I don't have a religious bone in my body. There has never been anything about religion or spirituality that's ever had the slightest appeal to me, at least since I was 12. I couldn't believe in a "higher power" if you stuck a gun to my head.
Even if AA meetings weren't pure torture to me, leaving me writhing on the floor moaning in pain from the cravings aroused by non-stop accounts of drinking, I still couldn't take the 3 steps of the 12 that demand a belief in God.
It does. Certain cells in the brain release chemicals that cause you to feel happiness. In normal people this happens when they watch a good movie, play a game of sports, eat a good meal, hang around with friends, or other things that make people happy.
But an alcoholic has trained his brain to only release these chemicals when drinking alcohol. That's why an alkie has that sudden need to drink more and more just after a couple drinks.
That's where the boredom comes in. A normal person feels bored, he might call a friend, watch a movie, go out. None of that affects an alkie.
That's not the only chemical process that alcohol changes. Alcohol is normally a trace chemical in the metabolic pathway. When you drink this basic process has to change to handle greatly increased quantities of alcohol. When you drink steadily these changes start to become permanent.
That's where the anxiousness comes in. You stop drinking, and suddenly your basic metabolic processes aren't working right.
We have no idea what people used to talk like. The nature of language has completely changed in the last few centuries. At the time of George Washington they were just getting around to the idea that everyone should spell a word the same way. And there were no trains or steamboats, people didn't travel much. Even now isolated communities develop their own dialect, imagine a world where all communities were more or less isolated.
Language started freezing in the 1800's when everyone started being taught to spell words the same way. Then we got radio and tv, and heard how we were supposed to speak.
Well, that's the thing. George Washington probably would have sounded a lot more like Shakespeare than us. We'd probably have a hard time understanding him.
Those weren't Al-queada, the Iraqi insurgents are mostly Baath who didn't want to live in the "Islamic Republic of Iraq" we were imposing on the secular Iraqis.
Well, you're not really an alkie. Drinking a case of beer in a day isn't that hard, it's less than three beers an hour. There's a lot of people like you in AA. You had a brief fling with alcohol, so suddenly you're an alcoholic. The problem is your experiences do not relate to the type of hard core alkie who has to pace himself to make a case of beer last an entire day.
Yea. One soldier wrote about how his unit escorted some nurses to a village to give all the kids shots. The next day he comes back and there's a pile of kiddie arms in front of the village. The VC had came after the Americans had left and cut off every arm that had had a shot.
The writer wrote that it was then he realized the VC were going to win.
This is a great idea. I moved a few years ago and I still haven't figured out the sports in my new location. It's kind of a serious problem, how do I make small talk with people?
I would love a web site where I could go, enter my zip code, and get the conversation triggers for sports.
This is true, but you don't actually have to watch a game to carry on a sports conversation. You have to memorize the local quaterback, coach, and team owner. Then just skim the sports news, who won, who lost, what's the consensus opinions on the quarterback, coach and team owner. There's only a half dozen conversations you can have about sports, the team is good, the team is bad, the coach is good, the coach is bad, etc. So you just pull some consensus opinion from the news, and the sports nerd you're talking to will run with it.
