Day 18: vomit.

Not mine thankfully. It is a beautiful day and I am feeling well again. I have fresh sheets on my bed, freshly washed ones hanging on the line, and I have just polished off my first Frosty Fruit ice block of the season while strolling home from a spot of Christmas shopping. I love this kind of shit. The ordered, clean wholesomeness of it all. The productiveness (I never buy Christmas presents this early!). While out and about though, I also received a number of phone calls from friends and fam, reporting in on their activities from the night before. That's where the vomit comes in. It turns out that a good friend of mine ended what should have been a normal Friday night at the pub, sitting on the pub floor vomming into a bag. On the other side of town, a family member was engaged in a whiskey-fueled wrestling match that resulted in his entire t-shirt being torn (i.e. in pieces) from his body. It was his favourite shirt. He went home topless. Another friend merely drank for a solid 13 hours, arriving home at 7 this morning. When I spoke to him (at 3 in the afternoon) he said he still felt pissed. And here I was thinking I'd had a rough night battling seven different mosquitos in the stifling night heat. But seriously, what drives us to do this stuff? (Not battling mosquitos obviously. It's a crazed pursuit but absolutely necessary and entirely reasonable.) It's not like I've been out of the game long, and Lord knows I've been on my fair share of benders (I am, as far as I know, the only person in my vicinity who can boast waking with shocking knee bruises, blood crusted in my hair and one white Reebok neatly filled with pink sick), but at what point has our definition of fun and relaxation come to include vomiting, hanging with the junkies in Kings Cross at 6.30am, and getting punched in the head? Am I going soft or does it all actually sound like no fun at all? Of course, none of the chaps involved were saying they'd had a great night out. These were bits of train-wrecks of evenings. But none of the incidents were first-time events for any of the boys either. Repeat offenders. Just like I was. Also repeat regretters/repenters, but repeat offenders nonetheless. Shall I say it again? Repeat. Why do we keep coming back for more?

As I inch my way away from drinking excesses like these, I am starting to find them more and more shocking. What used to be, to my mind, a slightly exaggerated version of the norm, is now starting to look like dangerously damaging and destructive behaviour. What's freaky too, is that for a large section of the partying public, in this town at least, these levels of intoxication are normal. It's normal to have a hangover on Saturday. It's normal to have bits of the night you can't remember, or don't want to. Is this really normal though? Or is it just that this part of the world advocates alcoholism as an accepted way of life? A girlfriend of mine (whose father was an alcoholic) got it right when she said: "We accept too much. It's not acceptable behaviour, but we accept it, far too much". Time for a little stay at Camp Claire people? You are always very welcome.