stupid first world problems you're dealing with

Forget what I said earlier about not being an alcoholic.  I wanted to have a couple shots of vodka last night and realized that I couldn't stop drinking until I emptied the bottle (it was 2/3 full when I started).  This was completely unintentional and I had no plans to get as drunk as I did.  This is an almost daily routine for me and it's starting to cause problems.  I'm going to try tapering off starting today.

Wow, a bottle of vodka a day is a lot. If you don't eat a lot it will fry your stomach after a while. Gastric cancer is probably one of the nastiest cancers (at least I imagine it that way).

  On 2/4/2021 at 2:47 PM, manmower said:

Hot co-workers are the worst.

Yeah, it's always annoying when they make you accidentally bust a nut into your pants. 

  On 2/4/2021 at 2:47 PM, manmower said:

Hot co-workers are the worst.

In a corporate job I had years ago after one particularly hot summer women (well, also men tbf) were forbidden to wear miniskirts or shorts. This was because the men, who were mostly engineers, complained that they can't focus on work with all the skimpily clad young women parading around.

*walking behind a slow person* My son, are you not invested with the spirit of industry, have u not felt the warmth of the promethian flame, the siren call from the mountaintop whose summit awaits? my sweet child, have not ye heard tell that time is money, and thus it is a matter of pecuniary decency that i advocate haste. it is not simply out of concern for your own social standing that i must admonish the taciturn manner in which your soles communicate with yon pavement, but rather it is of the utmost importance for the maintenance of our society. this laxidasical approach to locomotion is none other than the foreshocks of oncoming societal decay

*fast person walking behind me* [sharp inhale to indicate displeasure beyond words]

  On 2/4/2021 at 5:13 PM, drillkicker said:

Forget what I said earlier about not being an alcoholic.  I wanted to have a couple shots of vodka last night and realized that I couldn't stop drinking until I emptied the bottle (it was 2/3 full when I started).  This was completely unintentional and I had no plans to get as drunk as I did.  This is an almost daily routine for me and it's starting to cause problems.  I'm going to try tapering off starting today.

Not that is is any help or consolation, but I basically had a very close family member kill himself very slowly almost exactly the way you describe.  I have almost daily regret that I rarely spoke up and offered him help.  I would never wish dying of cirrhosis of the liver on anyone. 

Get yourself some help brother.  I'd be also happy to chat more if you care to. 

  On 2/4/2021 at 2:47 PM, manmower said:

Hot co-workers are the worst.

ngl the usual isolation of canadian winter + most conventional dating options being shuttered thx to covid has made it so that i feel like a bear coming out of hibernation any time i'm out in public & talk to someone i find attractive

Everyone's horny, it's true.

  On 2/4/2021 at 7:20 PM, dingformung said:

Wow, a bottle of vodka a day is a lot. If you don't eat a lot it will fry your stomach after a while. Gastric cancer is probably one of the nastiest cancers (at least I imagine it that way).

Yeah, it's always annoying when they make you accidentally bust a nut into your pants. 

Yeah, it was a huge epidemic in postwar Japan because of the radiation in the food supply that resulted from the nuclear bomb fallout.  They had no effective treatment for it, so doctors would just lie to their patients and tell them they were healthy, and so everyone who got it simply died slowly and painfully.

But yeah, I don't eat very much because I spend too much money on alcohol.

Also I agree that hot coworkers are terrible.  I only had to deal with it once a couple of years ago.

  On 2/4/2021 at 7:42 PM, Extralife said:

Not that is is any help or consolation, but I basically had a very close family member kill himself very slowly almost exactly the way you describe.  I have almost daily regret that I rarely spoke up and offered him help.  I would never wish dying of cirrhosis of the liver on anyone. 

Get yourself some help brother.  I'd be also happy to chat more if you care to. 

Thanx for the concern.  The only thing that scares me about quitting (aside from the withdrawal) is that it won't solve my problems, it'll just force me to confront them.  Yeah, I'd like to chat with anyone right now.

