Alcohol and Calibration

A lot has been said about not drinking and sarging. So I’m about to state the obvious, but per my deep love for alcohol, it didn’t become obvious to me until I had been sarging for well over two years. I used to ALWAYS sarge drunk. It was the rule, not the exception. That was until late last year when I started cutting back, and early this year when I started sarging completely sober. The differences were stark, but that can be left to another post.

This past weekend, circumstance had it that I got absolutely shit-housed two nights. Friday night, about halfway into the night, I found myself enmeshed in like a 15-set of Indian girls. The fat one LOVED me and kept putting shots of Patron under my nose. It was pretty awesome, as even though she wanted to bang me, I was able to use her to pivot to all of her cute friends.

Me: “Who’s that over there. Do you know her?”
Her: “Yeah, hey HBRandomIndian! Come meet Entropy! He’s great!”

The drawback was that the Patron caught up to me pretty quickly. For the first time since I was in college, I actually fell on my ass I was so fucking drunk. Next time you want to lose a SNL try falling over like a moron. Field-tested, Entropy approved.

Sunday night, a student who works in the film industry invited me to a wrap party. Basically a wrap party is the party they throw when filming is finished and all of the crews, extras, actors and of course, actresses are invited. The bad news was there were only a few decent sets. The worse news (or great news) was the open bar. Once again, I proceeded to mentally annihilate myself.

Now, to the point of this post. The longer I do this and the more I analyze what we’re all doing, the more I realize how almost EVERYTHING comes down to calibration. It doesn’t matter how good your skills are, if you can’t calibrate, you’re cooked.

I never noticed it back when I used to drink all of the time, but since I took about 6-8 months of little drinking, I notice it now. Getting drunk RUINS your calibration. I would give examples and details here, but honestly, I can barely remember them. I just remember saying things that seemed to be fucking money and the girls looked at me like I was a retard. This happened multiple times. Both nights I got some numbers that seemed really solid, but the next morning when I went over the night in my head, I realized they weren’t solid at all.

Guys love to drink because it makes you feel like you’re invincible. If you feel you’re invincible, you can open easier, escalate faster, and be bolder. But unfortunately, it kills your calibration, so many of your sets aren’t going to go nearly as far as they normally would. When you’re sober, you can always force yourself to open, escalate and be bold. But when you’re drunk, there’s no recovering your social calibration skills.

This isn’t to say I don’t drink or don’t think you should either. Community dogma is to never drink. I honestly think I get better with a couple drinks. One or two drinks loosens me up and pumps my state a bit. I enjoy it. The important thing is that you should never NEED alcohol and that you should try to avoid getting hammered.