Don’t ever fool yourself into thinking there is a such thing as a functional alcoholic. You are more likely to stumble across a 64-karat blue diamond than you are to find one of these.
How do they function at all? Very few do, really, without help. Hair of the dog helps the hangover and staves off withdrawals,, but obviously will exacerbate the problem. Vicodin and other oral painkillers is the miracle hangover cure, but just leads to another, more horrendous addiction. But to say they function beyond minimum requirements to be decent, productive human beings is a stretch. They are anesthetized and, until intermittent attacks of emotional and physical fatigue overtakes them, they are incapable of really understanding other people’s emotional needs or showing GENUINE emotions themselves. And their opinions reflect their sociopathy.
Physically, most alcoholics are complete fuck ups, useless. I just spent a few days trapped on a boat with an extremely wealthy white South African and his wife who repeatedly (repetition is an effect of wet brained alcoholism, in my opinion) and bombastically (bombast is another) explained to me—with perfect diction, no slurring of words, excellent vocabulary, and beautiful upperclass accent—how the ethnic and social cleansing that occurred in Germany in the ‘30s and ‘40s was directly responsible for the German economic and social success of the post WWII era up to today. This was after a day of constant vodka tonics. Later, in way of apology, his wife told me that he wasn’t always like this. I believe it, lady. The difference is that he’s a fucking drunk now. And one with money and influence over other people’s lives. It almost drove me to drink—or shove his ass into it—to have to listen to this shithead for more than two days.