I’m not drunk, I’m married!

Drunkenness is a state many of us insist on pursuing from time to time, but it’s usually a fairly bad investment. You have that initial high in the early stages, but most of the time end up with nothing to show for it later but a hangover, a loss of dignity that comes with slobbering on girls half your age and double your attractiveness, and a soul-crushing despair as you realize yet again that yesterday’s boozing only digs deeper into that hole inside yourself that gnaws at your will to live.

On the other hand, there is much to be said for the “liquid courage” effect, which has brought many happy couples and even more disastrous ones together. Lowered inhibitions means more horny people making a move on secret crushes, which, at the very least, brings the sexual tension to a head (heh) instead of keeping it bottled up inside like continuously shaken Coke in a can. And, dancing! Unfortunately, those same lowered inhibitions also bring about an increased occurrence of exposed asses (both literal and figurative), fights about which group of muscle-bound millionaires can defeat other groups of muscle-bound millionaires, and long-winded, tear-ridden ravings about unremarkable relationships and even more banal break-ups. Oh, and bad dancing.

Moving on to the more physical effects, passing out has a certain elegance of finality to it. There’s nothing more depressing than a night out stumbling into the harsh light of dawn, and passing out just completely bypasses the often annoyingly political decision of when to call it a night. No one will whine about you ditching them if you’re splayed out drooling and unconscious on the couch. You also end up providing a valuable canvas for bored midnight body artists. And let’s not forget the diuretic qualities of alcohol, which supplies an excuse and plenty of fuel for whipping out your penis and peeing the name of that chick who gave you herpes into the snow. Girls, it’s OK to cry for not having this opportunity.

Torturing terrorists sure takes its toll.

On an even more positive note, being smashed gives people an outlet for evolution, namely by killing themselves in ways as mundane as ramming an SUV into a redwood at 75 MPH to ways as exotic as trying to add momentum to a high-altitude spit and subsequently hurtling over the railing to a concrete death splat 24 feet below. Unfortunately, this phenomenon does sometimes result in lethal splash damage to unrelated innocents, which puts a damper on the Darwinian celebrations.

And finally, drunkenness can lead to great stories, excepting those cases that involve conversations like:

“Dude, you were so drunk last night.”
“Naw man, but you were WASTED!”
“I can’t even remember what we did!”
“I KNOW!”