Binge

Nothing enthuses us more than the anticipation and excitement of an upcoming event that will give us the pleasure and licence to indulge in a good binge fest. With our mates especially and perhaps at a wedding or event where it is accepted and expected. Where there is plenty of grog and it is free. Bugger the overpriced expensive dinner and the cake. Bring on “cheers”.


I don’t think that we care how much we spend at a pub, club or drinking venue really whilst binge drinking. Its like we have a thousand dollars in our pocket when we walk through the pub doors, and even more after the first three have gone down and it’s like it’s someone else’s. It’s great. I will hum and ha about buying a cool t-shirt I really like or a couple of trays of wheat grass from the markets for good health but will not hesitate about shouting the whole of the GABBA (at an AFL game where the Crows are winning), to a beer or white wine spritzer after I’ve had a couple.


What are responsibilities? The answer is there are none while drinking. I mean there are accountabilities morally and legally which we are all unmistakably aware of while sober but once we have had too many, our responsibilities and good sense leave us as we are replaced by the drinking monster. I don’t buy that whole I was too drunk to know excuse either. We KNOW. We just don’t CARE. Why? Because we are the bravest souls on the earth when we are drunk on happy juice. Once I left my poor dog in the car for 4 hours while having a binge fiesta with a friend at a pub. I hadn’t planned to and I love my dog almost as much as my partner and child but I was driving home from somewhere when I got this text from a friend to pop into the Albion Wine bar for ‘one’ drink. I did. Four hours later, I had to find another friend who could come get my dog and me and drive us home. Bad girl. The guilt comes out in the hangover like the anxiety bug and that can be penance enough because that guilt is unbelievably full on.


It’s part of Australia’s culture to binge drink. People who are able to consume large amounts of alcohol are held in high regard by their mates. Except in Amish circles I think, but whatever. They’re not supposed to have a web site either because it’s ‘modern’. The challenge, “I can drink you under the table” helps to egg us on. People are proud of that ability. Binge drinking and getting drunk to a point of complete loss of control is not only accepted but encouraged; it is passed off by us as just "being Australian" and is seen as a perfectly normal cultural practice rather than as a problem.


What is a problem is beer goggles.Waking up the next morning with that thing in your bed or in your memory makes you swear off grog til the end of time. ( Note to self, look up: How to avoid trapped arm whiles cuddling in bed ). You feel like saying “Where’s that good looking piece I brought home? And who the hell are you?” and it could mean either of you? You become someone else while pissed. You are funny, first of all, smart as all get the fuck out and gorgeous. You can dance well and while on the dance floor you realise you had never noticed this before, why are’nt you on, ‘So you think you can dance?’, similarly for ‘Idol’ when performing Karaoke, singing love ballads from the 80’s and always, without fail, ‘New York, New York’. Yeah start spreading that news! One you can really belt out because you are that good and people will love it. ‘You light up my life’ is another belter and don’t you hate the other drunk arsehole who gets on before you and sings ‘Evie’. It’s 12 and a half fucking minutes long.


Biggest lie while drinking? “Okay, but just one.” Second biggest, “Must have been something I ate,” And on a hangover, “I’m not hung over I’m just tired. I think I have a bug.” No, you have a hangover darling after consuming 14 beers and seven vodka cruisers, actually. Accept it. You got drunk, you pay. Take it on board. Have a Red Bull, a bacon sandwich, a saus and egg Muffin, and a pizza for lunch (pepperoni and cheese, extra cheese, extra pepperoni) and then later, a serve of fish and chips. Grease, grease, spew. It won’t help at all, neither will the 4 two litre bottles of coke, lemonade and sars but you think it will and you’ll be right tomorrow.


That first hour of waking after a big night is horrid. Paralleled of course with the wake at 2.30am if you have had just enough that night or after the afternoon drinky fest but not the coma amount. There is that foggy, sick, anxious feeling in your head and it is asking you very slowly one thing at a time,


“What the hell happened to me?”


“Oh yeah, got drunk.”


“Jesus, did I say or do anything embarassing?”


“Nah. All good. Head hurts though and I’m parched.”


“The singing was a bit embarassing.”


“Dancing wasn’t good either.”


“Why the hell did I push that woman in the loos?”


Now, although you haven’t opened your eyes yet you start to frown.


“Shit, because I made a pass at her boyfriend. Fuck. That’s bad.”


“God, anything else?”


“I fell down. Now that is embarassing. And I ripped my jeans. Fuck.”


“God, anything else?”


Then your eyes dart open as quick as greased lightening and you look urgently to your left and there he is. A balding hairy ape with a bushmans beard. And who turned the Fucking sun on and up to full beam?…where’s the dimmer? The DIMMER?


“Morning beautiful,” it says as you feel the vomit rise in your throat. And as you run to the bathroom down the longest corridor erected since the romans built Pompeii, you feel the pain and look down at the scraped and bloodied knees you thought were cute and amusing last night and worst of all so did the new man in your bed. And as you heave back black bacardi and coke into the porcelain pony, all you are thinking about is how the hell you are going to get him out of your house. Is it hideously rude to recommend he do Egg McMuffin solo three blocks over. And do you care?


What never fails to amaze me with binge drinking, is that you do all these stupid things, drink drive, cheat, punch people, fall down, eat kebabs at 3.30am in the morning and feel really, really bad the next day and yet go back and do it again soon after. Some people can even do it the very next night if a function warrants it. Hell, I have in my younger day. In fact for my friends and I it used to start Thursday nights, then Friday night, Saturday night of course, you wouldn’t be caught dead at home on a Saturday night – loser, and it would end at a Sunday pub sesh. The thing is if I eat a piece of chicken loaf that is off and it makes me crook. I never do that again. If I have oysters and I throw up just once even, I don’t go there again. I stopped drinking coffee after 12 noon six years ago because once I had a coffee in the afternoon and it made me feel slightly queasy. But with binge drinking, as sick as we get on occasion, even alcohol poisoning in some instances for some, we keep doing it, we even look forward to it. Every weekend sometimes. We have the understanding that at least one day over the weekend we will have a hang over or at least be seedy. It is a given and it is accepted. To me that means the hangover for most of us is worth the feeling and effects alcohol gives us. I know someone who doesn’t ever drink more than two drinks at any sitting. I asked him once if he didn’t like the taste and he said that he did, he liked it a lot, so I asked him why he never got drunk and he told me he did once and didn’t like the feeling, the lack of control. That’s what most of us like about it, I told him.


Many of us don’t know a life away from binge drinking. I always wondered what people who didn’t drink did with their time. Obviously they are a different sort of loaded, that’s a given but I used to wonder if they get bored with life. I asked a friend of my partners once. She never drank more than one or two drinks at any given show and always drove everyone else home, which while handy was also mystifying to me. She had been drunk a few times so it’s not like she was against it or anything but she said she was, as the old adage goes, ‘high on life’. I laughed.

“Yeah that’s bullshit. What’s the real reason?”



Feel like a drink?