like a wounded osprey

One amusing thing about 13, "with heights and malt liquor" (comes great propensity to get fucked up, presumably), is that in some ways it's the most autobiographical piece about me that Dauntless has yet hosted, despite being written by, uh, not me.

In the summer of 2002, I'd just been released from college. I sat on the couch, lay on the couch, really, for a couple weeks, depressed and lumpish in a bathrobe. Eventually, I applied for a job at my neighborhood bar, basically as a joke, just to get in the habit of applying for jobby jobs.

They hired me.

It was then that I began to explore the intriguing world of making around 100 wing-wangs a day and paying back somewhere in the neighborhood of sixty thousand dollars worth of student loans. Cost-cutting was obviously a necessity. Eventually, I bought a GameCube and a hockey game, and stopped leaving the house to do anything but work.

Sometime around then, the Plaid between my house and the bar (a six-block span) introduced a new "it's a buck!" special: 22 ounce bottles of Steel Reserve. I immediately moved my diet to Steel Reserve, Totino's "party" pizzas and "flamin' hot" Cheetos.

I lasted about a month, I think.

The thing that was amazing was that I'd never really feel drunk, particularly. I'd be there, on the floor, marching Carolina to another stirring victory (riding hard the incredible speed and skill of Sir Sami Kapanen, my then-favorite Finn), feeling just fine. Then it would come time to void my bladder; I'd pause the game and start to go upstairs. Frequently I'd fall down somewhere in this process; my first clue that I was drunk.

Thus, the signal feature of malt liquor: it brings out things you might not have known were there.