Why Are You So Incredibly Drunk?

I was working it good, selling the heck out of my beloved household junk at the big happy first-ever garage sale my housemate and I held just recently, the same sunny Sunday as the annual Bay to Breakers footrace/street party/costume fest/random act of insanity held every year here in San Francisco, both of us sitting on the stoop of our fine flat a mere three blocks from the race route itself as groups of runners/drinkers/spectators sauntered by and bought various books and lamps and old candleholders and, you know, junk.

It started out, in the morning, friendly and happy and good. But by the early afternoon, the pitch and timbre of some of the drink-laden passersby began to change, some morphing into loud and slurring partyers, who then later turned into swaggering random epithet hurlers, who then later, as the citywide party really got going, devolved into something else entirely.

By the end of the day, I believe I counted a good dozen individuals who had not only wobbled by my stoop in a slurry state of post-race martini-laden bliss, but who were actually so sloshed, so brutally incapacitated, so out of their minds on alcohol they actually had to be carried, supported, guided down the street by a wary boyfriend or a slightly embarrassed gaggle of friends or even an equally drunk cohort who was also so utterly wasted that both parties had to pause on the sidewalk every few feet so they could find a moment of shaky equilibrium in order to avoid falling over into the street and getting smashed by a bus and turned into a puddle of blood and bone and roughly two gallons of cheap Stoli.

It is, I realize, a basic scenario enjoyed citywide, nationwide, planetwide. As any loutish frat party or Marina beerfest or football tailgate barbecue reveals, acute, extreme drunkenness is pretty much the unacknowledged Great American Pastime. But despite all the obviousness, despite all the tradition, I shall admit it right here: I don't quite get it.

It's a simple enough question, with a thousand fragmented answers: What the hell is the appeal of severe, excessive drinking, over and over again, to the point of illness and physical collapse and extreme stupidity and brain-melting moronism?

What is it about, say, hard-core sports fans or twentysomething post-sorority girls and pot-bellied frat guys gathering in hordes and drinking so heavily two or three times per week and every single weekend that they can't see straight and fall out of their restaurant chairs and break a tooth on the ceramic tile and throw up in their hair and don't know who they slept with as they fry so many brain cells they finally move to Texas and become president of the United States?

Let me be perfectly clear. I am not talking about enjoying a cocktail or three at a dinner party with friends. I am not talking about a couple of glasses of wine after work or a pre-coital shot of chilled Hangar One Raspberry or a lonely bottle of cheap Pinot by yourself in a tear-filled bathtub after a painful breakup. Mmm, wallowing. It does a body good.

Nor am I talking about casually partying it up, getting a good buzz on and maybe having one too many and needing a cab ride home and suffering bed spins and regrets about that final gin and tonic. Nor am I not talking about hard-core alcoholism, the disease, the famous and well-documented affliction, because not every ordinary, extreme drinker is an alcoholic and not every habitually wasted partyer has a disease because if they do, well then, we are the sickest nation on earth.

I am talking about all those otherwise healthy, well-bred folk who repeatedly, intentionally cross that threshold of bodily tolerance and behavior, the extreme soaking of the liver, that incredibly toxic and humiliating activity largely undertaken (it seems) by those with good jobs and good families and plenty of beauty and youth and strength but who still find some sort of need to turn into heavy-lidded blotch-faced weak-legged body-slammed mysteriously bruised-in-the-morning lumps of bloated toxic hangover every third day and definitely on Fridays. It is not, as I saw outside my own door, a rare or uncommon thing.

I suppose I should confess: Despite all the regular winking references in this very column to how much I enjoy (and recommend) all manner of liquid inebriant, Islay single malts and daiginjo sakes and fine wine by the case, I have never been, not one time in my entire life, so uncontrollably drunk that I couldn't walk. Or stand. Or speak. Or see. Or remember what the hell I did last night. Or who. Or how I got home. Oh, I've come close a few times, but the instant I do my body recoils and my spirit regrets it and I reach for the water, fast.

I realize this puts me in a certain category of Americans. I realize this means, to some, that I have not truly lived, or partied, really pushed my limits and partaken of a beloved American hobby, one that's not only acceptable, it's actually encouraged that you disrespect your body and hold your life and your friends and your mind and your heart and your liver in so much contempt that you don't really give a damn what you turn into after your 12th Coors Light or your fifth pitcher of margaritas. Yeah, sign me up.

On second thought, maybe I do get it. After all, we all crave escape, we all desire a certain numbness, a warm buffer between us and the cold pain of this nasty, nail-driven world and alcohol is our one legal narcotic, our beloved social lubricant, our supreme remover of everyday inhibition. Why not get completely smashed all the time? Life's a bitch and relationships are thorny and sex is fraught and she never wants to get naked and he never brings you flowers and everyone's job sucks and hey who wants to go out and get totally s--faced tonight? F-- yeah!

In other words, perhaps it's merely another ice-cold shot of the great human conundrum, severe alcohol intake as both a means to attempt to connect, and a means to try and separate. You think?

Of course, you could also easily argue that regular, near-comatose wastedness also reflects a rather obvious sense of sadness and self-loathing, a feeling where you are, deep down, so afraid that you don't really have much going on deep down that you cling to this cheap drug's ability to remove you from the responsibility of trying to figure out who you really are. You know, just like organized religion.

Or maybe it's none of those things, and what I see and what you see every weekend in bars and street fairs and house parties across America is merely the way of the culture, just everyday people blowin' off steam in the only legal way they know how, not really knowing when to stop because, for whatever reason, they simply do not have the proper mechanism, or forgot they were supposed to cultivate a mechanism in the first place.

Which is, not at all ironically, the exact problem of our national character, our global identity as a whole. Huh. Go figure.

Thoughts for the author? E-mail him.

Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate and in the Datebook section of the San Francisco Chronicle. To get on the e-mail list for this column, please click here and remove one article of clothing.

Mark's column also has an RSS feed and an archive of past columns, which includes another tiny photo of Mark probably insufficient for you to recognize him in the street and give him gifts.