If I understand it, what you are asking is, “Do you every turn off the ‘razor edged analytical part’ of your mind, and just live in the moment?” The answer to that is, “Yes, but not with alcohol.” Despite being raised in a home with strong European influences, where wine was frequently served with dinner, and highballs and beer were a common, if not daily late evening and weekend beverage, I loathe the way alcohol makes me feel. I had “European style” access to alcohol as a kid; a tiny glass of wine with dinner, if I wanted it, and the ability to take a sip of alcoholic drinks to see what they tasted like. As a result, it was not forbidden fruit, and when my friends began to drink in their late teens, I tried to as well. I hated it.

As a kid, I would often walk into utility poles, leave my books at the market while buying candy on my way home from school, and leave the lunch counter at the Five and Dime without paying – all because I forgot. I lived mostly in other worlds and inside my head, and this was bloody dangerous, because I was almost as equally likely to step off the curb into oncoming traffic. If the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct, then in the vast majority of those worlds, little Mike Federowicz (now also known as Mike Darwin) was long ago run over and maimed, or killed. I had to work very hard to overcome “living in my head,” and to learn to live in the real world. Alcohol fogged my ability to function in reality, without giving me the warm, pleasant high, and the relief from anxiety that it does most people.

As a young gay man with a modest social life, I tried quite hard to take up drinking wine in my mid-20s. Drinking, and being mildly intoxicated, are very important socially – probably more important than food is, in this respect, especially if you were gay at that time: bars were pretty much the only social venue. I had also learned that people who are drinking together “go somewhere” that someone who doesn’t drink, can’t follow. And this is true, even if they have just a couple of drinks; being a teetotaler, to use a quaint and dated term, cuts you off from that journey, and is very socially isolating.

I needed a cleaner drug, and it wasn’t until I was hospitalized in the late 1970s, that I found it, or more precisely, them: benzodiazepines. I was bleeding from a peptic ulcer and the H2-receptor antagonists were band new drugs. I’d been bleeding every spring and fall like clockwork for several years, and swallowing what must have been liters of Maalox and Riopan, to little good effect. Finally, I was bleeding badly enough that I was hospitalized, started on a Tagamet (cimetidine) IV drip, and given Valium round the clock for a week. For the first time in my entire remembered life, the racket was gone. It was like I had lived my whole life with the radio blaring, horns honking, people talking loudly to each other, dogs barking…and then there was SILENCE.

Much more specific and potent drugs in this class have been developed since. And I have to handle them with extreme care. On the up side, I still don’t like the “drunken” obliteration of consciousness you can get with alcohol, and which you can approach with benzos.”

That’s wasn’t to be my ticket to “enlightenment.”

To go where you go, or I presume you go, I had to find another route. There’s nothing very remarkable about it, and isn’t illegal or immoral, but I don’t choose to share it here. Even I have some things I would keep to myself (and to those who I would trust enough to get stinking drunk with, if I drank). Because in addition to getting to a place where you just “are” and you are without thoughts or cares, and are just living; and feeling damn good about it, that is best done with others. It is a vulnerable place, a vulnerable time, and it is unarguably best shared with those who are going there with you, and in whom you trust. – Mike Darwin