I Love Snaps!

I don't usualluý drink much, but this has been an awful day and it's the second time this week I am getting inebriated. On Thursday we had a planning conference at work with dinner and today we had a chairman resign, so I am allowed.

I identify mostly as a European and Scanian, but when it comes to my drinking habits I am all Swedish. I love and adore snaps. I've already finished an Örtagårds brännvin, a Skåne Akvavit, a Herrgårds Akvavit and a Läckö Slottsakvavit (50 ml each), but I am not done yet. There is at least a Bäska droppar and O.P. Andersson Aqvavit requiring my attention.

See you all tomorrow - late...  

On Funerals

Today I am thinking about funerals.

This is because I read about Mrs. Barbara Bush's funeral today and how the current president Donald J Trump had been asked please not to attend which made me think about this quote from Yogi Berra*: "Always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't go to yours." 

I hope there will be droves and droves of people at my funeral and that no one will have to be asked not to attend. There is nothing quite as sad as a funeral with very few people.

*) Lawrence Peter "Yogi" Berra (May 12, 1925 – September 22, 2015) was an American professional baseball catcher for the New York Yankees.

P.S. "Food, serve them good food and drink and they will come!", I thought. So now I am going to set aside a good sized amount in my will for food and alcohol for the funeral lunch. 

Scandal: Ex-Minister Gropes Guests & Shows Dick

Anders Borg, Sweden’s former finance minister (2006-2014), has resigned as deputy chairman of technology investment group Kinnevik after a scandal over his drunken behavior at a party recently in the Stockholm archipelago.

Fifty of Sweden's highest, mightiest and finest industrialists were among the guests. The guest list did, however, not include either HRM King Carl Gustaf or HRM Queen Silvia of Sweden or Bock McMillan, the Much Honored laird of Southern Charm.

At the party Mr Borg became totally wasted by consuming too much alcohol. Borg's behavior at a party deteriorated rapidly. He started calling several of the women present "whores", "sluts" and "bitches". He also whipped out his penis, grabbed other male guests in the crotch and urged them to take out their penises so they could compare sizes.

Oh, how the mighty do fall... 

The Meaning of Relief

When I saw this picture I counted my blessings for being an occasional drinker of alcoholic beverages and gay to boot. 

Relief, the feeling you get when you realize that you're not doomed to eternal misery after all.

I Don't Drink

I don't drink much alcohol and usually don't like the feeling of being drunk, but today I am making an exception.

As every decent Swede I do have a stash of Swedish snaps in my freezer and I am going through it all, not that it is helping me any - yet. I have already drunk 20 cl and a still not connecting to my feelings - but there is still more in my freezer...

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35 cl and counting and still I don't feel shit all...
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45 cl and I still don't feel anything. Why can't I feel it? The most important man in my life died and still I don't feel anything at all? He loved me no matter what, why can't  I feel anything?

Drugs & Politics

The Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) is the leading organization in the U.S.A promoting drug policies that are grounded in science, compassion, health and human rights. Ethan Nadelman, founder and executive director of the DPA, talks about the politics of drugs over a period of 150 years.

This gives food for thought.

Transcript

If you ask the question why are some drugs legal and others illegal. Why are cigarettes and alcohol legal and pharmaceuticals in the middle and these other drugs — marijuana and, you know, other ones illegal? You know, some people sort of inherently assume well this must be because there was a thoughtful consideration of the relative risks of drugs and, you know — but then that can't be because we know alcohol is more associated with violence than almost any illegal drugs. And cigarettes are more addictive than any of the illegal drugs. I mean, heroin addicts routinely say it's harder to quit cigarettes than it is to quit heroin.

So, it's not as if there was ever any kind of National Academy of Science that a hundred years ago decided that these drugs — these ones had to be illegal and those ones legal. And it's not as if this is in the Bible or in the Code of Hammurabi. I mean, nobody was making legal distinctions among many of these drugs back in — until the twentieth century essentially.

So if you ask how and why this distinction got made, what you realize when you look at the history is it has almost nothing to do with the relative risks of these drugs and almost everything to do with who used and who was perceived to use these drugs, right.
So there's — you know, back in the 1870's when the majority of opiate consumers were middle aged white women, you know — throughout the country using them for their aches and pains and for their, you know, the time of the month and menopause and there was no aspirin.

There was no penicillin. You know, lots of diarrhea because of bad sanitation and nothing stops you up like opiates. I mean, millions — many more — a much higher percentage of the population back then used opiates than now.

