Music Babble

Forgot to mention a couple of things regarding his potentially buying it himself: first, he walks with a walker (one of those that you can get to a place, turn it around, and sit down on the seat and just drink from there), he lives a quarter-mile from the 7-11, and he could be very politely described as slipshod, literally -- you can see his socks through his the back of his shoes when he walks. Also, we're known to each other: whenever I come across him I stop and we talk for a few minutes; he's genuinely nice (if a bit of a Jesus freak). So this isn't just some rando in the gutter. I've always known he's a serious boozer but he tries to hide it around people. I also am uncomfortable doing anything vice-related in public, down to not smoking cigarettes around children; if he needs beer enough to break the front he keeps up, he must have been pretty poorly off, and that time of day I would have probably been the only English speaker around for a while. So it's a bit more complicated.

But yeah, thanks for the advice and I'll definitely shoot you an e-mail if I have to. Right now I'm feeling kind of silly for having worried about it (plus it's 5am, a new day when anything is possible). I think it's lingering twelve-stepism; I never bought into it enough to need to be deprogrammed, though I tried to back in the day, but the idea that even being around the stuff is a road to ruin can probably be traced directly back to that. (I don't regret having gone to AA for a year or two as it helped me a lot in early sobriety, but I have my differences with the ideology.) There are people who go too far the other way and say that anyone can learn to moderate, but I definitely can't, and for me alcohol removes inhibitions, including the inhibition against having another one.

I guess I'm especially sensitive to alcohol partly because it's financially ruinous, as I've found in two stretches of my life. A twelve-pack in 2011 dollars was $11, and if you have one of them every day it adds up quick. I'm not going to do the math, but if you smoke a supply of weed in three weeks and take four off afterward, that's only around $160 for seven weeks, total. Not cheap, but it's not going to get you evicted.

But I'm rambling. Thanks as always for the thoughtful response.