[The Lizard of Oz]

When I was in my twenties and early thirties, I loved drinking. It's a tough call, but all in all, I may have loved it more than anything else.

I was never an alcoholic or close to it, I didn't drink every day or every other day. But there was nothing I would look forward to more than a drinking night, and sometimes when the mood was right, a drinking day.

I loved snapping a tape or a CD into one of the great Walkmen that Sony used to make and walking out with one of my favorite songs to start the night in my ears. At this time of year, the fall, I might be going out in the early gloaming listening to Robert Palmer's cover of Early in the Morning. I would go to one of my bars -- probably the genteel expensive bar to begin with, where I might be alone at the bar with the windows facing the street at dusk. I would get a Stoli martini, then another, then a third. If I felt a certain way, I'd put the Walkman right back on and maybe track through Steely Dan's The Royal Scam right there at the bar. The bartender liked me and this was tolerated. That would be the start of my night, though later I would stop drinking martinis and switch to shots of Stoli on the rocks as I met some friends in a bar across the street I would bounce to.

I was blessed with a high tolerance so the night could easily end up being a 10 drink night and although I would be very drunk by the end of it I could maintain coherence. I am not naturally social but as the night went on I became more so -- I would speak to friends and sometimes strangers with passion and eloquence.

Other times, maybe some day in February with dirty snow lying on the ground it was time for the warmth of brown drinks. I would head into the bar and drink shots of Johnny Walker Black, neat, followed by bottles of Heineken that I scrupled to pour from the bottle into a tall glass. When you love something, the details matter.

I loved it, and for a while, a long while, it was all good.

Then I started noticing something. Sometimes I would feel that the drinks didn't seem right anymore. It's hard to explain -- how something is and isn't the same. I started noticing that the other times, the dry times, I would feel a little crabby. I might be watching a movie or reading a book that would normally hold my interest and it's not that I had no interest in it, but it just didn't have the same quality. There was a strange perfunctoriness to it, like it was more like going through the motions that actually being into something.

I noticed this and I did something, though I barely knew why I was doing it. I stopped drinking, from one day to another. I was in my very early thirties. I haven't done it since then.

Some of the friends who shared my love of drinking have stayed with it. Here is what I see:

One dude, one of my best friends, kept drinking, maybe even harder than before. Not to the point of becoming a drunk, just a guy that drinks pretty hard. In about 2-3 years, between the ages of 36 and 38, he seemed to age about 10 years. Especially his face became more bloated and softer in a bad way. He fell into a serious depression and is struggling to come out of it.

In other guys I know who kept drinking hard past their mid 30s it's not as extreme but I see subtle things. Subtle but dreadful, to be honest. The guys just don't seem as alive to the moment when they're not drinking -- there is a kind of tiredness even when they should be into something. They've gotten a little irritable, a little ungenerous, maybe even a little angry and resentful. And these are not loser types, they are winner types in every sense. That's what is so grim to see, winners subtly acting and thinking like losers.

I think that drinking hard past your mid thirties is a tricky and dangerous game. It beats guys up physically and spiritually in ways that are not always easy to see but that catch up with you. This is especially true for men that love drinking and are good at it -- there is a temptation to go to the well a few times too often, and then suddenly the well is poisoned. It's not about being stumbling drunk or not able to do your work or liver cirrhosis -- if you're at that level it's pretty self explanatory. But it's guys who can and do control it but keep drinking hard into their mid thirties let alone their forties that I think are in real danger of having their morale and best qualities of heart and mind lessened, and aging in a subtle but, in the end, terrible way.

I hope this helps someone...