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There’s a special kind of drunk that can only be achieved after many hours of careful, consistent drinking. You have to climb through tipsiness, buzz, slur, and slop — but over on the other side lies a place of perfect equilibrium, an alcoholic zen state where all the ethanol coursing through your veins resolves itself into something jangly and serene. Certain drugs aim to hasten or mimic this effect, but they do so poorly. You really have to drink your way there to get there at all. Recently, I was sitting in a bar that made gestures towards an “English” theme — there was a red “Telephone Booth” where you could pay to charge your iPhone — when it struck me that I had been drinking steadily since a first cup of whiskey consumed in Prospect Park around four that afternoon. I was watching New Zealand play the Rugby World Cup final, and for some reason Mickey Rourke was there. If I concentrated, I could retrace my steps. I’d moved from dark liquor through beer and onto vodka and back again, through dinner and a Jean Renoir movie and yet more beer, and now, sitting in the corner of a dank and fundamentally charmless Greenwich Village bar at a quarter to five in the morning, drinking PBR tallboys at $3 a pop, I realized I was balanced on the tip of that spear. Then France scored a try, and converted. The score was 8-7.

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