Speaking of Contest's I'd win...

My other love: Fashion

How to Make Sushi...

How to make a Zine... zine?

I'm going to be making an appearance at the DIY skillshare festival this weekend, so I decided that instead of staying in bed and complaining, like my normal sick self, I would make another instructional zine. I originally made a 'How to Make Sushi' zine, a skill everyone should have if they're partial to deliciousness. 


They were quite popular (in fact I have none left), and so I made a much more obvious alternative. I just finished it there, and I hope it's acceptable. Quite frankly I'm so fucking tired I don't care. Just fuck off and make a fucking zine. Thanks.

This is how the thing is laid out.

(It's much smaller in real life.)

Drinking

(Writing and drawings from Pepper Morrison 10, 'Ad Nauseum'. Apologies for shitty photos of drawings, I don't have a scanner at the moment. There's actually a pretty good picture at the bottom x)

It would seem that I've given up drinking.

I have never had a problem with drink. Well actually, that is entirely untrue, I have never had a problem with booze in the sense that most people would not understand it to be a problem. I know lots of people who have 'a problem with booze' in the more traditional sense, but I have always thought that was an entirely inaccurate way of describing what happened to these people when they drank. It seemed to me, that drink seemed to have a problem with them, rather than the other way around.

At first, because we're young, they just seem to be a laugh. They drink all the time, they are 'party animals', and generally in much demand and reputable for their ability to make a session become a party. Things seem to flow easier when there is someone running around in drunken tomfoolery, generally people follow suit. They lead the way at parties. But then gradually they begin to get this way at lesser functions, until they become (as selfish as it sounds) a chore to be around. And this is when the panic starts to set into their hungover face. Because they have stopped having a laugh and they realise that booze is out to get them.

It haunts them, torments them, beckons to them to come and play and forget about everything. Drink forces its way in and makes them blurred and happy at first and then gradually more and more worried as it calls louder and louder. Into daily life, into conversation, into wants and needs. All this happens as though completely exterior, as though booze is not an inanimate liquid, but almost an all knowing deity that has an immense hold over its subject.

This is booze having a problem with you. I am very lucky to not have these particular problems. Drinks problem with me is to cause a vague sense of unease that can't be shaken off, not quite out to overpower me, but just to let me know that it's lurking away whenever I swig. Don't get me wrong, I love drinking, and I love being drunk. I love not having to take responsibility for anything and since I am quite loud and obnoxious generally, drinking allows me to reach new highs of disgusting vile rudeness with nothing but drunken smiles in return. It lets me kiss people and talk shit to people and have nights out with people that become mushy and turn into a montage of dancing and staggering and laughing and laughing.

But it is a fucking bitch as well. It would turn on me in a second. Well in all honesty it would hint to me from the start that it wasn't entirely on my side, planting that vague but horrible question in my mind. 'What next?' And all the meanings it could possibly have. What next tonight? A sense of waiting, waiting for something big to happen, a kiss or a fight or an adventure. A sense of dissatisfaction with what is happening right this second, this conversation is never enough, what next?

And what next after the adventurous kissing fight? How do I get home? That one seems small but it encompasses every element of my anxiety. That future of aching hangover and swaying at a bus stop racked with nausea and bitter self hatred as the sun rises. In the same crusty clothes with the same crusty night stuck in my head. Or getting home before the thing. The adventure. What if my panic makes me leave before the big thing happens?

And what next? What next in everything? What the fuck is going to go wrong next? In my stupid little life.

Booze makes me anxious. It makes me panic. It makes me stop enjoying myself. Of course there is a lovely blissful time right in the middle, where I can truly let go. Well as I type this, I realise that this is what I have constructed from the events I have been told about in that time, because in order to go past the worry I have to get so very drunk I can't remember anything of that particular portion of the night. The parts I remember are me being socially awkward and trying to be funny. Running between conversations to try to not miss a thing and instead just getting nothing from any of it. Dancing in clubs for the three hours they're open after paying a tenner for the privilege.

I mean, there were good times I remember. I remember kissing a beautiful girl in a room filled with balloons and the best of motown playing. And lying next to her on a couch while she  curled up next to me. She slept and I watched Breakfast at Tiffany's.

And I remember climbing onto my friends roof to finish off a night of drunken silliness. I smashed my bottle of 'wine', which had become some horrible concoction of anything left over at the party. It had very luckily smashed all over the road and I plonked down on the pavement in what can only be described as a tantrum.  Sorcha sang Kate Bush and danced and lured me to her house. And through some strange sorcery I managed to drag myself onto her roof, much to her (and the following day, my) surprise.

And I remember a million other times where a million other amazing perfect things happened. But the next day, the headaches and the inability to move and leave and just losing an entire day to my drinking the night before brought a very minute and special kind of shame. But to be honest, none of it seemed like a problem at all. It was just part of life, you drink and have a laugh and suppress the rising panic and then feel like crap the next day. It's just the way it goes kiddo.

