I can absolutely understand how this can happen to someone once. I cannot for the life of me understand why anyone would allow it to happen twice, much less do it on purpose, as many of the twenty-somethings around here do every damned weekend.
[/QUOTE]
Well, at the time I didn’t really know that there were better ways to live one’s life.
I came from a poverty-stricken/broken-home/single-parent-family situation and I didn’t really have much guidance growing up. It seemed like normal behavior to me.
I won’t bother recounting some of the stuff I got mixed up in when I was young. Wow. The drinking was minor, believe me.
At one point I did make the conscious decision that I did not, in fact, want to end up in jail and I decided to drop all that shit. I got a good job and an upper-middle class, educated girlfriend and ended up being exposed to an entirely different way of living life. I met a ton of balanced, healthy-minded, educated people and it was a really eye-opening experience. Life is much better now. But when I look at my past, wow.
I used to get blackout drunk regularly during my post-college heavy-drinking phase. Almost every weekend. I’ve probably been blackout 40-50 times. Many times, I did stupid things like, for example, mouthing off to police officers outside a bar or getting in a screaming fight with my girlfriend at a party. Waking up and not being able to remember the night before (especially when there’s a precedent that you did bad things) is one of the worst feelings. I remember sometimes I would send random texts to my friends just to scope them out to see if they were mad at me about anything I did.
Should people be held responsible for what they did when they were blackout? Yes, but you might want to give them a little bit of leeway. Sometimes people drink too much and get blackout without intending to. However, they are still the ones who did what they did.
Yes, but I don’t think I ever used it as an excuse for anything. I don’t think I ever heard anyone else use it as an excuse either. I ran with a lot of drunks in my youth, it was not uncommon.
I’ve done it every now and then. Some of the more humorous examples:
“Let’s stop in this bar!”
[SCENE MISSING]
“WHAT THE FUTHUMP?!?” [Basically I woke up mid air being litterally tossed out of the bar]
Later that night my GF made me go to the hospital to make sure I didn’t land on my head. Apparently I blacked out again in the hospital because I thought I we were just there for 15 minutes. Apparently it was more like 3 hours. They performed a battery of neurological exams on me, none of which apparently could tell that I was completely wasted.
Another time out at a friends summer house in Fire Island:
“Yeah! Let’s do another round of Rocket Fuel with extra shots!”
[SCENE MISSING]
"What the fuck?! [Standing by myself in the living room at 7am covered in silly string]
“Do you want to know what you did last night?”
“Nope”
“Ok, then we’ll never speak of it again.”
Another time with my girlfriend:
Me: “Why do you look so pleased?”
GF: “Do you remember last night”
Me: “I remember drinking a lot at your friend’s party, acting a little crazy at McDonalds and then we came home.”
GF: “And after that?”
Me: …
GF: “You were running around the appartment and said you would marry me if I let you eat that container of raw cookie dough?”
Me: “What the fuck…I don’t remember that at all!”
GF: “It still counts.”
I like to drink, but I try to avoid getting that drunk. There is probably one or two more mundane examples I can think of. One of my college buddies has the best blackouts. He would go to his favorite bar and basically drink until he passed out. The bartenders all knew him so they would make sure he would get home. So from his perspective, he basically just gets wasted and magically wakes up in his bed every night! Now THAT’s enablement!
This, almost to the letter, except that I wouldn’t even realize that I’d been blacked out until things started reminding me and I’d get some little flashes of memories. I would apparently behave reasonably normally (considering that I was pretty drunk), and certainly not oddly enough to lead people I was with to believe that I wouldn’t remember.
I’ve never used it as an excuse. I don’t believe I ever did anything criminal, but I certainly did things that were embarassing, and I didn’t think it was any less embarassing because I subsequently couldn’t remember doing it. If anything, that made it worse.
As was stated earlier, it was an inability to form long term memories, not an inability to function. I can promise you that it’s very real. I probably did it at least a dozen, maybe more times during the eighties. I eventually realized that my tolerance for alcohol had become really low (especially if I hadn’t eaten), and stopped drinking entirely.
Forgot to add: this occasionally happens to me when I stay up finishing a TV show and am very sleepy. The next day, I can’t remember how the show ended.
When you wake up to someone asking “Sir? do you know where you are?” “Hospital” is usually the best possible option.
I think blackouts actually mean your tolerance has become really high. Basically it means that you can now drink enough to circumvent your body’s normal protective response of making you feel sick and dizzy and otherwise physically uncomfortible with what you are doing to yourself. Or you just drank a shitload of hard alchohol very quickly.
