I don't know a fucking thing about balance. I envy those people who maintain immaculate instagram accounts filled with vegan yogurt shots, fresh dad caps from brands I've never heard of and dozens of photos of them getting wild with friends each weekend. I personally am more of a bipolar pendulum veering wildly between week long hash brown / discount beer benders and guiltily stuffing another mouthful of lentils and spinach into my mouth whilst I wonder what yoga positions I'm going to attempt next. It's due to this pretty fucked lifestyle that I can attribute forgetting to ride for nealy two months. I actually forgot that bikes were a thing. I'd like to quickly remind everyone how hard it is to remember much at all when you're on your third day without eating or sleeping after discovering that pretty much everything is a trampoline with enough special K. So yeah, after a series of particularly brutal benders I did again remember that I own a push bike and I had this niggling feeling that riding is actually a great way to spend your time.
This shitty bmx fuelled guilt led me to try take a brief break from my nightly binge-drinking and give my nose a holiday. Old mate Jim said that he was going cold turkey on booze for a whole month (and he's stuck with it, kudos to him) but I figured if I could just lay off getting completely pissed for a fortnight I could happily celebrate Australia day with a whole lot of goon and googs.
First up I'd like to say anyone who actually does a proper detox for a serious amount of time has a lot more mental fortitude than I would have imagined. I think I was maybe two days in when I started opening the fridge door and staring at the beers while I tried to remember what I had actually come to the fridge for. Full junkie spec shakes kicked in at about day 5, so bad that the dudes who work at the tattoo studio I go to were looking at me like I should be locked up in a mental ward. That was day 5 (Thursday). I hadn't even hit a weekend and I was fucking suffering. That night I had a sneaky beer at a gig and it went down so fast my friends didn't even realise I'd actually bought a beer. So my 'clean' fortnight was ruined less than a week in but it was only one beer so I told myself it really wasn't too bad. Besides, I've heard the first beer you drink actually re-hydrates you better than a glass of water would.
The following night I was going to an art show and I thought that was a pretty safe place to avoid alcohol. I'm broke and the kind of places that hold art shows charge approximately 3 times the regular amount for a very shit pale ale, not drinking should be easy. The art show actually went really well, so well in fact that everyone who was there when it closed invited themselves back to my place for a swim. Normally I'm pretty happy being the odd one out but when someone rocks up to your place with a carton and starts smashing beers in the pool, it's really just rude not to join them. So after ruining my booze free fortnight on day 5 with a single beer I completely binned the idea on day 6 and drank half a carton in a couple of hours. I woke up the next morning and felt pretty guilty but I still went out and rode almost all Saturday and had an awesome time with nearly no hangover interference. Was it a miracle or did detoxing for just 4 days supercharge my body and allow me to process a bunch of piss as if it were nothing? I've resigned myself to never knowing the answer to that question and I've also realised that getting pissed and riding bmx can go hand in hand.
In summary of my completely failed attempt at not getting cooked in order to ride more I've decided that yeah cunt, bikes are fucking good, but so are drugs and dancing like a fuckwit so maybe the people who only drink beer every third week are on to something, or maybe I just need to man up, get some fortitude and work out how to hop-to-fakie that gutter in between come-down induced vomiting?
