Share your "blackout while drunk" stories

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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These could be yours or a family member’s or a <ahem> friend’s. Recent or in the dark, distant past. Dates & places must be changed to protect the guilty. Possible questions to answer: Was the blackout part of a serious drinking problem or a one-off? Did the person know that they blacked out or did someone have to tell them later, “Hey dude/ette, you were completely OUT.” Etc., etc.

I’ll go first.

In the early 80s I drank A LOT. Not in bars. Couldn’t afford it. But I could afford a $4.00 gallon of wine, and I put away one of those about every 2-3 days. Couldn’t keep liquor in the house, as I’d drink it all. (Just like I can’t keep ice cream in the house now.) I drank for only one reason: to get drunk. I might not have been able to come out and admit it at the time, but looking back, yeah, that was the reason. I was in a truly low place in my life, broke (hence the cheap wine), involved with a married man, in a job I hated. Can you see any reason there NOT to drink to insensibility? <Rhetorical question.>

One time I was at home on a weekend afternoon and had just gone through one of those 1.5 liter bottles of cheap white wine, and I remember lying down on my bed just for a minute. I opened my eyes a fraction of a second later (so it seemed) and it was dark outside. It was a couple of hours later. It was like when you have surgery and they give you a shot and one nanosecond later you’re in the recovery room. It wasn’t like “falling asleep”-- it was BAM! lights out.

P.S. I gave up drinking a couple of years later. Don’t know why exactly. Have no interest in it any more. But I wish I could have all of those empty calories back…

Story #2: Later in my life I fell in love with a guy who turned out to be an alcoholic. Don’t ask me why I didn’t see it immediately, because it was as plain as the empties in the trash-- possibly because my judgment was impaired in the years immediately following my husband’s death–but it didn’t register on me that he was drinking two six-packs of beer every night. He rarely had hard liquor in the house, but he put away the beer like nobody’s business. He’d buy what he called the “suitcase of beer”-- the 18-pack-- and drink it all in one evening. (Didn’t Paul Newman used to say that he drank a CASE of beer every day?)

This guy wasn’t all that into sex-- emotional issues, physical function issues, turns out there were sexual abuse issues in his childhood that came to light later, whatever. One evening, after he’d gone through his usual two six-packs, and possibly a bottle of wine, too, we went out to a concert that was really fabulous, When we got home to his place, he was drunk, but he started getting amorous, and it was a nice surprise, as this didn’t happen often, I got on board (so to speak) enthusiastically. We had one of the most romantic intimate encounters of my entire life–suffice it to say that he said all the right things-- all the things a woman longs to hear-- he did all the right things, it was like a movie. I was so happy-- I thought (sad to read now), “This is who he really is and he loves me!”

The next day I was still all aglow, and I told him how wonderful last night had been and how wonderful he had been.

He said, “Yeah, that concert was great!”

I said, “I’m not talking about the concert, I’m talking about later in the evening.”

He said with complete sincerity, “What happened later in the evening?”

I told him about our magical encounter and HE DIDN’T REMEMBER ONE MINUTE OF IT.

[Pause]

I said, “Who WAS that?? Did you mean all the things you said??”

He said, “That was me. I was there, but I JUST CAN’T GET **BACK **THERE.”

He asked me all about it, and I told him, but he didn’t remember one single thing.

I call that a blackout.

Lordy. And yet I stuck with him for another four years. :smack:

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**Share your “blackout while drunk” stories **

How could I? :confused:

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I swear I had five dollars in my pocket.

We went to the Taco Store.

We did?

There’s the wrappers on the table.

4

I have never drank, because of diabetes my whole life. I have went down because of low blood sugar. I assume it’s similar. I never know I’m going down. My family has learned to recognize the signs. Of course I have no memory of what happens. I do talk and move about. Apparently I say very outlandish things. May be completely different than blacking out from alcohol, IDK.
I have family members who have blacked out. I have watched them struggle the next day, trying to remember events while being hung-over. It’s kinda sad.

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I have been actually intoxicated (as opposed to pleasantly tipsy) probably only 5-10 times. I have never blacked out. To my knowledge, none of my friends has blacked out, though as we age I notice some of the more frequent drinkers having some recall lapse for minor conversations had while drinking.

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College years: senior year 1998. It’s end of my final quarter at Northwestern, and also the weekend of Dillo Day, which is generally just a weekend of all-out debauchery, or, well, by NU standards.

Anyhow, at the time I was in a jam band, and we were playing our last show at one of the dorms. I had been drinking throughout the day, and our guitarist helpfully brought a handle of vodka to the show. We all shared the handle, I perhaps having more than my fair share, played the show. It ended; I went to another party afterwards.

Now, I remember the other party, and I thought I remembered the whole show. Apparently, there was about 15-20 minutes of the show that did not make it into long term memory. I saw the guitarist the next day, and he talked to me about the show and said something about a cool song we made up on the spot towards the end of the set. I have no recollection of it whatsoever. Then he names a couple other songs we played before and after it. I have no recollection of playing those songs.

Well, he happened to record the show, so we listened to it, and there I was, playing piano and keyboards surprisingly competently for 20 minutes of songs I don’t remember playing, and one song we never played before. It was very disconcerting hearing original music coming out from under your fingers that you and the band created on the fly, and have no memory of playing. Had I not heard the recording, I would have thought the guitarist was just trying to pull one over me.

7

Only once that I know of. I had the majority of a fifth of vodka at home in less than half an hour. It felt really great for about another half hour, then I realize I had been staring at the TV for more than an entire show without remembering what I’d been watching. Then the dizziness came, which explains why I’ve never done that again.

There have been some times where I’ve browned out and only vaguely remembered the last night’s events but none where someone who knew me informed me of something I didn’t remember doing.

