Daddy Drinks

Some people are beer snobs. I, on the other hand, am a beer whore. I’ll drink any beer, even if it’s not my own. If you put your beer down, I will drink it. I don’t care if you put three cigarette butts in it. Three days ago. It still tastes good to me, even if it doesn’t taste good at all. I don’t care if it’s regular old Budweiser. I don’t care if it’s one of those douchebaggy fruit porters brewed by some café-owning asshole in Oregon. I will drink any beer. Hell, I even drink hard cider, which is the gay man’s beer. I don’t care. If it’s brown and carbonated, I am ingesting it quickly. Beer has no hope around me. I’d take it in from both ends if it were physically feasible.

In a way, it’s a shame I don’t live in the United Kingdom. Here in America, if you’re drinking in a bar at 10AM, it means you’re an alcoholic. Over there, it means you’re an English professor. I like to drink. I saw on one website that binge drinking is defined as having “5 or more drinks in one sitting.” I’m sorry, but isn’t that happy hour? I have 5 or more drinks as an ‘hors deuvres to the rest of my night’s drinking. In fact, if you don’t have 5 or more drinks in one sitting, aren’t you just a complete and utter pussy? I think so.

The buildup to Mrs. Drew’s pregnancy was a mixed blessing. Mrs. Drew did lots of reading on male and female fertility. She learned that, in order to better increase your odds of pregnancy, you need to have lots and lots of sex. Awesome. But she also learned that alcohol and marijuana can inhibit male sperm. Fuck. I’m sure she read this on ivillage or some other site that flagrantly despises the male species as a whole. There was a time when men didn’t let women read, you know. That was a good time.

So I had to stop smoking weed. Fine. I like the occasional toke, but I can do without relatively easily. That’s like giving up eating smokehouse almonds. I can do that, even if I have a hankering for it every now and again. But then Mrs. Drew placed a 2-drink maximum on me for nights out. This was agony. I’d have been better off not drinking at all. You ever try and make 2 beers last 6 hours? It’s impossible. I may as well have been drinking it out of an eyedropper.

I tried to reason with Mrs. Drew. If alcohol really killed sperm, I argued, then how can we account for the current existence of Ireland? I also postulated that alcohol, in fact, causes far more pregnancies than it inhibits. How else would anyone in Wisconsin become impregnated otherwise? Come on. You’ve seen people from that state. They’re fat and hideous. Some of them still wear stirrup pants. No way they’re all hitting each other sober. But Mrs. Drew wouldn’t hear it.

Thankfully, Mrs. Drew got pregnant relatively quickly. And pregnancy is fucking money if you’re a guy. You get a designated driver for 9 full months. You bet seeing that baby come out was a bittersweet moment.

Since the Girl's birth, I've more or less had to ease up on drinking anyway. Getting up constantly at night to take care of a baby isn’t much fun when you have 8 beers in you. It tends to kill your buzz. And your soul. But once the little one is sleeping through the night, don't put your beer down around me.