Mental Clutter Is My Passion
I don’t think I’m that unique in this, but my mind is like a clown car. Most likely it is a feature of undiagnosed/untreated ADHD but I also just accept that it’s just The Way I Am (I got up to water plants twice while I was writing this sentence.) I’m also one of those people that gets regularly asked “how” I sleep because I have so much going on at any given time. (Quite well, actually, I did CBT-I in 2019 and it changed my life.)
I enjoy solitude. I am never alone with my thoughts and I often notice them having lively conversations, which keeps me perpetually entertained. The two semi-conflicting thoughts that are having the most audible discussion right now are between Mallory O’Meara’s excellent Girly Drinks, and my latest piece for Thrillist: “What’s It Like Being a Sober Bartender?” (Which is itself a riff on another piece I wrote wayyyy back in 2018 for Liquor.com: “Sober Bartenders Say They Feel Great. But Does Not Drinking Hurt Their Business?”)
I’ve written a bit on the absurdity of gender and cocktails, so I was excited to pick up O’Meara’s book, and after an excruciating waitlist at the NYPL, I got it in my hands a few weeks ago and I’m about a third of the way through. (There is a joke here about a guy reading 97 pages of a 380 page book and feeling qualified to write about it in a newsletter, but I divest).
One of the main points of the book—aside from how enthusiastically women have been written out of the history of alcohol—is that the policing of women’s production and enjoyment of alcohol is yet another example of patriarchal control over women’s minds and bodies. The book sees drunkenness (or public/liberated enjoyment of alcohol) as an extension of bodily autonomy. Drinking is a feminist act. This I agree with one hundred percent. As someone who believes in abolition, decarceration, and full bodily rights to all, I love how O’Meara uses the control of alcohol as a vector into understanding how society uses systems of oppression to consolidate (hoard) power. I’ve also scanned the index and she does get to queer people towards the back third of the book. This is quite possibly one of the best drinks books I’ve read in a really long time. Not only is it fascinating, it’s also kind of hilarious. Eg. “See, one of the things you have to understand about drinking during the medieval era was that everything was gross.”
But as someone who has experienced varying levels of alcohol use disorder at various times in my life, I couldn’t help but wonder, what if the opposite was true? What if consumption of alcohol (particularly during the horrors of late stage capitalism) be more of an endorsement of an oppressive system than a bucking of it? When I spoke to the bartenders for my Thrillist piece, I noticed that all of them faced some level of systemic oppression, be it due to gender, race, or sexuality, and being sober felt somewhat like an added layer. People drink to fit in, and in the bar world drinking is a great way to get ahead: late nights with brand reps and owners, drinking shots bought by regulars. Not drinking while working in bars is HARD, but it almost feels like a way to opt out of a capitalist system that causes a great deal of harm to marginalized communities, both in its production and consumption. I Before you say it: I have Quit Like A Woman on my library queue right now.
The cop-out is to say that there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism, and call it a day, which is what I’m doing because I have to get back to writing my book before my editor kills me in a drone strike.
I will leave you with this picture of me when I was cat-sitting for my friend and I took my shirt off because she has cool mirrors.
Thanks for reading! Please forward this to someone you like.
Love,
-JdB