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A friend (truly a friend this time :)) had 3-4 drinks one evening and ended up collapsed alone in a parking lot, ambulance called by random strangers, ER drama followed. He apparently has some type of hypersensitivity to alcohol and didn’t know it. He knows it now.

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Too many times times to relate all of them. But I once woke up on the kitchen floor of my drinking buddy’s apartment. Mostly the kitchen, half on the carpet, with my face on the vinyl floor. No idea how I got there. Last I remember we were in a bar. Must have driven there, my buddy didn’t have a car.

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Nope, I’ve never drunk so much as to black out. Nor have any of my friends in my presence. I don’t believe that I’ve been at a party where someone blacked out.

Falling asleep when stone cold sober is another matter! :smiley:

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My brother tells of a time in a camp ground with buddies. They had drank moonshine, the real stuff. He and an other guy went to the bathhouse/toilet. He said his last memory was looking at the concrete floor, really closely. The other campers found them the next morning, passed out.

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I didn’t black out but one time I was at a campground when I had to use the toilet and I was so drunk I made my brother go with me because I was worried I’d lose my way. I had to go a second time during the middle of the night and I did almost lose my way on the way back and went several campsites too far at first, but that’s easy to do when there are no lights on in the campsites even when you’re sober.

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I do remember someone when I was in high school, not a friend but at a party I was attending. Sloppy drunk, combative, slurring, in and out of consciousness. He sprawled out on a sofa, quite stinking of alcohol, and people pretty much worked around him since he couldn’t be moved. At some point he lurched up and left the house, and there was some discussion of whether people should walk him home. I don’t remember if they did, though I do know some of his buddies went after him.

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The only time I ever blacked out was on New Year’s Eve when I was living in Virginia. I was going to go to a party and had bought two bottles of champagne, but it started snowing and I decided not to go out. So I popped some popcorn and opened one of the bottles. After finishing that, I opened the other one. I woke up the next morning on the bathroom floor, with a black eye.

15

After a long hot afternoon by the pool drinking rot gut bourbon, went to a house party where my girlfriend was house sitting. But we were late so didn’t have time to eat. Once there, started drinking red wine then got in the hot tub. Woke up the nest morning to red wine vomit all over the white carpet and apparently I shit in a drawer. It wasn’t fun trying to clean it all up while severely hung over. Girlfriend got fired from her house sitting gig and she fired me as her boyfriend. And I didn’t blame her one bit. I pretty much stopped drinking anything other than beer since then. I’ll have the occasional shot here and there, but not hard booze all day long anymore.

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Funny how we’re all thinking and talking about blacking out nowadays. :smiley:

The only time I can remember was a long time ago, when I was 21 years old. I was at bar with some friends, and my older brother came in with a friend of his from out-of-town. That friend took a liking to me, but only mildly - he was about 15 years older than me, and though he told my brother he thought I was pretty cute, he wasn’t seriously making moves on me. What he was doing was buying me shots of Scotch, of which I happily downed way too many.

I woke up later that night at another (male) friends house, in a spare bedroom. That guy and I were sort of on-again, off-again dating, and he’d ended up taking care of me and got me out of the bar. I have no recollection of getting to his house, only waking up at around 3am thinking “where the hell am I?”

Looking back, I see how easily young girls can get themselves in bad situations. Had my brother’s friend been a bit more of a jerk, or my male friend been a jerk, or had I run into any number of men who could have been jerks it could have very much ended up being a bad situation.

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The last time I was drunk was probably about 35 years ago. It didn’t end well, but there was no blacking out, i.e. doing things that I didn’t remember later. Mostly I remember feeling very sick and being very sorry that I had drunk so much. I did pass out for a while, but I was just lying there, inactive.

There was one time a few years earlier, I was staying at another guy’s house when I was visiting LA, we went out to a few bars I think. I don’t remember where we went or what we drank, and I have vague memories of him driving us home and doing a surprisingly good job considering how drunk I thought he was. Maybe he wasn’t so much. Maybe he had better sense than I did.

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Blackout or head injury? You decide.

The only time it happened was when I was stationed in Germany. We got into a car accident on the way back from Frankfurt (driver was sober). I bumped my head in the back seat but I never had any concusion symptoms. But I also didn’t think I was that drunk. I’ve been drunker.

The last thing I remember was being checked out at the hospital as a precaution. Next thing I knew I was lifting my head up at the MP station. I asked the driver if I did anything weird and he told me I seemed the most sober out of anyone.

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I think it was the summer of 82. Me and Tobin were lifting weights. We worked out a lot at his house after football practice. Anyways, when we finished, we tapped a keg and had a few beers. I liked beer then. Still do as a matter of fact. We drank a lot that night. We heard Squi and the girls might come over later. I think Mark Judge stopped by and we drank even more. Then it gets hazy. I am not sure if we boofed or got into a Devil’s Triangle. It’s hard to remember. I should check my calendar. Reminiscing like this puts me in the mood for a brewski. Boy, those were the days.

20

Cute.

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Reading all these posts (Thanks, BTW!) it occurs to me that there is a fine line between blacking out and passing out. Blacking out seems to include walking around, driving, singing (and even composing music) and to all outward appearances you are conscious and completely awake–except that you have no memory of these events afterwards. Blacking out (from these stories) is followed at some point by passing out or at least falling asleep. You wake up later and people tell you that you composed a new song or were great in the sack but you can’t remember.

Then there’s just plain, no-frills passing out, where you drink a lot and lose consciousness, but don’t perform surgery or fly a plane while under the influence. You just pass out and wake up later feeling like dogshit.

In my OP, I think I passed out. But my BF had a blackout, because he was active and conscious but had no memory of events.

Science-- that’s what we do here. :slight_smile: