If you’re also wondering if numbing refers to doing illegal drugs or having a few glasses of wine after work—the answer is yes. I’m going to argue that we need to examine the idea of “taking the edge off,” and that means considering the glasses of wine we drink while we’re cooking dinner, eating dinner, and cleaning up after dinner, our sixty-hour workweeks, the sugar, the fantasy football, the prescription pills, and the four shots of espresso that we drink in order to clear the fog from the wine and Advil PM. I’m talking about you and me and the stuff we do every day.