  On 2/4/2021 at 5:13 PM, drillkicker said:

Forget what I said earlier about not being an alcoholic.  I wanted to have a couple shots of vodka last night and realized that I couldn't stop drinking until I emptied the bottle (it was 2/3 full when I started).  This was completely unintentional and I had no plans to get as drunk as I did.  This is an almost daily routine for me and it's starting to cause problems.  I'm going to try tapering off starting today.

there's a lot of cliche things that help people quit drinking. they sound silly cliche but it's one of those things where you just put one foot in front of the other and keep moving forward. I lost a friend to alcoholism. I miss him every day. he was kicked out of every bar in north miami, lost good jobs, was eventually isolated though people would try to look in on him and help when possible. he experienced sporadic homelessness and several misdemeanor arrests.  Several times he tried to quit but never went to meetings at AA. he was sharply intelligent and independent and stubborn. he was also hospitalized several times and one of the last times i spoke with him he was in the hospital and very embarrassed which was understandable but not at all necessary when someone is just try to say "hey i love you man so stop killing yourself please". But it's hard for people to hear i guess. He had tried to detox and had a seizure and collapsed on the sidewalk and smashed his face up pretty good. this is someone who i went to highschool with. later we shared a house with other friends and spent lot's of free time together going to shows and parties and having life forming experiences. for several years he was one of my closest friends who i totally cherished. i moved away from miami and we kept in touch but not enough and some years after i left and friends moved on in life getting married etc is when his drinking and isolation really started. 

it's incredibly sad and frustrating. he was a straight up legend in many ways but the alcohol didn't take long to turn him into a depressed and dark minded guy. the detoxes didn't take and the seizures got worse and the anti-seizure meds are something he didn't stick to and he kept drinking and disappearing. 

so, please do understand that you can wreck yourself if you continue to drink like you are and whatever problems you have that you aren't facing won't go away and will just get buried under all the new problems you'll possibly create for yourself. maybe that's harsh to say but i wish i could've said it to my friend many years ago. he died in  2016 and we didn't even find out that he was gone for 6 months because everyone had lost contact with him largely due to sporadic homelessness and from his drinking. the sadness is endless over this.

and i'm not saying what happened to him will happen to you. we're all different machines with different tolerances and constitutions. But, eventually that shit catches up to everyone. so, while you've got your wits about you maybe it's time to embrace some of those cliches and go to a meeting and spill your guts a bit or just listen.. i think one of the things they say is "you have to surrender to win" which i think is apt for a lot of people. 

you may not even be a full blown alcoholic.. maybe.. you're just binging a while to bury your feelings and stuff.. binging is bad too and the road to nowhere good. so take a breath and figure some shit out and take care of yourself.  i don't know you but i don't want you die. 

  On 2/4/2021 at 8:56 PM, ignatius said:

there's a lot of cliche things that help people quit drinking. they sound silly cliche but it's one of those things where you just put one foot in front of the other and keep moving forward. I lost a friend to alcoholism. I miss him every day. he was kicked out of every bar in north miami, lost good jobs, was eventually isolated though people would try to look in on him and help when possible. he experienced sporadic homelessness and several misdemeanor arrests.  Several times he tried to quit but never went to meetings at AA. he was sharply intelligent and independent and stubborn. he was also hospitalized several times and one of the last times i spoke with him he was in the hospital and very embarrassed which was understandable but not at all necessary when someone is just try to say "hey i love you man so stop killing yourself please". But it's hard for people to hear i guess. He had tried to detox and had a seizure and collapsed on the sidewalk and smashed his face up pretty good. this is someone who i went to highschool with. later we shared a house with other friends and spent lot's of free time together going to shows and parties and having life forming experiences. for several years he was one of my closest friends who i totally cherished. i moved away from miami and we kept in touch but not enough and some years after i left and friends moved on in life getting married etc is when his drinking and isolation really started. 

it's incredibly sad and frustrating. he was a straight up legend in many ways but the alcohol didn't take long to turn him into a depressed and dark minded guy. the detoxes didn't take and the seizures got worse and the anti-seizure meds are something he didn't stick to and he kept drinking and disappearing. 

so, please do understand that you can wreck yourself if you continue to drink like you are and whatever problems you have that you aren't facing won't go away and will just get buried under all the new problems you'll possibly create for yourself. maybe that's harsh to say but i wish i could've said it to my friend many years ago. he died in  2016 and we didn't even find out that he was gone for 6 months because everyone had lost contact with him largely due to sporadic homelessness and from his drinking. the sadness is endless over this.

and i'm not saying what happened to him will happen to you. we're all different machines with different tolerances and constitutions. But, eventually that shit catches up to everyone. so, while you've got your wits about you maybe it's time to embrace some of those cliches and go to a meeting and spill your guts a bit or just listen.. i think one of the things they say is "you have to surrender to win" which i think is apt for a lot of people. 

you may not even be a full blown alcoholic.. maybe.. you're just binging a while to bury your feelings and stuff.. binging is bad too and the road to nowhere good. so take a breath and figure some shit out and take care of yourself.  i don't even know you but i don't want you die. 

