Lost a month once, but it wasn’t booze induced. It was a combination of pain meds and high fever. I can remember going to the hospital in mid April, then my next memory is it being mid may and I’m at my sister’s graduation.
Lost hours, many many times - I can totally buy Martin Hyde’s suggestion that if you blackout once, you’re much more likely to do so again. Never lost a whole day or anything close to it though. I’ve since stopped drinking so it’s unlikely to happen - I could see it though; it takes less and less alcohol to get you into a blackout, the more times it happens. So presumably eventually, you get to the point where any alcohol makes you blackout, then you just need to drink normally in a day and it’ll vanish. (Presumably this is just before your liver explodes and you die.)
I’ve lost several hours to alcohol’s sweet embrace, but never a full day, let alone an entire weekend.
That’s pretty funny but unless I’m misunderstanding what you’re saying it doesn’t seem you lost a whole day or days. I’m curious about the phenomenon of someone waking up after partying and thinking it Saturday afternoon when really it is Sunday afternoon, literally lost a whole day to drinking. As I said in OP I’m a heavy drinker and have had blackouts before but never anything approaching that scale. There again I’m not apt to drink pre-6pm most of the time so maybe I just don’t get the build up.
The closest thing I’ve had to a lost day was when I’ve been so jetlagged I’ve slept for a ridiculous amount of time but that of course is completely different.
Furthermore, I don’t get terrible hangovers, but the last thing I’m apt to do of a morning after is to start drinking again, I have maybe done it twice in my life and usually I’ve been a little bit less thirsty that day than the previous night.
I think I lost an hour or two during college days–but never an entire day, let alone weekend.
Just losing a bit of time, and various conversations, is pretty freaky.
My grandpa quit drinking for the bulk of his life after a Depression-era binge in which he began partying in NYC and woke up two days later in Philly.
Oh, hell, yeah. For a while, losing gaps of time was a normal part of my life. For instance, one of the first things I’d do a lot of mornings was wake up and look out my front window to see how my car was parked to get a clue how blasted I was the night before. The worst was if my car wasn’t there at all. Did I leave it at the club? At someone’s house? Was it stolen?
Since I didn’t want anyone to know the extent of my blackouts, I had to kind of sidle up to conversations about the previous night’s activities, and fish for clues about what I did or didn’t do the night before. The best was when I wasn’t a topic of conversation. This meant I’d been pretty low key. The worst might be something like, “Man, Sue is never going to talk to you again. I can’t believe you peed in her aquarium.”
My twenty year sobriety anniversary is coming up the first of October. I say the first of October, but it could have been September 29th or 30th. I was pretty baked and don’t remember.
Man, it’s amazing what you can accept as normal sometimes.
I had a lost weekend in a hotel in Amsterdam, and double pneumonia in a single room, and the sickest joke was the price of the medicine. Are you laughing at me now? May I please laugh along with you?
Another vote for just an hour or two. The lost hour is totally worth the buzz you get from 10 straight ounces of vodka. What’s not worth it is the room spinning for another hour after you snap out of your trance. So I’ve only done that twice.
ETA: but who hasn’t had a sort of a fugue state once in awhile even without alcohol? Especially when you’re doing something repetitive, you snap out of it and don’t even recall being self-aware before that very second, being sort of on auto-pilot?
Alcohol has helped me misplace an hour or two. The combination of “drugs” and alcohol, maybe 4 or 6.
Two years I never drew a sober breath. I call them the lost years.
Three words: San Luis Obispo.
Some of my fellow Dopers know of which I speak.
I have gotten seriously, properly gold-star shit-faced only a few times, and I’ve never blacked out.
In fact, if I had, I might be more likely to get equally drunk now. But no, I remember every drunken lurch of which might generously be called ‘dancing’, and every slurred come-on passing as my most sophisticated banter.
I still avoid tequila.
That gives me an idea…
Yes, the above.
I went on a date with my then…well, calling her “girlfriend” is an exaggeration, let’s call her a “date buddy” (she wasn’t putting out so “fuck buddy” isn’t the right term either). Anyway, I went on a date with her over New Year’s Eve. And we drank a lot, and we ended up going to see several people who we kinda sorta knew, and at midnight we kinda sorta snogged a bit, and on her way home she said she wanted to do a lot more of that in the future.
Next morning, I saw her again, and made a mention of what she might like to do in the future. She was horrified. She didn’t remember going to anyone’s apartment or kinda sorta snogging or anything like that. At first I thought she’d had a 4 AM change of heart, but later I realized, after we walked past the same places we had that night and she had no recollection of them at all, that she’d honestly forgotten everything that happened that night.
So I guess what I’m saying here is, alcohol affects different people in different ways. I remembered everything, and AFAIK I’ve never forgotten anything, but other people don’t get that way. Maybe this is where we do a poll here to see what the distribution is.
And I was particularly upset about her loss of memory, because we never did snog again, even kinda sorta.
It’s probably a good thing that I don’t remember the last time I went on an ether bender.
I thought blacking out was the purpose of drinking?
QtM, sober over 20 years (and blackout-free that whole time too!)
And you were wrong.
I lost about 12 hours one New Year’s Eve. From say 9 PM to a few hours after sunrise when I finally went to bed. It’s weird for me because I’ve occasionally drank enough to get sick but only a few times ever, and never blacked out before. Plus I had a few hazy memories the day after and a few more have come back and it was a really great time. I just don`t remember any of it.
I’ve always associated blacking out, whether it’s hours or days, with problem drinking. I clearly drank too much, but I was having fun and not annoying anyone and actually continued to be polite. I found out the next day that I had spilled gin on some woman so I apologized to her. She said not to worry because I’d already apologized profusely at the time. Nope, don’t have any recollection of either spilling the gin or apologizing.
That takes me back a few years.
To answer the OP, not full days or weekends, no. A few hours here and there, but not all that often.