There is also the fact that in the advanced stages of alcoholism, you can drink like a fish and seem nearly normal, because you are drinking now not to get high but just to fly straight and stave off the shakes. At that point one's main caloric source also is the alcohol-- food has ceased to be part of the daily routine. So yes, at that point, you might need to sip all evening to play at all, but that does not mean the drinking has anything to do with the playing. It has more to do with the person's ability to keep from crashing due to lack of food and their need to earn a buck for the next fix.

The mystique that gets attached to legendary drinkers usually is a smokescreen people agree to subscribe to during that short period in the drinker's life, just before they bottom out, when it seemed like they might actually be someone you could deal with in mutual responsibility. But it's just a smokescreen. It's just the behavior that the drinker and others surrounding them agree to pretend is OK, so that the status quo need not change and the drinking can continue.

By the time one needs to drink to do anything, one has passed the line of truth long since. It doesn't help them any to agree with the view that alcohol "helps" anything. Alcohol has one job-- to impair some part of us. Some people enjoy the result of that as a recreation, but that's all it really does. It's our agreement to let alcohol and its use stand for other things that make for the messes in dealing with it. That's what destroys the lives around the drinker-- the illusions passed off as truth.

~S~