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Thanks for all this.  I have a friend who died in a similar way to yours but with heroin.  I can barely think about that guy now without a strong physical reaction.  I knew him since seventh grade and he always had a perpetual habit of disappearing for long stretches of time, and he never talked about any of his problems.

As for me, the problem is that I don't know if I'm an alcoholic.  It seems like a hard thing to discern, especially when you live alone.  It doesn't help that almost all of my friends have drifted away from me over the past two years.  My AA friend is pretty much all I have now.  I can't figure out why, but for some reason people just don't want to do anything with me.  My drinking has only been this bad for about a month and it escalated to this point since around October.

  On 2/4/2021 at 5:13 PM, drillkicker said:

Forget what I said earlier about not being an alcoholic.  I wanted to have a couple shots of vodka last night and realized that I couldn't stop drinking until I emptied the bottle (it was 2/3 full when I started).  This was completely unintentional and I had no plans to get as drunk as I did.  This is an almost daily routine for me and it's starting to cause problems.  I'm going to try tapering off starting today.

yikes. all I can say is vodka and whiskey are the fucking enemy. pace yourself dude, because that shit will change your brain. I don't mean to sound insincere here, but if you're going to drink, then why not stick to wine/beer? I hardly ever drink the hard stuff because I hate the way it makes me act. things are good one minute and then bam - you're all of a sudden really fucking angry or sad or some other emotion that you can't contain thanks to the hard alcohol. at least with a few beers or glasses of wine, I'm still relatively level headed and feel more relaxed.

but yeah, none of us know your level of control and if you feel you can't stop then absolutely, take a break from it an re-assess. a few beers or some wine is fine, but polishing off more than half a bottle of vodka a night is definitely danger zone territory...

  On 2/4/2021 at 9:56 PM, zero said:

yikes. all I can say is vodka and whiskey are the fucking enemy. pace yourself dude, because that shit will change your brain. I don't mean to sound insincere here, but if you're going to drink, then why not stick to wine/beer? I hardly ever drink the hard stuff because I hate the way it makes me act. things are good one minute and then bam - you're all of a sudden really fucking angry or sad or some other emotion that you can't contain thanks to the hard alcohol. at least with a few beers or glasses of wine, I'm still relatively level headed and feel more relaxed.

but yeah, none of us know your level of control and if you feel you can't stop then absolutely, take a break from it an re-assess. a few beers or some wine is fine, but polishing off more than half a bottle of vodka a night is definitely danger zone territory...

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Beer and wine give me diarrhea, even if I just have two drinks.  A single glass of red wine is all my body can take.  Vodka, on the other hand, gives me barely any hangover at all.  I realize that's probably a bad thing but in drunkmode it's really cool.

  On 2/4/2021 at 10:00 PM, drillkicker said:

Beer and wine give me diarrhea, even if I just have two drinks.  A single glass of red wine is all my body can take.  Vodka, on the other hand, gives me barely any hangover at all.  I realize that's probably a bad thing but in drunkmode it's really cool.

this could be allergies. sulfides in wine and gluten in beer. do you have any other food issues? does bread, pizza, pasta mess up your stomach? 

clear booze is supposedly easier on the body long term but too much of any of it isn't good. i don't know how old you are but eventually the hangovers will come. 

  On 2/4/2021 at 10:28 PM, ignatius said:

this could be allergies. sulfides in wine and gluten in beer. do you have any other food issues? does bread, pizza, pasta mess up your stomach? 

clear booze is supposedly easier on the body long term but too much of any of it isn't good. i don't know how old you are but eventually the hangovers will come. 

