Alcohol has made me fat and impotent

I get smashed, get back at three o’clock in the morning, two weeks later some bloke from DHL turns up asking me to sign for a life-size edible Hitler.

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Before I start this column, for full disclosure I should tell you that I am not a student.

Having said that, this morning I did get up at 11am, then drank a cup of tea out of an Aerial Powerball because I hadn’t done the washing-up, and then later on today I’ll be spit-roasting a cheer-leader with some rugby boys.

Boozing is obviously part of university folklore, so get ready, I’m about to blow your mind: I’ve decided to not drink in June. Yeah that’s right! A month off the sauce. I’m brave like a soldier, or a fireman, or someone having colonic irrigation for fun. This is a first for me, I’ve barely strung two consecutive dry days together in the past.

I’ve spent about 30% of my life drunk. And do I regret it? Not a bit. I regret the hangovers, obviously, but that’s it. As soon as scientists work out how to produce hangover free alcohol I plan to be pissed pretty much the whole time.

But only when I’m drunk

In fact, they probably have invented hangover-free-alcohol, but haven’t told us about it because things would get out of hand.

People would be sat at their desks, pints of snakebite on the go. Productivity would collapse and kebab shops would make up 40% of our GDP.

I tell you what I do regret though, the times I was sober when I could have been drunk. Like the driving test I failed. What a wasted opportunity to be shit-faced. Better to have failed for being dangerous, rather than simply incompetent. Or all the meals I’ve eaten sober, because alcohol adds two Michelin stars to everything.

I came home so hammered the other night that I went into the fridge, picked up a jar of Dolmio pasta sauce and downed it, and let me tell you it tasted like the breast milk of Aphrodite.

Sober life is so flat, so dull, and alcohol adds risk to everything. Every time I go for a poo I wish I was drunk. The feeling you might fall off the bowl is absolutely exhilarating. The toilet becomes a smelly Bucking Bronco.

I’m a better person when I’m drunk. If I become the same man sober as I am when I’m drunk I will consider my life a success. Beer makes me friendlier, more courageous, more honest. Where would I be without this delicious emotional laxative?

Well, down the gym probably. But nobody ever found love in the gym. How many inventions have been conceived on the treadmill?How many friendships forged on the cross-trainer? Exactly: zero, zilch.

Crick and Watson cracked the structure of DNA down the pub, not in the steam room. The only thing you’ll crack in a steam room is your own skull as you slip on the phlegm of a stranger, a gooey whelk hidden by the hot vapour.

In the last five years I’ve conceived over 400 different businesses whilst drunk (e.g. tanks that look and sound like goats). Obviously, I haven’t actually started any of them. But I really think that there is something in the goat tanks idea, it might just be the innovation that defeats the Taliban.

I want excitement in my life. But when you’re sober you’re never surprised. And who wants a life without surprise? I’ve never been on a dry night out and then been asked the morning after, “Do you remember when you arm wrestled that lesbian?” Those who think they have squeezed every drop of adventure from life have never gone online shopping when they’re pissed.

I get smashed, get back at three o’clock in the morning, two weeks later some bloke from DHL turns up asking me to sign for a life-size edible Hitler.

In London they’ve started doing “Sober pubs”, or dry bars. A pub without alcohol? What a pointless exercise. A pub without booze is like having a brothel without vaginas. We fetishize health now.

People have a masochistic desire for self-flagellation, not with whips but with smoothies. Why do you want to live forever you fool? Well done, you’re going to squeeze out an extra 5 years. You’ve now condemned yourself to stay even longer in the concentration camp of your own self-loathing.

Living longer is not a good idea. By extending your life span, you’re basically like someone who pushes back their flight home on the last day of their holiday. Yes, they get more time in the resort, but all they can think about all day is that their holiday is about to end. We see exactly the same scenario in old age, but for “flight home” read “death”.

When you’re lying on your death bed, the dewy gaze of your loved ones clinging onto you like mooring lines, your ship about to disembark this mortal port, you won’t ever wish that you’d eaten more hummus. You’ll mourn the people you wish you’d told you loved; the lakes you didn’t swim in at midnight; the Tupperware you could have defecated in.

And all these are facilitated by alcohol, that mourish steroid of joy.

Having said all that, alcohol has made me fat and impotent. Trying to get an erection when you’re hammered is like trying to blow up a lilo with a faulty foot-pump, it takes forever, and then when you finally manage to do it, you realise that the lilo has got a hole in it too.

I want to detox for a bit. I’m bored of waking up with smoke in my brain, and an anchor in my belly.

So I’ve challenged myself to a dry June. I want to commit to this in public so I’m held to account. I will not touch a drop for a month. Thirty days without booze? I’ll drink to that.

For more from Max Dickins, check out his youtube.