Drunken Stories I’ll Never Tell

Ahead of my January detox, and to answer some critics about the efficacy of a month long cleansing I wanted to write a post about how ‘Moderation’ in the past while a nice idea in principle, rarely works for me.

To illustrate this fact I could write a pain inducing, cringe worthy post about the decade that was my twenties and some of the boozy adventures that me and my band of merry men regularly ‘enjoyed’.

Getting kicked out of a Lionel Richie concert was a low, so too Millennium Eve and facing an Ecuadorian Firing Squad but they weren’t the worst chapters of my life. Certainly not on a par with the likes of Keith Richards who snorted his own dead Father’s cremated ashes in a drug and drink fuelled marathon session.

I could tell you about:

• The time I instigated a bar brawl in Boston for flirting with a woman, completely oblivious that her ‘friend’ was in fact her husband.
• The time where I was ‘politely escorted’ from a strip club and broke my thumb in my tumble.
• The time I missed my last train from Cascais to Lisbon and ended up sleeping on a park bench, and deciding next morning as the street vendors began setting up their stalls around me, that it would be a good idea to walk back to my hotel in the blazing sun along the beach front – 30km away.
• The time I missed the late night bus from a nightclub on the outskirts of Montpellier, France and ended up walking back for hours groping in the darkness through fields and bizarrely traversing an assault course en route.
• My last night in Shanghai where on my way home after a club I caved to an offer of a ‘free massage’ and went back to a shady hotel that was certainly not what was offered on the flyer.
• The NYE in Belfast where I slept on the streets ten years ago because I was lost, without a phone or wallet and had puked all over myself.
• The night in Boston when I left the club and lost my bearings, spending the next 3 hours roaming around the ghetto until I had the brainwave of calling my brother on his cell phone to collect me.
• That night in Vancouver where my buddies and I went skinny dipping in a community swimming pool only to have the police arrive to investigate the disturbance. My narrow hasty escape kickstarted a nocturnal adventure not unlike Joyce’s Ulysses except I was in a drunken haze roaming the city streets in my underwear for 3 hours until I sobered up and corrected course – 10km from my hostel..

I mean, I could tell you about these stories, but some things are better kept private.