My stomach gets messed up very easily, but it isn't connected to any kinds of food like that.  I just generally have a poor system.  I do definitely get hangovers from vodka, but they're nothing like wine hangovers.  I'm 23 by the way.

  On 2/4/2021 at 9:44 PM, drillkicker said:

As for me, the problem is that I don't know if I'm an alcoholic.  It seems like a hard thing to discern, especially when you live alone.  It doesn't help that almost all of my friends have drifted away from me over the past two years.  My AA friend is pretty much all I have now.  I can't figure out why, but for some reason people just don't want to do anything with me.  My drinking has only been this bad for about a month and it escalated to this point since around October.

Does it matter? You're bothered by how much you drink, by the fact that you insisted on downing 2/3s of a bottle when your initial plan was to have just a glass and the fact that you spend a lot of money on alcohol annoys you.

That alone should be reason to consider quitting.

The good news is, if you've only been drinking 2/3s of bottles of vodka for a month, tapering shouldn't be necessary. That's mainly for the 2 to 3 *entire bottles* for years folks. Just prepare for a week or so (if that) of not feeling too great.

I sincerely wish you the best of luck. It may suck for a while, but not as much as drinking on your own to relieve your boredom.

  On 2/4/2021 at 8:09 PM, Braintree said:

Everyone's horny, it's true.

oh yah, i can feel it in the air. it'll be kinda poetic if the end result of a lockdown done largely to ensure the health of aging boomers ends up initiating baby boom 2.0

  On 2/4/2021 at 10:33 PM, drillkicker said:

My stomach gets messed up very easily, but it isn't connected to any kinds of food like that.  I just generally have a poor system.  I do definitely get hangovers from vodka, but they're nothing like wine hangovers.  I'm 23 by the way.

there's a chance that you could be allergic to something basic that's in lot's of foods.. if a lot of foods mess up your system.. i wasn't diagnosed with celiac until i was almost 40. you wouldn't really know unless you talk to a doctor. 

23 is pretty young and you're still in good shape ad probably recover quickly from all kinds of abuse on yourself. if your system is often fucked up you should remove things from your diet and see what happens. 

btw, a friend of mine who i've lost touch with, has been an alcoholic for probably 20 years. i'm not sure if he's still alive. going to bars every night was his thing. in his early 20s he went to a doctor and was told to quit drinking before his liver turned into pate'

I heard psychedelics can help overcome alcoholism and addiction (in a suitable set & setting). There seems to be a considerable amount of research on that, it's googleable. Naturally caution is advised.

  On 2/4/2021 at 2:47 PM, manmower said:

Hot co-workers are the worst.

Quite. Years ago my then-gf left me because she thought I was falling for a hot coworker. Well I wasn't, I swear.

Running is the thing

  On 2/4/2021 at 11:06 PM, dingformung said:

I heard psychedelics can help overcome alcoholism and addiction (in a suitable set & setting). There seems to be a considerable amount of research on that, it's googleable. Naturally caution is advised.

Indeed. Ketamine as well.

PCP all day every day.

  On 2/5/2021 at 12:19 AM, cichlisuite said:

Quite. Years ago my then-gf left me because she thought I was falling for a hot coworker. Well I wasn't, I swear.

  Reveal hidden contents

She did had nice legs though.

 

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  On 2/5/2021 at 12:58 AM, Zephyr_Nova said:

PCP all day every day.

Hamilton's Pharmacopeia made it seem sorta OK.. sometimes...???

  On 2/5/2021 at 12:44 AM, yekker said:

Indeed. Ketamine as well.

Ketamine has a different application but is useful as well. Only tried it two times in lower doses for fun, made me feel a bit like I was more hovering than walking but I feel I didn't get the full spectrum of the effects because the dose was too low. It's got a bit of a bad reputation because people use it irresponsibly at parties and then look like zombies made from rubber. It's not that dangerous, though.

  On 2/5/2021 at 1:21 AM, dingformung said:

Ketamine has a different application but is useful as well. Only tried it two times in lower doses for fun, made me feel a bit like I was more hovering than walking but I feel I didn't get the full spectrum of the effects because the dose was too low. It's got a bit of a bad reputation because people use it irresponsibly at parties and then look like zombies made from rubber. It's not that dangerous, though.

Oh good. I’ve been on the fence but your testimony has inspired me to try it.