-This Saturday I woke up feeling very strange.  I felt unusually refreshed and alert, but I couldn’t figure out why.  Then I suddenly I realized it – I wasn’t hungover.  After a month straight of traveling, performing, yelling, and drinking, I decided it was time to take a weekend off.  While in the throes of sobriety, I realized that much of twentysomething life is comprised of determining whether or not to get fucked up.  When someone asks me if I’d like a drink, I often hesitate for a brief moment before deciding.  In that moment, I subconsciously extrapolate that one drink into the fifteen drinks that will inevitably follow.  If vomiting and/or hooking up with a wideclops (i.e. a girl whose eyes are too far apart) is an acceptable next-day scenario, I quench my thirst with a cold Amstel and let the bloodbath begin.  After all, when you’re in your twenties, the worst thing you can possibly hear is a buddy proclaim, “Dude, you missed a great night.”  To go out or not to go out – that is the dilemma.  And this is the strife of the party.

-Even when you decide to go headlong into the night, there’s always one foe who’s determined to make you wish you stayed home: the bouncer.  My all-time favorite bouncerism is when he says he can’t let anybody else in to the bar because the fire marshal will shut the place down.  I always imagine some fireman with a giant hat and an axe and a hose running up to the bar yelling, “We got a call that this place is full of dudes!”

-Junior year of college, my buddy Shermdog suddenly began suffering from chronic vertigo.  For weeks he struggled to find the cause until finally he discovered that he only got dizzy when he was sober, and that imbibing alcohol made the symptoms go away.  I like to believe that this remarkable self-diagnosis led Shermdog to become the doctor he is today.  I also like to believe that I won’t let him near me with a scalpel unless he’s had a few jagerbombs first.

-I think that people's reaction when I tell them that I don't drink coffee is equivalent to my reaction when people tell me that they don't drink alcohol.