Hello, my name is Frank, and I'm an alcoholic.
Or so Alcoholics Anonymous would have me believe. According to them, two drinks a day qualifies me as an alcoholic, a weak-willed chemical addict, a bona-fide diseased person. The Food and Drug Administration, on the other hand, recently confessed two to three drinks a day is good for you. The British Health Department admitted two years ago that up to twenty-four drinks a week is the safe level in which individuals are unlikely to damage their health. Which begs the question who is A.A. going to go after next? Broccoli addicts? Carrot fiends? Or, most hideous of all, the dreaded vitamin junky?

I, for one, refuse to give in to their tyranny of repression through guilt. I do not drink with the intention of getting into a fistfight, vomiting in public, or climbing into an automobile and searching out minivans full of children to powerslide (laughing wickedly all the while) into, as MADD would have you believe. I do drink for pleasure, to aid in social intercourse, for my health, and to relieve the burden of stress the workaday world straps daily upon my back. I have met the most intriguing characters and had the most invigorating conversations while sitting in a bar, and my fondest memories are, quite frankly, getting drunk with good friends. If that is the definition of an alcoholic, than that is what I am. I revel in it, I pursue the title aggressively and, what more, I refuse to change.

Thousands of years before the Bible thumpers condemned it as evil, Noah was enjoying the intoxicating harvest of his vineyards. Alcohol in its many forms has seen us through flood and famine, revolution and renaissance, war and wealth. According to some historians, it has been humankind's constant and faithful companion for three-hundred centuries. That's five-hundred times longer than A.A., and I've every confidence, like Noah and the Flood, it will prevail.

Disclaimer
Views expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Modern Drunkard staff or publisher. In fact, I would like to take this opportunity to deny everything. Your Honor, I was never even near the place and, what's more, those are not my trousers and those are most assuredly not my friends. They are merely a drunken and surly gang of hitchhikers I made the terrible, terrible mistake of giving a lift. I promise to be good. Really. I swear.

I'm staggering home.