Ack! Today is the birthday of two people close to me--the cousin mentioned in a previous blog, and an Irish girl I met here a couple years ago. Tomorrow Brigid "Dessie's Got to do the Rage" Lynch is having her birthday drinks at a bar in a neighborhood I adore and it will be a huge challenge to stay sober.

Not that I've exactly made a Herculean effort--a couple days ago I gave drinking for 12 hours my all, and succeded wildly. Made it from 2pm to 3am without a break and without passing out, although there were a couple of cups of coffee, a few liters of water, and two heavy meals thrown in there for good measure.

So far, from what I've seen of the Irish in Berlin, stereotypes about Celtic drinking habits are not that unfounded. After one of their favorite bars closed its doors forever, the former employees are now scrambling for work in other Irish bars staffed entirely by their friends, and one is even going home. After eight years of living in Berlin and having a child with a German woman, he is packing it up--life is simply not worth living if he can't go down to Murray's and have a bit of a craic with his mates.

Tomorrow night will be a true test of my dedication to pretending not to drink. I will be around people who are piss-drunk, people I don't know all that well, which never helps. Also, truth be told, I might just have a better time with a few drinkies.

The problem with that is that all I'd be having is a fake good time.

I can still remember, way, way back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, before television or electric toasters or democracy or the internet and before I was a career alcoholic--so about 1999 or so, that I was perfectly able to engage in great conversations, to dance, sing, laugh and embark on adventures stone sober. After having gone through my pot phase, my cocaine phase and my current alcoholic phase however, it's become nearly impossible to imagine doing all the things I used to do without a bit of help. After the cocaine phase ended, I literally could not sit in a room with anyone--even people with whom I'd been well-acquainted for years--without drinking something. I also could not smoke pot. Something had changed in my brain, I felt that I was actually differently wired than I was before.

Re-wiring my brain to go back to its default settings will take some time and effort, and I won't get any further by going tomorrow night and drinking myself into a good time.

I suppose we'll all find out in Tuesday's blog how it went tomorrow night.