Guide to Getting Drunk and Staying Drunk.

1. Shoosh.

I'm a good person to write this guide. I've been drunk for about 6 straight months. Luckily I've now officially run out of money and I can't do that anymore. It's either run lean and mean or break down for good. I'm excited about it. This morning I had shredded wheat for breakfast. Does that sound like a guy who's not living his life the right way? I didn't think so.

My point is this:

Why? Why do you want to get drunk and stay drunk? What good will it do? How long do you want to stay drunk? Like a day? Your entire adult life? It's a slippery slope.

But let's say it's one of those special occasions where you just want to blow it out for whatever reason.

And also, a guide's a guide.

2. Easy does it.

If you're really going on a marathon bender, then treat it like a marathon. That means not doing four shots of whiskey right away. Shots of whiskey give you the warm droolies anyway. Whiskey's a sippin' drink.

You're aiming for being the type of person who can slowly sip on a mint julep. If you can't slowly sip on anything because you're a guzzler, like me, then get yourself something low weight to guzzle. Light beer gets a deservedly bad rep, but you can use it. You're the one who wanted to know how to get drunk and stay drunk. And the answer is "slowly." So no showing off.

You can do an initial liquor blast to kick things off, but then you've got to either switch to beer or get really slow about things.

When I was in college, I went on a booze run with my friend Janaka to an old drunkie liquor store in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. We bought a couple of cases of beer and I think maybe a jug of Gallo Rossi (that was our drink), and during checkout Janaka grabbed a pint flask of Beam as an impulse buy, and held up the line. He apologized, to which the counter lady, a well-worn lady of indeterminate age with nicotine stains on her lips, replied "That's ok, you gotta back it out without blowin' it up."

I don't know what that means, but it's true.

You gotta back it out without blowin' it up.

I think that means that if you're really going to be drinking, like for real, you will do well to envision the end of your night when you start things off. Give yourself something to shoot for. Like "I'm going to be ridiculously drunk, but I'm not going to puke, and I'm going to make it all the way to last call even though it's noon now."

Drink to win. Drink through the ball. Whatever sports thing works here.

3. Ebbs and flows.

So the key to getting drunk and staying drunk is balancing on your drunk plateau. You know that kind of drunk where you're like "I'm exactly drunk" but not like "Oh man, I'm really drunk" yet? Well you need to get there and live there.

The first secret to this is the slow thing. If you take it slow to start, then you'll get to your plateau naturally and evenly, and you'll have an easier time staying there. If you guzzle some tequila, you might overshoot your plateau and you won't even know it until the tequila catches up to you. And by then it's too late, my friend.

The way drinking works, and I learned this from a chart they gave me in driver's ed about blood alcohol content, is that for a regular sized dude, your liver burns off about a drink an hour. For girls it's like 75% of a drink. So the math on that is roughly:

Initial drinking to plateau (3-5 drinks over the course of one or two hours) + Continued slow drinking (1-2 drinks an hour) = Drunk all day

I mean, you're not going to be looking at your watch or treating it like a science experiment, because you're drunk and that's not how drunk people are. It's more like a gut instinct thing. The best advice I can give is to be in touch with your drunk.

Know when it's on the top heavy side of the plateau, and slow things down. Eat something. Drink some water. Do something with your hands that you can't hold a beer for, like video games or auto racing. Something. Those are your ebbs.

And your flows are pretty easy to figure out. That's when booze is flowing into your mouth. You can get a little top heavy on the flows if you know there's an ebb coming where you won't be drinking for an hour and a half, like if you're going to the movies or your brother's college graduation or something.

4. Getting cocky.

There is going to be a point in all of this where you start to get cocky. It's usually around hour 8 of being drunk. You've done everything right up to this point, and you've been on a pretty even keel on your drunk plateau all day, and if you packed it in now, you'd acutally be pretty good the next day. You know, hungover, but not like atomic hungover where your head feels like it's packed with its own sweat to like a thousand psi and your stomach is rancid and turny and you feel like you’re going to shit out the tequila worm man from Poltergeist II. But instead of avoiding that, you're going to get cocky.

Let's be honest here.

You've been drinking for 8 hours, which is already cocky. That's a full work day of drinking. If you're going to keep drinking, then your brain does a thing where it's like, "Well, my full day of drinking is done. I really put in a good day's work. It's Miller time!" And you figure, what the hey, let's throw away all the rules about going slowly, no shots and stuff, because you've been drinking for 8 hours according to the rules and for some reason that makes you indestructible. And also you're drunk and you've been that way for 8 hours, so your judgment is pretty bad.

