The dry drunk revisted
Declan Lynch’s tales of addiction
One of the things that people think they’ll miss if they stop drinking, is the camaraderie. That feeling of togetherness with total strangers that you can uniquely achieve by spending quality time with them in the old tavern. That sense of belonging to a group of like-minded individuals brought closer together by the power of inebriation.
In the mind’s eye there is the ideal vision of a crowd of drinkers raising their glasses in a toast to the good of it all, though towards the end of the night this may get a big messy, with men telling other men how much they love them, high on the improbability of it all. Or just high on 14 pints and all that camaraderie.
The betting corporations have been trying this too, with the TV ads for bet365 voiced by Ray Winstone, conveying this sense that by gambling online you are becoming a member of this global community, that when you’re in your garret punting on some fourth division football match, you are part of something much greater than yourself, that in Paris or Copenhagen or Rio de Janeiro there is someone just like you, doing what you’re doing — and doing it, of course, ‘responsibly’.
Ah, they always land that old punchline.
It is the opposite of those bleaker visions of the drinker on his own at the bar, isolated not just from the other imbibers, but from the rest of the human race. Or the gambler in his hellish solitude, trying to figure his way out of a hole that keeps getting bigger.
These are the tragic contradictions which come into play, the fact that a lot of us start drinking because it helps us to become less anxious in social situations, or we gamble because it connects us to these great sporting events in a more meaningful way — and yet that stuff which enables us to ‘get involved’ is the same stuff that will eventually drive us into a state of isolation more acute than anything we have known. Or even into a state of oblivion.
And yet another kind of camaraderie awaits, if you can get out of the first kind alive. They say that it’s almost impossible to beat an addiction without help, and by this mainly they mean the help you get from other people who have gone through the same thing. And the kind of help they mean derives mostly from the simple fact of knowing these people, of being in their company, of feeling this sense of fellowship. This... camaraderie.
Like drunks together, those who have retired from the game are seeing things that others can’t see, united by these bonds which to outsiders mean nothing.
There was a good one recently when the horror writer Stephen King tweeted about Brett Kavanaugh that “his angry performance corresponds closely to what people in AA call a ‘dry drunk’”. Followers of
50 Ways... will know that we dedicated a recent episode to this ‘dry drunk’ concept, and also that there’s a distinction to be made between the classic dry drunk and Kavanaugh, who of course is not ‘dry’ — as he was at pains to point out, he’s always liked beer, and he still likes beer.
So King’s tweet was about the kind of anger being displayed by Kavanaugh, rather than a direct identification of his state of being, but you may be sure that Kavanaugh was making the same impression on many retired drinkers as he was making on the horrormeister.
We can spot this stuff a thousand miles away, we can hear it in the nuances of a line uttered on another continent. We just know these things. What’s that line coming to me now? “You can find us in every corner of the world… watching… listening… analysing… we are everywhere… and we see everything…”
Actually that’s Ray Winstone, for bet365.
“Like drunks together, those who’ve retired from it are seeing things that others can’t see”