consumed alcohol, and intend to keep it that way for basically this reason. Like, I never got the appeal in the first place, as I’ve never had an issue loosening up, relaxing, and having fun in basically exactly the same way most people seem to use alcohol to accomplish.

Amusingly, between my being able to lower my inhibitions at will, my very poor sense of balance that only gets worse as I get physically exhausted which results in getting very “stumbly”, and the fact that I pick up accents *very* quickly (and apparently drunken slurs are considered accents to my brain), despite never having had a drop of alcohol in my life, when I hang out with people while they’re drinking, I appear to get inebriated along with them as the night goes on, as I relax my filters to match them, I get worn out and start wobbling, and I pick up their slurring voices and drunken speech patterns, but I retain my full faculties and can still be the “sober friend” when one is needed and drive just fine as the designated driver. That’s led to some *very* amusing interactions with people who are *convinced* that I’m drunk, including one cop who saw me stagger from the bar and into my car with my friends piling into various passenger seats. I passed ALL of the “drunk tests” (the walking in a straight line was hardest, because as mentioned my balance is crap, but *because* my balance is crap, I have a ton of practice doing that anyway, it just takes more effort when worn out, but is totally doable), and then passed a breathalyzer proving I hadn’t been drinking. At first he was dubious about the slurring being me picking up their “accent” but as we chatted away from them I started sounding more and more like him (he had a thick redneck accent, as he was from the boonies an hour out of town where that’s more common) and less and less like a drunk, so he eventually let me off as I hadn’t actually DONE anything illegal.

My own drinking habits are rather like Nina’s, not often and usually because it is something that I enjoy the flavor. I have known people like Ed is describing. In particular, I worked with a physician who described herself as going from 0 to 100% belligerent drunk in the course of one drink. She was a bit of a train wreck but in fairness to her she had a lot of trauma that was pretty close to the surface.

It’s interesting to see that Ed openly admits to the Jekyll & Hyde effect when it comes to drinking because I didn’t think he was the kind of person who would be reduced to doing such a thing even after a drink or two.

Definitely kudos to him for abstaining.

There is a difference between drinking a glass of wine, and getting blackout drunk.

For most people, yes. But some people find it very hard to stop at one. If Ed has had trouble in the past then abstaining completely may be the best option for him.

Also, I mean, even if Ed COULD drink in moderation and not have a problem, the knowledge that he can get outright violent if he drinks too much, AND lose all memory of it, could understandably be a scary enough prospect to put him off from drinking entirely. Sort of like how Thomas doesn’t drink (if I recall correctly) because he’s afraid he’ll like it and then he won’t be able to stop. We’ve all got our demons and it’s probably best to stay far away from them rather than tip-toe up to the line, lest we stumble.

I don’t drink either. not a violent drunk or anything, just makes me feel like I’m about to crap myself.

I stopped drinking alcohol a few years ago when my gastroenterologist noticed a pancreatic stone. He told me, “Every drink you take is a step toward the grave.” Yes, dramatic language. Apparently these stones are caused by excessive alcohol consumption. My wife (she was a doctor) and I spent a while wondering when in my life I had been drinking like that and drew a blank. I’m now on a drug to provide the digestive enzymes the stone is blocking; otherwise I can’t digest my food. About a month after starting thd drug my appetite noticed the change and my food intake dropped suddenly. (I had been eating about three times as much as she was and still losing weight.)
Now I’m off alcohol completely except for communion wine, which my church provides once a year at Easter.

Also on the ‘I dislike being drunk train’. I still get the motor function impairment, but my inhibitors go up instead of down. According to my older brother, I’m the most “up-tight unfun drunk on thr face of the Earth”. And he was a bartender for 5 years.

I remember the last time I got drunk, I was still taking keys from the tipsy people at the party and only made it to my room before blacking out. Everyone was disappointed I had the wherewithal to check for and scrub off the magic marker before rejoining the party.

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