I've recently started to be a bit more conscious of the amount of alcohol that has been in my life for most of my adult life. I try to not be super preachy about this now that I am making a conscious effort to not drink all that often, but every now and then I will encounter someone that has the sort of problem that isn't just him gaining weight and feeling terrible all the time, but is one of those people that just kind of turns mean and awful towards those around them when he is drinking.
In this particular situation it was at a really terrible place to be drunk and mean to everyone as well and I regret participating with the boozing that was taking place there because of how it ended up.
I believe myself to be a functioning borderline alcoholic. I don't allow my booze to seriously damage my life and I never did in the past either. I had a good time, sometimes a bit of too much of a good time, but I never lost jobs, screwed up relationships with family, got into fist fights, things like that. I have had some mean hangovers in the past though and now I work to avoid them as much as possible because they have gotten worse as I get older.
There is a guy that I know that I rarely see. He was part of our bowling group every now and then but I wouldn't see him often outside of these things. Then he stopped going to the bowling things because he had a baby just a few months ago. I hadn't even heard from the guy which is very understandable seeing as how I would imagine that having a newborn really takes up a lot of your time.
He invited me to a "meet the baby" sort of party at his house over the weekend and of course, I was going to go to something like this. The party started at 10:30 AM so I figured it was a family sort of thing, we are just going to have lunch and meet the baby and then that would be it. I hadn't planned on boozing because even when I was at my worst, I rarely drank before noon because it just seems wrong.
Well, when I got there at quarter to 11 my friend, the new father, already had a glass of wine in his hand and I held off and just had water until around noon but then I decided to imbibe a bit with the booze as well. Things were fine, but then he started throwing tequila shots in front of us and it wasn't even 1pm yet. I could see that even at this point he was already being kind of aggressive with his "orders" to drink a shot and he was already pretty loud. It isn't my place to tell him to quiet down, so I just let it ride.
[src](https://img.magnific.com/premium-vector/drunk-man-holding-beer-mug-lively-party_620197-6025.jpg?semt=ais_hybrid&w=740&q=80)I noticed his wife trying to calmly say things to him over on the side and you don't have to be a police detective to figure out that this was in relation to how loud he was being and how he was shoving drinks in front of people rather aggressively and some of these people don't even drink at all. People, especially the Vietnamese people who don't drink, tried to politely refuse but he was insistent and very loud about it. Dude was making an ass of himself at his own party, and to make matters worse this is a "meet and greet" for an infant, who is just sleeping the entire time.
Unfortunately, as is often the case with drunks, his attitude did not improve as the day went on. There was no amount of drinking that you could do that would appease him and this is something I've never really understood about drunks: Why do you insist that everyone get as sloppy as you are?
Then, almost kind of like it was a middle finger to his wife who was lying on the sofa with the baby cradled on top of her, he went upstairs and got his dog to come down even though he knows that his dog is not well-behaved and that his in-laws are afraid of it. His wife meekly protested but he was just like "blah blah blah blah, it'll be fine."
Sure enough, the dog goes mental as soon as it gets downstairs and is being a nuisance, just like my friend is.
Eventually, one of the other people around my age that has known this guy for a while from bowling pulled me to the side and he and his girlfriend said "I think we should all get out of here... this is getting ugly."
I agreed and we made an announcement to our host some sort of lie about needing to be somewhere else and then this just made our host even louder than before and now a bit upset at us for daring to want to leave 4 hours after arriving. The caterers were all gone, the booze was basically all gone, the dude's mother had had enough of him and had left already and things were just getting really bad.
I really felt bad for the wife because it was pretty clear to me in this little bit of exposure time that this is probably what it is like with him every time that he drinks.
I really don't think that I have EVER been like this when I drink. I might be a little animated or perhaps joke a bit too much but I have never lashed out at anyone while drinking like this guy was doing. I'm not a small person and neither is my sensible friend who advised that it might be a good idea for us to depart. Nothing physical was ever going to happen there but it did kind of make me wonder about if these sorts of things could become physical with his tiny little wife or worse, with his kid.
I'm not going to do anything about this but I have to say that this was a real eye-opener for me about this guy in particular and just kind of drinking in general. This mild-mannered and actually really nice person who is a friend of mine turned into an absolute animal at a truly inappropriate time and place.
I can't imagine having my mother visit from the other side of the planet and then being such an ass that she leaves in tears and won't hang out with me anymore.... at a baby's party.
I'm not going to intervene. It's not my place. But if this host does approach me about going for drinks one day in the future I think I will accept and then have a chat with him about his behavior, how it was definitely noticed, how it is shameful, and how I will not have anything to do with him anymore if this happens again. This likely won't do anything to improve his home life but maybe he needs to hear it from someone else.
Alcohol can be a wonderful thing. Lord knows I have had a lot of good times with it but I think there are certain people out there that can control the demons, and certain people that cannot. For me, I stay off the stuff purely because I don't like feeling like shit every day but for my friend, the drunk father, he has a lot more to contend with the day after than just a headache and maybe a bit of nausea.
Have you encountered things like this in your own life? If so, how did you handle them?
