Alcohol has now become a source of joy.

Permitted drugs.

It is true that there is no business against alcohol. You rarely find a heavy drinker who lives a long life. There are countless people who have fallen ill due to alcohol. Do you call it "going to hell"?

In the U.S., alcohol was banned through prohibition, but that also created bootleggers. It is human nature to do something even more when you forbid it.

I have liked whiskey since I was young. It all started when I was 18; a designer I worked with was a heavy drinker who didn't even eat snacks with her drinks. She drank whiskey. I didn't have any adults to teach me how to drink. Thinking about it now, I remember her as quite the cool one, too. I wonder if she is still alive.

Once you drink, all fear disappears. Consequently, you become talkative. It creates the feeling that the entire world belongs to you. It shows you a shortcut into your own world. Just as there are so many people, there are countless worlds of mine as well. Each one has a different world. Usually, this is where the problem arises.

Living within the institution of marriage, perhaps it would be a good idea for the parties involved to have a drink together before making a decision. If a fortune teller turns out to be an unsuitable partner after marriage, one must live a lifetime of misfortune. This is because one must live under a delusion within someone else's world. Yet, when you think about it again, there is a confidence that one can handle everything when young. Perhaps that is why I now feel that youth is a pile of lies. Youth is the time when life's delusions are most severe. Knowing everything, being able to do everything, the whole world is mine! What a fuckin' lie! Youth is just a complete latent realization of an illusion.

I heard a story a long time ago that there are ranks in drinking. I can't memorize them all, but apparently, the lowest rank is someone who cries or fights whenever they drink. Then, if you join the ranks of heavy drinkers, you enter a category where you know a little bit about the taste, and finally, at the very end, you get drunk just by looking at alcohol. In my statistics, people who aren't very smart are usually the ones who drink.

 

I've also had many incidents caused by alcohol.

After abandoning 40 years of life in the U.S. to live in Korea, I naively drank a bottle of whiskey a day to survive the competition, but the alcohol punctured my intestines, causing me to pass bloody stools. When I went to the hospital, I was told that if I had arrived just three days later, I wouldn't be alive today, so I packed my bags and came to Laos. Five years passed, and I began to wonder why I was even there, so I started drinking alone. One day, I woke up to find my speech coming out slurred! My wife was shocked, so she booked a flight back to Korea that night to get a diagnosis. It was early-stage cerebral infarction.

I am perfectly fine now. I recovered thanks to the medicine prescribed by a renowned doctor. As expected, the Korean medical field is cutting-edge.

After that, I realized the power of alcohol, and along with the lesson that one should not fight with it, I even developed respect for it. I gained the wisdom that one must become good friends with alcohol. Good friends are formed when the distance between them is just right. Not too close, not too far—just the right distance.

After realizing the destructive power of drinking alone, I now only have a glass or two occasionally with food that pairs well with alcohol. I also formed a drinking group and meet once a month. As always, who you drink with really enhances the flavor. The group is comprised solely of people I feel comfortable with. Preparing snacks for that one-month gathering has become a new and meaningful task. The excitement of welcoming my friends...

It became my only pleasure. Alcohol.

True friends~~~!!!