Beer Bowling

A friend shared this article today about a young girl who died after a night of playing a game called beer pong. At the college I attended for *cough* two years, we called it beer bowling. I'm pretty sure that my buddy Gunner and I took second place in some sort of beer bowling championship at his fraternity house, but that could just be a combination of delusions of grandeur and massive amounts of Beast Light.

Regardless of skill at this game, it and many others combined to give me more easy excuses to drink way too much. My favorite way to start off my Friday nights was with a Power Hour, where you drank a shot of beer every 60 seconds. I also played Quarters, TV games (where you drink every time a certain word is said), Truth or Dare, Flip Cup, Kings, and let's not forget having Snake Bite Shooters for breakfast, or drinking while showering, or walking two miles alone in the freezing snow to get to an off-campus fraternity house in the hopes of finding someone to drink with, or keg stands, or beer bongs, or jumping into the frozen lake on campus in February on a bet to win a case of Miller Genuine Draft in bottles... So many creative and ridiculous ways to do one simple thing: drink.

I can laugh off some of the things I did in college. After all, don't all college students do these things? Don't all college students sneak their way out of the dorm to a party with a backpack full of beer? Don't all college students drink their way from one fraternity house to another, arriving at the last one to lock themselves in the bathroom so they can vomit until they pass out on the dirty tile floor? Don't all college students drink until blacking out, and wake up with someone they don't know? Don't all college students drink so much that they stop attending all of their classes altogether at some point? Don't all college students take an ambulance ride to the hospital when they drink an entire bottle of vodka and an entire bottle of Southern Comfort? And upon release from the psychiatric ward, don't all college students go back out drinking that same weekend?

It may seem ridiculous to ask such questions. But to an alcoholic mind, we can't ever stop asking. Because the minute that we start to believe we really are just social drinkers out for a good time, then we will lose sight of what we had truly become while drinking. I do not ever want to become that person again, and telling my ugly stories is one of many steps I need to take to keep myself sober today. I can't take the risk of glamorizing the life that I used to live.