It might be hard to believe, but I am not particularly territorial about writing. Sometimes friends will point out that someone has written an essay that sounds a lot like something I wrote, or that a writer I admire is working on a book with the same title as one of mine, or that a travel journalist has written something awfully close to a piece I wrote a couple of years earlier, even using the same angle I came up with.
Most of the time, this doesn’t bother me. (Especially when it’s an author I admire.) After all, every writer but one has had to follow earlier practitioners of the craft. In journalism, such articles are even called “follows” or “follow-ups.” Sometimes a follow article will advance the narrative with new information, undiscovered sources, and additional insight. Sometimes it’s just a simple do-over. (As the hack reporter asks in an old journalism joke: “Thanks for agreeing to be interviewed. Can you tell me exactly what you told The New York Times?”) They happen. We have to get over it.
And that is why I hope it is okay that I am writing about something that many other drinks writers have already addressed: How I came to re-evaluate my relationship with alcohol.
I blame (or, more accurately, credit) the pandemic. Things change once you start doing all your drinking at home. As a purely hypothetical example, if you’re regularly consuming four or five beers a day, you might lose count when they’re mostly on draft. However, it is fairly hard to overlook the amount once you’re forced to bring home 28 to 35 beers every week. They take up space, in a home that already feels crowded by lockdown. The empty bottles and cans bear constant witness until you take them away, and you have to take them away again and again. At some point, you might start to wonder if it’s really necessary—and if it’s not necessary, why do it? Cutting back will at least save some shelf and refrigerator space. Even laziness makes its case: Drinking less means that you won’t have to take out the recycling as often.
And then, without even realizing it, you find yourself drinking half of what you were drinking before, with no ill effects. On the contrary: You have to admit that you’re sleeping better. You lose a good amount of weight—some from lockdown, plus several pounds from before. If you keep a close eye on your finances, you might appreciate having the cash equivalent of 40 or 50 beers left over at the end of the month. At a time when it’s hard to keep up with everything you have to do, cutting back on drinking can feel less like something that is going away and more like you’re actually giving yourself more space, time, and money.
None of which is particularly original, I recognize, nor is it entirely clear to me why I actually cut back. But something that comes to mind is an image from the Before Times, when I used to walk across Prague’s Old Town early in the morning every workday. As I passed through the web of lanes that surround Old Town Square, I would watch the city’s army of sanitation trucks hosing off the cobblestone sidewalks and streets, spraying away the urine that sloppy drinkers had deposited the night before. At the same time, I could see convoys of the city’s beer trucks making their morning deliveries on those same streets and sidewalks, bringing in fresh tank beer, kegs, and bottles to the many taverns of Old Town. There’s a strange feeling when you realize that the two different sets of trucks are dealing with what is essentially the same liquid, separated only by 24 hours and a journey through a person’s body. These guys bring in the fresh beer, and those guys wash away what was previously beer, and they keep doing this, every day—but maybe none of this is really necessary, or at least not in such large volumes?
That is not an observation I have heard anyone else make, though of course some other writer almost certainly has made it. Everything that can be written has been written before. And somewhere, sometime, it will all be written anew.
If I have stolen that line from you, or merely followed you in mentioning it, please have a beer, or half of one, and try not to take it too personally.
