People who want to find out what a "Drunken Bastard" is can first visit the group's homepage on the World Wide Web. At this site, there is a list of criteria one must meet before being named a "Designated Drinker" of a city. First, one must always be available to drink with people who call him. Secondly, a DD must never leave a party sober.
The purpose of the Designated Drinker system is to indoctrinate new members into the group. My point of contact was with the DD of Phoenix, now the DD of Tempe (I took his place ;-). When you travel anywhere in the world, you are supposed to call on the DD of that area and he has to put you up and get you drunk while you are there. I traveled to San Francisco earlier this semester, stayed at a DBs house, and had a hell of a time. Most DBs are friendly and nonjudgemental.
The central activity of Alt.Drunken.Bastards is posting stories and reading about others exploits. Most DBs try to read the newsgroup once a night, preferably while drinking or after having gotten "lubricated." The group is full of information on how to make certain drinks, what to do in situations, and when important events are. There is no elected hierarchy, but the older DBs do seem to hold respected positions like maintainer of the "homepage" on the WWW. I host a site called the "Hall of Bastards", where various DBs are profiled.
Once a month, if not more often, DBs get together for a "Century Club." This event takes place via a communications network called the Internet Relay Chat (IRC). Every minute for a hundred minutes, each person takes a 1oz shot of beer; alternatively, you can take a 1oz shot of vodka or other hard liquor every eight minutes. The DBs with greater tolerances often show up early to "pre-drink."
During the CC, members catch up since the last CC and note how "the newsgroup is really going to shit" or how "none of the old DBs are with us anymore." But, as the event progresses, everyone becomes too drunk to really care. Sometimes, the members of the group will go over to a "channel" where AA members meet and raise hell.
Completion of a CC is mandatory before one will be treated as a true Drunken
Bastard. DBs tend not to trust anyone they haven't drank with.
At age thirteen, Allan decided to find out what "being drunk" was all about. He took a bottle of clear rum and a few cans of coke from his father's bar, and began mixing them. A few hours and half a bottle later,
."..I sat motionless in a chair in front of the television, wondering whether my mission had been accomplished. I recall marveling at my lack of motor skills and the fact that most anything on television seemed humorous. Finally, I decided, I was drunk....."Allan later tried to go to bed but ended up puking for quite a while. Looking back, Allan realized he had gone a bit overboard, something he says he always tends to do.
Allan was seventeen when he began drinking regularly. He was working full-time at "a dead end job for a typically low wage." At this stage, drinking was a buffer to the menialness of the job, a reality that was also faced by his co-workers. Allan notes that, to this day, he is tolerant of others' choices when it comes to the lives they lead and how they choose to seek pleasure.
For Allan, the first experiences with labeling were positive. A short while after he became a regular drinker, he had developed a reputation as "the drunk guy." His friends and acquaintances marveled at how much he could drink, relative to his slight body weight.
Allan's experience with "others" also aided in the development of his "drinking self", which finally became "who [Allan] is." He says that those who want to judge what kind of person he is are going to do it anyway. Allan would rather "be feared as a violent drunkard than be perceived as a pleasant person, perhaps the kind of individual of whom other can take advantage."
Allan calls this his "personal buffer-zone of vagueness" and claims that he doesn't need all that many friends. Approximately one-fourth of the people that try to get to know him remain friends with him. Allan says this is because they become intimidated by his behavior. His outrageousness is not limited to drinking great volumes of alcohol; he also carves designs into his body with his collection of knives, refuses to back down from a challenge, and sheds his clothes upon achieving intoxication.
On the subject of "problem drinkers", Allan has mixed feelings. He admits that some people are predisposed towards "rapid alcoholism", especially those whose parents were alcoholics. It is his opinion, however, that an "addictive and excessive personality is what leads to substance abuse. It's just that alcohol is one of the most legal, cost-effective, and socially-acceptable substances available."
When you mention Alcoholics Anonymous specifically, you get a much less understanding answer. To Allan and many other DBs, AA is a cult comprised of weak-minded and weak-willed individuals. They recognize that the group has helped millions of people turn their lives around, but, like was said in class, they feel that joining AA is like trading one addiction for another.
From reading Allan's posting to the newsgroup, it is evident that he has had more run-ins with the law than he will admit in this survey. What probably started as an unintended consequence of heavy drinking became a symbol by which Allan can prove his "bastardity" (a word coined for just such a purpose).
Allan is a guy in his 20's, who dropped out of college his freshman year but
has been working on getting his degree for the past six years. On the newsgroup,
he is known for his drunken antics. Favorite activities include scarrification, daring
people to see who can be more outrageous, and sending people electronic, "real-time"
pictures of his "private parts." When you get to know him, however, you
realize that this outrageous behavior is self-protective. By keeping everyone at
a distance, Allan protects himself from being rejected and getting hurt. Fortunately,
he continues to work to obtain money for school. He has also found a female DB that
truly cares for him. She has flown across the country several times to see him, and
they talk for hours at a time on the phone (which her company pays for, unbeknownst
to them).
In high school, she began getting drunk with a group of friends as often as they could get someone to buy beer for them. This turned out to be every weekend. Shelly says that it wasn't the friends that made her drink; she actively sought them out because they were drinkers.
