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Nineteen years ago, an award-winning science-fiction writer did his best to talk his fans into reading a straight-fiction story "Saint Mary Blue" about a rehab clinic. Now that the book is almost drinking age itself, the Dominator is finally getting around to reading it.
Assuming fiction to be like reality (at least when it's autobiographical fiction), the book teaches many lessons about alcoholics, but few about drunks. The Domination of Eiler now steps into that void, to illustrate the difference between alcoholics and drunks.
- Alcoholics hate life and drink to escape it. Drunks love life and drink to enhance it. (Disclaimer)
- Alcoholics seek chances to drink in private, where none can blame them. Drunks seek public venues with social interaction, where caring professionals keep track of their consumption, and friends can call taxis for them.
- Alcoholics deny they drink. Drunks not only avow it, they give good drinks as gifts.
- Alcoholics miss their commitments the next day. Drunks suck it in and show up anyway.
- Alcoholics hurt people when they drink. So do amateur drunks if they lose their focus. Professional drunks learn to avoid those hurtful situations.
- When alcoholics misbehave, they are trained to blame alcohol. When drunks misbehave, they blame themselves, then learn from their mistakes.
- Alcoholics are trained to believe, what they're like when they're drunk is just alcohol talking. Drunks believe, what they're like when they're drunk is just themselves without inhibitions.
- Alcoholics are trained to treat their love of liquor as a disease. Drunks treat it as another thing to enjoy but not overindulge in. Just like coffee, tasty food, television, computerized recreation, sex, childbearing, and any number of other things.
- Alcoholics are trained to believe in a Higher Power which tells them to never drink again. Drunks have the option to believe in a Higher Power whose agents drank but acted wisely like King Solomon, or brought the wine to parties like Jesus of Nazareth.
This is not to say that treatment plans should try to transform alcoholics into drunks. Some people are physically capable of so much drunkenness, the "slow" switch doesn't work. Forunately for the Dominator, his body is quite capable of calling a halt to the festivities on its own. The rest is just a matter of careful planning.
The Dominator will not deny he's a drunk. He now avows he's a drunk, but not an alcoholic. And a professional drunk at that - so professional, he does his best writing on barstools.
- Stephen King would be horrified... but back when he started writing, word processors were not that portable. Now they are.
- If Stephen King had written on a barstool, he might today remember writing "Cujo" - if only because the fellow patrons would have interrupted him to ask, "Can you look at porno on that little computer?"
In the Domination of Eiler, the Higher Power can grant a lifestyle in which alcohol can actually be treated like God's Blessing. Just like ancient priests of Egypt and Babylon used to treat it, and that's practically the origin of priesthood.
(Disclaimer: Of course there are always counter-examples. In particular, such a thing as silly alcoholics may really exist. But it doesn't mean the examples aren't true.)
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