It’s that time of year; it is the intersection of college break, family reunions, friend gatherings, and the need for stress relief from the intensity of the fall season. Blackout Wednesday is the night before Thanksgiving. On that night, you, the home-returning college student, will meet up with all your friends and family to hit the town. Most everyone has the next day off, so inhibitions and common sense get loosened up a little.
One pint leads to two, or a shot or three, and so it goes, until you wake up on the floor of grandma’s bathroom in just your socks and underwear. As you lift your cheek from the puddle of spittle on the cold porcelain tile to look at your grandma’s pink bunny slippers, the shame of your current situation just begins to wash over you.
That shame and some serious nausea, as the remainders of the toxic brew you consumed last night, are still washing their way through your intestinal tract. As you scramble to put your face into the bowl of the toilet, spattered in the vomit of last nights exorcisms, and purge the last remaining ounces from your tortured belly, you might ask yourself, just how much trouble could I be in?
Here are some of the high costs you could have paid for last night’s meltdown.
DUI
You could have gotten behind the wheel of a vehicle, even a bicycle, and tried to navigate your way home. This wrong decision could well have landed you in jail, so you probably wouldn’t be puking in your grandma’s toilet. You could have made it home, but who knows what the cost. Imagine waking from your booze-induced stupor to see damage to your vehicle and hear of someone you hit as you drove recklessly home.
Check Yourself
You may have just paid for the tab of a bar full of people. Considering that the average mixed drink costs $6.75 and a pint of Bud comes in at $3.75, your credit card may have just hit its limit last night. Or, you may not have that card or your phone or your car keys, as you may have left everything you own in some seedy hole in the gut of your hometown. Or, you may have been so drunk, you were marked as an easy target and were summarily robbed of everything you had on you. After your stint in the toilet, you get to spend some time panic calling everyone you spent the evening with about where you were and what you did next.
You Threw A Match in A Pool of Gas
You may just wake to a sense of foreboding that you said or did something inappropriate with, or to, someone in your life. Drink by drink those walls we build to maintain good relationships with others, (called boundaries) started to come down. As you get more “real”, you become less self-aware and able to maintain the decorum needed for healthy relationships. Maybe you started talking about how someone shouldn’t be dating someone, or how someone is fat, or how someone isn’t as smart as they think they are.
Anger, hurt, envy, and a pandora’s box of other vile human traits start to flow in a vodka-fueled torrent. If your friends like you enough to forgive you and protect you from yourself, they brought you home anyway. Or you may have just pissed them off enough that they left you to sort your crappy attitude out for yourself. Again Panicked phone calling ensues.
No matter what happened, here you are, hungover and having no idea how much carnage you left behind. So, before you dive into that next pool of alcohol for a good swim, remember this moment and choose to stay on the dry side.