When asked about how much her parents drank, Shelly said that her "father drank like a fish and wasn't ashamed of it." She seems to recall the drinking being the cause of much argument and embarrassment for her mother, "but", she adds, "it never affected his work and he was always responsible."
Shelly's drinking hasn't changed all that much from high school. She says that there are nights when she only has a drink or two, "but they're rare." On a bad day, meaning when she is either depressed or celebrating, she can consume as much as three-fourths of a bottle of vodka. "I've been trying to stay away from the hard stuff and cut down on everything else, but I get anxiety attacks and the hurt and drinking helps - even though everyone knows in the long-run drinking makes it worse."
Her opinion of AA differs somewhat from Allan's. AA to her provides support and distraction for those who want to quit but can't find the strength to do it by themselves. She has gone to a few meeting but didn't get anything out of them. "I'm just not someone to sit around and talk in a group about the things they talk about. I might try it again sometime though. For me, it's the religious aspects I'm most uncomfortable with."
When Shelly is around people who aren't close friends or who aren't drinking, she feels terribly self-conscious; it makes her think about how much she drinks. She has also done some real stupid things when intoxicated, but she wouldn't say anything more than that they didn't involve the law.
Shelly is a middle-aged homemaker. By her own admission, she has attended a couple of AA meetings but was turned off by the religious aspects. She thinks she has a problem with drinking, noting a lack of control over her behavior when inebriated.
My conversations with her in "real-time" yielded more detailed responses. There was a certain despair present, and she admitted more readily to a problem with drinking. Her written answers indicated a high rate of alcohol consumption but no admission of problems resulting from this excess.
As I knew her long before this paper, I didn't expect that she would be dishonest with me. But I guess that admitting you have a problem with your drinking is not something you want to do in front of active drinkers.
Drunken Bastards are always making jokes about Alcoholics Anonymous. One member of the group said:
You AAs are the true losers! Not us DBs...You gave up the booze because you couldn't handle it and spend all your time trying convince everyone else to give up drink because...As you can see, admitting to a drinking problem in front of DBs is not something anyone does. An alternative answer came from a California DB (a female, though DBs don't like to differentiate):
A. You miss the booze and need to prove to yourself your not a boring sober bastard by trying to convince us we drink too much.
B. Your jealous your life is so boring and us drunks are having such a good time.
C. You are sober and have nothing else to do.
D. You are wondering why life is passing you by so fast and
getting scared so you need to prove to yourselfs that life has meaning.
So in Summary AA's are a bunch of wankers that get a buzz outta not drinking and want to continue the buzz by trying to convince drunks to stop drinking. People of AA your missing what life is about.
"[name], I couldn't agree more with your sentiment. I believe that we should live life to the fullest and bozo's should not tell us how to live our lives. However, I think you're missing the point of AA. It's fine to get annoyed when you're being preached at, but to accuse AA-ers of "missing what life is about" is very, very unfair and IMO wrong. Why? Because we *can* control our intake of alcohol and use it to have fun. These people *can't*. They have a physical addiction that ruins their bodies, their minds, and their lives. It's *not* fun for them to be drunk. It's devastating. It's a severe problem."Shelly told me in a private that the reason I didn't find people who admitted to problems with their drinking was because those people are in AA; the rest of them still think the trouble is worth it.
Still, some refuse to modernize their behavior. There was a thread (a series of posts following up on the same subject) on tagging vehicles of convicted DWI offenders so that they could be easily recognized One of the hardest-drinking DBs said, "sober bastards kill a lot of people driving too! Let's take their licenses, shave their heads and shoot 'em on the side of the road too!" He was reacting to the overwhelming DB sentiment, which was that people who drink and drive endanger others and therefore should be punished.
The DBs also believed in personal accountability. Just as they didn't expect other people to judge what they do, they realized that we are each accountable for our actions. This took the form of disapproval of the civil justice system and its emphasis on finding "deep pockets." Similarly, the members of the group thought that the drinking age should be lowered and "blue laws" should be repealed.
Finally, I detected a lot of self-hate amongst the members of the group. One
DB called himself a "Quasimodo" and noted he would give up drinking instantly
if some female would express interest in him. Another, after a 47 day hiatus from
the newsgroup (his fiancee's decision) said, "Let me tell ya, a sober existence
is a sad one. I realized that I truly am a half-wit. I always thought it was the
alcohol."
Of importance was the Adler's excellent article on "tiny-doping." They examined how people who participate in an enjoyable activity have to keep their business secret from the straight-world. DBs very much agreed with this idea. They claimed that they didn't drink around customers, their bosses, or relatives, all people whose opinions actually matter to them.
Another article that was quite interesting was Thomas Blume's "A Social
Role Negotiation to Campus Prevention of Alcohol and Other Drug Problems." Its
applicability was limited by its focus on prevention and the college population.
The process of researching this subject has enlightened me as to the negative
effects of alcohol. A review of Arizona liquor law and civil liability has convinced
me that alcohol use is not all fun and games. Hopefully, by sharing what I learned
with the other DBs, we will convince the reluctant DBs to modernize their behavior
and prevent them from harming others.