So you get cocky.

There's nothing I can say to you in a guide that you're reading now, while you're sober (or at least sober enough to read) that will stop you from getting cocky. It is either going to happen or it isn't. Just at least consider drinking some water or eating like a taco here or there. That's all I'm saying. To myself.

Oh, while we're talking about getting cocky, this is an excellent time to address...

5. Drugs.

I've been reading up on this and apparently in the 60's, booze was considered to be an "establishment trip" and people were more about getting high as kites in as many weird ways as possible. That's why everybody called them "fucking hippies."

Everybody knows that booze is the base god of all getting fucked up. It's the Zeus of the whole mythology.

Pot definitely has its merits, but I look at pot-based adventures as being more sedentary and antisocial in nature. Maybe that's just how I handle my weed, shutting down, but I'd say that's a fair generalization. Like you don't need a guide to getting high all day. You just fucking do it and then you're high all day and you watch Finding Nemo and eat one of those microwaveable gas station cheeseburgers, and then you fold your socks for an hour. Who cares? You're high.

Anyway, back to booze. And how it's going to work with drugs.

You're likely to get involved with drugs in the "getting cocky" phase of your bender. It's dangerous, because in the getting cocky phase, you generally do more than you should because you're cocky.

I actually think pot is a good idea here, because it settles you down a little and pushes you toward your bed a little faster. So absolutely, big shot, smoke that weed like you were Snoop himself. You'll be in a cab pretty soon after you have the, “Oh shit, I’m very high now. All I want to do now is go home and listen to a bunch of Black Sabbath records at the wrong rpm for like 20 minutes until I realize what I’m doing wrong and decide it’s best if I just go to bed” realization.

Coke is super dangerous territory if you've been drinking for 8 hours already. Like you'll do a bump and then that'll feel like it just took away two drinks and you'll be good to go for another forty five or so. I think that's actually why they call it a "bump." Cocaine has the potential to turn your planned 14 hour bender into a 17 or 18 hour bender. With coke. And all those drinks that "went away" when you did bumps are not really "away," but they're tucked into your system waiting to kill you tomorrow. So look forward to that, hot shot.

Luckily, if you've been drinking for 8 hours already, you're probably pretty close to running out of money anyway, and it's pretty fucking unlikely that anybody you're with will have successfully been holding coke for 8 hours of drinking without breaking it out already. But this is basically the same drill with any sort of speed-based thing you could do here. Stay away unless you're ready to be "fucking take over the world!" cocky about because it’s an occasion for celebration akin to getting a MacArthur genius grant or something.

Hallucinogens (we'll put ecstacy here too): What? Are you kidding me? You've been drinking for 8 hours. It's going to be bedtime in like a maximum of 6 hours. You're trashed. Taking something that would make you hallucinate now is called "wasting your money" because you wouldn't remember it anyway. I mean, that's the logic. But actually if you know how to and you're really interested in scoring something legitimately trippy after drinking for 8 hours, then you're kind of my hero. That's some next-level shit and you're probably going to be going for another two days anyway, so go for it.

Pills: Stay the fuck away from pills (narcotic pills like Vicodin and such) in the cocky phase. Pills are a starter, not a finisher. Seriously, this is how people die. Don't be a bummer.

6. Oh no.

So at some point pretty soon after your cocky phase, you're going to have an "oh no" where you realize that you're fucked. Here's where the "we're all adults here" rule kicks in.

If you're at the point where you seriously need help, you won't need to ask for it. It'll be pretty obvious to your friends that you're sitting indian style on the floor of the bar going "bluhhhhhnnnnn." You shouldn't be at that point in public unless you're seriously working through some shit, and if you are then your friends will understand. That's ok. Adults need help sometimes. Your job as an adult who's not going "bluhhhhhnnnnn" is to pick your friend up and get him home.

But if you're not that bad, then as soon after the "oh no" as possible, pull a silent runner and get your ass home. There is no decorum here. You're putting yourself into survival mode. It's like when Ed Harris breathed that goo stuff in The Abyss. Your body will remember.

And as your stinking face hits the pillow, you will likely have been going for somewhere in the neighborhood of 10-14 hours straight. Congratulations. You've been drunk and stayed drunk for a pretty decent chunk of time, my friend. May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest, because when you wake up tomorrow those angels are going to fuck you in the ass.