The thing is: It’s about drinking, but it’s about so much more than drinking. It’s about feeling comfortable; it’s about distancing ourselves from moments and people and feelings that we don’t want to experience, and bringing closer the ones that we do; it’s about self-medication; it’s about belonging; it’s about taking a little edge off a thousand kinds of discomfort; it’s about status and appearance and sophistication; it’s about sex and desire; it’s about filling in the spaces we don’t know how to otherwise fill. It’s about having something to do with your damn hands.
