Alcohol turns off the upper brain functions and all you are left with is lizard brain. And lizard brain ain't pretty.
Not always. I had two aunts, now deceased, who drank like, well, two fish in the ocean. They guzzled flagon sherry and port like water, every day starting in the late morning after their household of domestic pets had been looked after. Both lived together, and it's interesting to note that their small cats and dogs were better treated than most people's children.
Anyway, one aunty was naturally born nasty but with drink turned ever so sweet. The other was entirely the opposite, and after two water glasses of fortified sludge went from Madam Jekyll to Miss Hyde - I wrote "Miss" and not "Ms" as the emotional shock of any notion of being the latter would surely have killed the biddy. Both were Edwardian leftovers to their very core.
When "under the influence" as we then said, they were anything but lizard-brained. Often they spoke unpleasant truths about family members, which amused me as I myself even as a child held much the same opinions about those relatives. I listened and laughed to myself and held my tongue as my well-meaning but highly neurotic stepmother took all disagreement or any unpleasant comment as a personal attack and I would then hear nothing but recriminations from her for my behavior for at the very least, the next week.
One day I secretly snapped a photo of them - this in 1962 or 1963. I no longer have that negative as said stepmom carried on as if she had been groped in public and demanded that I destroy the image. Which I did. I used to listen to her nonsense in those days. By 1965 when I came home from two years in boarding school I had learned to stand up for myself. Why this did not carry over to my being a success in street photography, I really do not understand. I have always been shy of "confronting" people in public with a camera, altho' at times I've forced myself to do it, and generally my end results were mixed - a blend of good and rotten.
However, I do agree that lizard brains are not pretty things to have to deal with, especially when fueled by too much ethanol. Sadly we have an ample supply of those in Australia, and I most definitely do not mean those of the four-legged species.
Overall, an interesting post by boojum. Noted and enjoyed.
(Added later) They were great-aunts from my maternal grandmother's family. And there is a photographic connection here. One GA had a brother who married my mother's eldest sister in the 1940s, he was her first husband (of three) and she his first (and only) wife. This 'uncle' was a man of mystery, a banker in Asia in the '20s in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Rangoon, Singapore. He met my aunt at a party at the iconic Raffles Hotel in 1940 - she was then a nurse in Singapore) - and they took up together. A year later he had her sent home to Canada, as if aware of what was coming. He turned up mysteriously in Canada after the fall of Singapore but never revealed how he escaped the Japanese Occupation.
He had two cameras, a prewar Rolleiflex and a Contax I, which he kindly let me play with in the '50s. My first serious images were made with that Rollei in 1961, when I was a precocious 13. I still have those negatives, unimpressive they are but nonetheless a treasured visual part of my personal and family history.
The two ladies lived to almost 90, indulging all the while, and eventually passed away not long one after the other.
Interesting to say they also enjoyed good wine and had a taste for select vintages. Now and then I sneaked into their kitchen pantry to quaff a glass of German reisling or a Lisbon rose or a French Beaujolais or burgundy or Cotes du Rhone. I'm sure they knew but they said nothing. To them I attribute my lifelong taste for and love of good wine.
Many years after they left us I revisited the house (which the family had left untenanted) and in the cellar I found a small alcove with a few bottles. A sherry with a handwritten date (1951) on the label and two bottles of French wine, one from 1947 (my birth year), the other from the '50s. I snagged both and later opened them. The sherry had evaporated a little but was drinkable; the two reds were corked. The '47 ended up as salad vinegar and the '50s went into a bolognese, so none of it got wasted.
A few small events in a long life. I'm now mid-70s, still enjoying life, still uncorking good wine and traveling with my cameras - Nikkormats, Rollei TLRs, Contax Gs, Nikon digitals, latterly Fujis. when I go overseas I take a corkscrew and a crystal wine glass. Good plonque is meant to be properly appreciated.
Long may it all go on.