I’ve never quite blacked out, but I came damn close once. My group house hosted a lot of parties during my first couple years of law school. At one of them, I somehow convinced myself that drinking a Solo cup full of vodka, ice, and a nominal dash of coke was a sensible idea. Then I decided to nap on the living room sofa for a bit.
I barely remember waking up to see this woman leaning over me - an LLM student, Swedish, lovely beyond words. She spoke.
“Forgive me,” I said - or thought I was saying - “But I’m far too drunk to understand you. Could you try that once more?”
An exasperated wrinkle creased that lovely brow. I was seized by the arm - this angel was strong! - and tossed into my room. (I lived on the first floor, near the living room). The notion had barely sunk into my head that being dragged to one’s room by a beautiful woman is a Very Good Thing before the door slammed closed - alas, with the girl on the other side. She yelled something - I assume, in retrospect, that it must have been something like “go to sleep!”
I slept.
The next morning, the memory had a bizarre, dreamlike quality to it. I was fairly sure that what had happened was real, but I wasn’t certain. So I emailed the woman, apologized if I was out of line, and asked if she’d actually tossed me into my room last night.
I dont think that state can last very long because you either pass out shortly after or are generally not interested in doing anything but sitting by the toilet./QUOTE]
Oh, you’d be surprised. I’ve had this happen to me about 4 or 5 times, and the main symptom is gaps of time, sometimes as long as a couple hours. In college, I played in an improvisation band (yeah, a “jam band”) and we recorded the entire show. After the show, I do remember going to another party, but the last half hour or so of the show I completely had no memory of. I played the tapes later, and there were songs on there we had never done before or since. Complete improvisations, musically sensible (although a bit sloppy), that I have no memory of playing whatsoever. It was odd listening to yourself play something you’ve never heard before. Utterly weird.
I spent alot of time working and drinking at bars, pubs, parties, etc. and I can testify that it happens to some people often.
Personally, I am a “long distance” drinker. I drink at a slow, steady pace, and usually close whatever event I am at. I don’t get overly intoxicated, but I have had nights that I don’t remember everything until someone reminds me, then it comes back.
I once had a female room-mate who was a notorious binger. she was famous for disappearing for days at a time and then coming home like she had just gone out to the store for a minute.
Anyway, We all went out drinking at the bar we worked at and she got sloshed and picked a fight with one of the owners! He’d finally had it with her, so he fired her and had her thrown her out. She showed up for work the next day and had no clue as to what had transpired the night before. It was priceless! I thought she was faking but after questioning, she had no memory of anything that happened.
We soon realized that this was a regular pattern. After a while, her shenanigans and drama till the wee hours in the morning and her denial of doing anything wrong got to be too much and we booted her out.
Blacked out drunk once, and it scared the shit out of me <still does> because I’ve been WAY drunker than that before, and never blacked out. Had a full stomach, was with good friends, drank over a period of 7 hours or so. All I can attribute it to is mixing alcohol, somehing I’d never done before because I don’t drink beer. Ever. Hate it. But I started with hard cider, which I love. The night graduated to irish coffee…and that was it. Admittedly, it was 4 hard ciders and probably 4 irish coffees, but come on…over a whole evening? We started at 5 p.m and closed the place down at 2. And I remember standing up from the table in the restaurant/bar, and waking up 4 hours later on a couch. Apparantly I had redecorated the ENTIRE bathroom of the gentleman who drove me home <I was visiting friends out of town>. And, though he was pretty much a jerk in other ways, I WILL call him a gentleman for not letting me use that bathroom and taking care of everything, including making sure I was all right.
Anyway, scary shit because it was so totally out of whack with the last 30 years of my drinking experiences.
I can tell you I’ll never mix booze types again, though!
A friend was having a party at her house while her parents were away and the two of us had obtained a 40oz bottle of tequila to share. Apparently word got out about the party and many many people she didn’t know showed up. She got worried about that and decided not to drink. The key part of this story is that she didn’t tell ME she wasn’t drinking.
We were too cool for salt and lime, we were just using water glasses. The difference was, hers was filled with water. At some point after I had choked down the first glass I started watching her drink. I believe the words “If she can do it, I can do it” might have left my mouth. They tell me I had a wonderful time. It was the first time I had ever been sick while drinking, the only time I’ve ever blacked out while drinking and to this day the smell of tequila makes me cringe.
I was lucky that I didn’t end up in the hospital - I was 16, about 100 lbs and there was very little left in that bottle in the morning.
Pretty much every night. (I’m not bragging, I know that’s a really bad thing.) I’ll wake up in the morning… ok, afternoon and find that someone had helpfully closed and locked the windows and sometimes even refilled the ice cube trays and I have no recollection of it. Nor how I obtained the fresh assortment of oddly-placed bruises that occasionally crop up.