But nobody thought about criminalizing it because nobody wanted to put, you know, auntie or grandma behind bars, right. But then when the Chinese started coming to the country in large numbers in the 1870's and 80's and, you know, working on the railroads and working in the mines and working in factories and, you know — and then going back home at the end of the night to smoke up a little opium the way they did in the old country. The same way White people were having a couple of whiskeys in the evening.
And that's when you got the first opium prohibition laws. In Nevada, in California in the 1870's and 80's directed at the Chinese minorities. It was all about the fear — what would those Chinamen with their opium do to our precious women. You know, addicting them and seducing them and turning them into sex slaves and all this sort of stuff.

The first anti-cocaine laws were in the South in the early part of the twentieth century directed at black men working on the docks and the fear. You know, what would happen to those black men when they took that white powder up their black noses and forgot their proper place in society. You know, going out — the first time anybody ever said that, you know, the cops needed a 38 would not bring down a Negro crazed on cocaine. You needed a 45.

I mean, the New York Times, the paper of record, reporting this stuff as fact back in those days. That's when you got the first cocaine prohibition laws. The first marijuana prohibition laws were in the Midwest and the Southwest directed at Mexican migrants, Mexican Americans taking the good jobs from the good white people. Going back home to their communities, smoking a little of that funny smoking, you know, marijuana, reefer cigarette. And once again the fear, what would this minority do to our precious women and children.

So, I mean, it's always been about that. I mean even alcohol prohibition was to some extent a broader conflict between the white white Americans and the not so white white Americans, right. The white white Americans coming from northern and western Europe in the eighteenth, early nineteenth century with all of their stuff. And then the not so white white Americans coming from southern Europe and eastern Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century bringing with them their beer and their vino and, you know, their schlivowitz, right. I mean, it was all about that type of conflict.

And it wasn't as if the white white Americans weren't also consuming. It's just many of them knew that when you criminalize a vice that is engaged in by a huge minority of the population and you leave it inevitably to the discretion of law enforcement as to how to enforce those laws, those laws are not typically gonna be enforced against the whiter and wealthier and more affluent or middle class members of society.

Inevitably those laws will be disproportionately enforced against the poor and younger and darker skinned members of society. So to some very good extent that's really what the war on drugs has been about. When people talk about it as the new Jim Crow in this wonderful book by Michelle Alexander with that title, it's about understanding that, you know, the war on drugs is not just about race and it's not just about targeting black and brown young people because, God knows, I mean, millions of white people have been swept up in the war on drugs as well. But it is disproportionately and overwhelmingly about that from its origins to its enforcement to who gets victimized today.

Change

To change, i.e. to do things differently or to become different by changing personal traits, is difficult for me. I am very much a creature of habits. Although I may like change as a concept, I do not like sudden and unexpected changes that I do not feel I can control. 

When it comes to changing my ways of doing things or my ways of thinking I procrastinate a lot and drag the process out. I first need to feel, then think and then to re-feel and re-think before I go ahead and start doing it by trying things out. It's a slow and arduous ordeal, even when I am aware of the need and see the benefits of changing. This cautious approach to change is of course the fundamental reason for my political affinity for reform rather than revolution. 

Even if I have this guarded enthusiasm for change I mostly adapt with relative ease to new situations in my surroundings - if they do not crave personal change. Surprisingly, I have no problems with unthinkingly establishing new bad habits, the problem is rather to break these when I realize they are destructive. My insight of this character flaw in my personality at an early age has made me  relatively cautious in my relationships with alcohol and drugs. 

The drugs I do abuse on a daily basis are caffeine - well, I am Swedish after all - and nicotine. Both these addictions have become excessive over the past three years since I was diagnosed with depression, I drink many litres of coffee and have increased my smoking from 20 to 40 (sometimes 50) cigarettes per day.   My weight has also increased with 10 kilograms during the same period due to the fact that I completely stopped exercising. From being a moderately fit man I have become a couch potato.

I need to change my life, my choices and my habits.

Sedation (Updated)

Well, I really don´t know what is going on. I don´t blog and I don´t log in to SecondLife, but I think of both those things all the time and miss my friends in-world.

As opposed to my problems earlier, I now cannot sleep when I need to. The last week I only got four to four and half hours of sleep a night. This week I have decided to take some drastic measures to induce sleep.

I do not drink very much ordinarily, so to bring myself to that stage of tiredness I am now sitting here with no less than two 5 cl snaps-bottles which I am going to drink while writing this post. I will give you a report tomorrow if it helped.

The two are Norwegian, one is Trondhjems Aquavit, it tasted great but perhaps a bit too chilly, while the other one is Taffel Aquavit, which doesn´t taste as good and has a strange oily aftertaste. But hell I am not drinking them to enjoy them, so down the hatch it goes.

Now I will wait and see if they are enough, or if I need one more.

Update My unconventional solution worked well and I had a good nights sleep. I woke up bright and early feeling rested and ready to take on the world. Of course I realize that this is not a remedy that should be used often, but this once it worked fine.