I have had drunk blackouts a couple times. It does happen, and oddly enough witness accounts portray me as annoying but not overly stereotypical drunk (y’know, slurred speech, difficulty walking straight, etc…). I even DM’d a roleplaying game session once that I completely blacked out. Admittedly, my players say it was the longest 8 hours of their lives and still won’t let me live it down. But still, means you can black out and remain quite coherent, for relative values of coherent.
Never faked it though, that’s… how does that even work as an excuse anyway ? “I know I was pathetic yesterday, but it turns out I was even more pathetic than you thought !” doesn’t seem like a great get out of jail free card to me. I tend to apologize *more *for stupid shit I do because I’m drunk than stupid shit I do because I’m stupid.
I’ve done it enough times, but never used it as an excuse for anything or done anything to someone else that I would need an excuse for. I’ve met people I don’t remember (once I had what I can only assume was a pimp call me the day after going out with friends, saying he wanted to get together and talk about how we could “make some money together”; I declined) and had plenty of conversations I don’t remember, and got some bumps and bruises I have no recollection of (from being clumsy, not fighting).
Oh, and once I woke up wearing a shirt…as pants. Pajamas are complicated to figure out sometimes.
I’ve experienced one blackout, at the reception for a wedding in Italy where they were serving cheap red wine out of kegs (KEGS!). Apparently at one point I fell off my chair, grabbed the table cloth, and took the entire tabletop’s glasses with me.
I am an alcoholic, in recovery. I can attest that blackouts are real. I’m sure some people have lied about being blacked out to try to excuse their poor behavior. However, being blacked out is not an excuse. It’s still you doing it.
I hated blacking out. It was extremely embarrassing to find out the next day from friends what I had done. Such as trying to hook up with my friends husband. No memory of that. Or, being at a family party and nagging my boyfriend to propose…all night…in front of everyone. How obnoxious! I didn’t hear about that until 3 years later. I wish I had not been enlightened of my behavior that night. But it’s little things too. Having to check my phone to see if I had drunk dialed or texted the previous evening. Likewise with Facebook.
It’s not fun to black out. Who would try to get to that point? Is not the point of drinking to have fun? I did it over and over, not because I wanted to get that wasted to that point, but because I started every evening with, I know better and I will drink less tonight. I can control this. Denialism at its best.
Yeah, it is fairly common. Not only not remembering what you did but finding out you were acting perfectly normal and not like an out of control drunk. It’s also not an excuse for anything.
I know this was a zombie thread but I appreciate having had the chance to read it. I have wondered about just this subject in relation to the Diane Schuler case (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Taconic_State_Parkway_crash). No one will ever know why she did it (the heavy drinking and then driving with kids in tow) but some people try to at least partially excuse it by saying well, maybe she was in pain and started drinking the vodka (:eek:) and then got so drunk that she was in a state in which her eyes were open and her brain was shut down except for the lizard brain/respiratory drive/muscle memory to drive the car but she didn’t know what she was doing. Some people try to say this is what a “blackout” is and that she wasn’t really conscious while she was doing this fatal wrong-way driving. I never really bought that excuse and also don’t believe that most people who are either teetotalers or very light drinkers (as Diane was claimed to be by her husband) would opt for drinking large amounts of vodka all at once for tooth pain instead of taking an aspirin and calling the dentist.
Is it possible that you can be so drunk that you can appear to be awake but have no idea what you are doing? The consensus, here anyway, seems to be no.