Giving up drink had never appealed to me. Or rather it never occurred to me as something a person would do unless they had to. Even now, after not drinking for a few months, if someone tells me they don't drink my brain immediately demands to know WHY? WHY NOT? And then the social side of my brain enters and equally rudely shouts DON'T ASK BECAUSE THEY'RE PROBABLY AN ALCOHOLIC. Which is just mortifying really. I think I would be much less ashamed of myself if I was able to suppress my brain's natural instincts on all occasions. It irritates me that my brain does this because if someone doesn't smoke my natural instinct isn't to begin an onslaught of personal questioning. There are simply people who smoke and people who don't and my brain accepts this with great ease. I understand that smoking and drinking (while often done hand in hand) are very different activities, and it is normal to view them differently. Drinking is central to Irish socializing, Irish youth and Irish sex. Americans can approach and exchange numbers and even date and kiss sober, but to do so in Ireland takes a balls of concrete. So if  life is for the sole purpose of procreation, as the Catholic church is correct, then booze is the lubricant for life itself. Without it the Irish would remain celibate and childless. So it is subconsciously considered crucial, unlike smoking. Which is simply considered to be delicious... by me.

But then Eavan gave up drinking and has been sober for fifteen months or so. Eavan is not as delicate as I am. In fact she is the opposite of delicate, to the extent that how well she would survive in prison has been commented on by numerous unrelated groups of her friends. She has the cast iron will of an ox (and incidentally the immune system of one as well). In the last fifteen months she has been to festivals, countless club nights, parties, sessions and meet ups in pubs. She remained in constant motion, rocketing from one event to the other in a flurry of popularity that she refuses to acknowledge. And she does every single thing sober, and has an amazing time in the process. Like all other things she does, she made the right choice look like the easy choice and the most appealing choice. She did not become preachy or evangelical about being on the wagon, she just went out and danced her face off and could do so every night of the week because she was hangover free. She was saving huge amounts of money and could remember every minute of these new booze free nights of fun.

On her one year anniversary we sat in the smoking area of The Dragon and drank booze free 'cocktails' (that were closer to resembling strawberry milkshakes. They had oreos in them and everything) and we celebrated. And then a few weeks later I went out on the tear and got into such a panicked state that the night became the illusion of total disaster. My feelings on that night could not have been further from the actual events that were taking place. I went to the Abbey theatre for a new and hip club night, which was paid for by the lovely Rachel Noble. We got some food and I parted ways with them as they went to a party and went to the girls apartment in Temple Bar for a natter. They offered me a bed for the night which I turned down and instead left at about 4am and caught the last bus to the party Rache and the others had gone to. While I was there I chatted to loads of people and even got a lift straight home in the morning.

Now doesn't that night seem lovely? But it wasn't, it was awful. I made it awful by panicking about how I was going to get from place to place throughout, and about whether where I was, was the best place to be. The very worst that could have happened to me that night was that I would have woken up in the girls apartment, safe and warm and among friends. But in my mind I was in some sort of demented nightmare, where I was uncontrollably trying to sabotage my own night and end up as far away from my own home as possible for, that all important of things, the morning after. By the time I got to the party I was near tears of panic, which in hindsight just seems completely bizarre. I was hoping to just get a taxi home from there but I discovered that Aine had left minutes before my arrival and I was now 'stranded'. I was close to a break down at this point, miserable at myself for making such terrible decisions. Eavan was at the party and spent the next few hours listening to me whine literally non-stop about what was in actual fact a very mild predicament. I was sobering up at this point and beginning to get gradually more and more hungover and as a result was finding being around my drunken friends almost impossibly irritating.

And I started to become more conscious of how much drinking stresses me out. The morning after I just try to blank the bad part from my memory and remember the jokes and silliness and the singing out of tune. But it is there. Blind panic. About where I am, what I'm doing and how the fuck I'm going to get out of there.

So I stopped. I didn't say 'gave up' yet and decided I just wanted to see what it was like. I think I was worried that booze might have a problem with me, because with the self denial about how much I freaked out when I drink I began to wonder why on earth I would ever drink. Maybe booze was out to get me and would call me back. But no, drink doesn't have a problem with me at all. It seems to have let me go with good grace, having never had a grudge against me.

There are some problems. One problem is worrying about being the boring sober person, or since I got my new camera, the sober person who recalls every element of the silliness the night before. This is quite easily avoided by not being a bastard.

A bigger problem is people getting a bit freaked out when they realise they are pouring their heart out to a sober person who will remember the conversation. They get even more freaked out if the conversation is in depth on both sides, because why on earth would a sober person open themselves up for no reason? It seems almost suspect, which is annoying because I like drunken banter.

But my mates don't mind, and generally people don't even notice I'm not drinking. Which isn't necessarily the best reflection on my behaviour when sober. But they did tests on groups of sober people in a drunken environment to see how they reacted. One group was given booze and the other a placebo, and unsurprisingly the two groups when socializing together both acted more or less the same, as you would expect. But bizarrely when they replaced the placebo group with a group of people who were aware what they were drinking was non-alcoholic, the results were exactly the same as the prior experiment. If you're around drunks you act a bit drunk, because a lot of drunken behaviour is just from being in a social situation.

Bizarrely, so effective is this non-placebo, I have woken up with a hangover.

Don't worry about asking me why I've stopped drinking though. Everyone does and it doesn't bother me, so long as a vague answer about it disagreeing with medication I'm on doesn't bother you. So long as nothing is said about me chain smoking. And cackling like a lunatic and generally being obnoxious.

(Side note: I do actually still drink. Just very rarely)