Just because Hunter Thompson, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Chandler, Raymond Carver, John Cheever, John Steinbeck, Jack London, Truman Capote, O. Henry, Tennessee Williams, Dylan Thomas, Dorothy Parker, Edgar Allan Poe, Norman Mailer, Jack Kerouac, William Faulkner, Charles Bukowski, Eugene O'Neill, Sinclair Lewis, James Baldwin, James Thurber, Fred Exley, Pat Hamilton, Jean Stafford, Ken Kesey, W.B. Yeats, Aldous Huxley, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Charles Dickens were raging alcoholics crippled by the unbearable darkness of their every conscious thought doesn't mean you have to be one, too!
Instead, try a more writer-friendly hobby, such as weaving place-mats or building tiny cottages out of peanut butter and crackers. You can even deliver them as Christmas presents to the very same neighbors who manually removed your unconscious body from their front yard after you set it on fire last Christmas.
When all else fails, remember that the guy asking for money for his daughter's tattoo removal at the corner gas station is also an alcoholic, and that's not a Pulitzer Prize-shaped lump underneath his army jacket. If that doesn't kill your buzz, Vladimir Nabokov - arguably the greatest writer of the 20th century - wouldn't even drink wine with his Kraft singles. The only thing old Vladdy was addicted to was too much butterfly-hunting!
The lesson here is it's better to collect bugs than to chase invisible ones away from the insides of your eyelids when you're going through alcohol-withdrawal-induced hallucinatory seizures. I can't stress this enough.
