Yeah, I was watching an interview last night with some recovering baseball player. The interviewer asked him, “How did you pitch a game while on cocaine?” I think the correct answer would be, “Pretty damn well.”

The idea that a serious cokehead would never be on coke on the job strains credulity. Besides, he would probably be worse at his job in the miserable interludes when he wasn’t on it (and drinking) than if he snorted during work hours.

Iowa City is a decent place. You get some of the cultural (and medical) amenities of city life from the university presence, in a nice natural setting with many of the upsides of small-town living. You can fly to the hub airports from nearby Cedar Rapids. I’d live there if I could.

That’s a sad story. I’m sorry.

I understand the criticisms of AA. And while it does have a low success rate, I don’t think you can point to any other specific approach/program that has a higher success rate on a demonstrated large scale. The converse is that there is no disputing that AA does work perfectly for large numbers of people who otherwise…

Al Anon. It won’t solve their problem but will help with yours.

I just read that Miller/Coors is in some distress because legal pot is cutting into beer consumption among young males.

Europeans may drink as a matter of course, but I bet that for your average frequent French wine drinker, 4 drinks in a sitting or even a day is a rare event.

You’ve really hit something in talking about envisioning or imagining not drinking. For an alcoholic, that alone causes distress (see “The Lost Weekend”); for the nonalcoholic it’s an odd idea—”worry about not being able to have a drink? That’s weird!”

I think any real alcoholic would look at the profile you’ve painted for your drinking pattern and would say, “That is not an alcoholic.” Even the AA “Big Book” allows for heavy drinkers who are not alcoholics, and I don’t think you even would qualify as a heavy drinker. I agree that some of these tests and experts are…

Your criteria are sound, but for many actual alcoholics,”cutting back” is a fiction, and clinging to the idea that you can cut back or control your drinking perpetuates your active alcoholism.

Some people don’t actually know they are at the point where quitting is physically dangerous.

A good point. Many don’t realize that heroin withdrawal is famously horrible but almost never directly fatal, whereas alcohol withdrawal in the very heavy drinker can be—although many drinking alcoholics are can cease without having seizures and/or DTs (which is not mere shakiness but a possibly irreversible and fatal…

thank you

Or you will hear people with a stomach bug or food poisoning say they have the flu (I think largely because as kids their many episodes of puking illness were called “flu”.) Or you will hear of athlete having the flu well outside of flu season. A semantic quibble, yes, but it also a reason the potential seriousness of…

It hurts me to see the Irish lushes in Ray Donovan drinking Heineken, even in Boston Irish bars, just because Heineken is obviously a sponsor.

It’s horrible. His singing in the acoustic is jaunty when the words say pain and longing.

Virginia has them in the middle of the front window, no?

Matt: Does your “adult immune system” ward off all colds? And don’t you wish all of medicine was founded on “it seems like” research?

Jack Kent Cooke, whose NHL expansion LA Kings were struggling to draw fans, was told there were 300,000 Canadians living around LA; he said, “Now I know why they left Canada. They hate hockey.”