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So I don’t keep beers in my house.

I’m deathly afraid of reaching the point where beer replaces pornography, football and writing as my nightly pastime to pass the time. I’m not talking about knocking back brews with friends at a pub, or going over to someone’s house and emptying a case of Bud. I’m talking about sitting alone in my apartment every night with the lights off, the television on mute, my cell phone buzzing restlessly in the background while the police car lights crackle through the window as the constabulary break up the fiesta dinner party across the street. I’m single and I live alone. Without knowing it, I’m one beer away from resting a plate of frozen moz sticks on the edge of my stomach, half covered by an undersized Favre Jets jersey, my rear end sunk deeply into my own ass groove in the couch.

Who is going to be that person that reaches over and touches me on the shoulder and says, “Son, I think you’ve had enough”? No one because I locked the door and every time I close my eyes, I see wavering images of Mother Shipton darning socks outside the cave, cackling madly “He’s coming for you, don’t open the door!” If the devil’s gonna get me, he’s going to have to bust in that door first.

Lately, I’ve been evaluating my no-beer-at-home rule. So what’s the issue really? That beer will become my substitute for love? That I will fall into disrepair and become a couch monkey, go to work blindly drunk and refuse to acknowledge that my personal body odor is offensive? That I might eat TV dinners out of the tray? That instead of being a social lubricant where my beers are cheering for the brief nightly appearance of 3 beer Andy (dark Mondays), drinking will actually make me more of a recluse, incapable and unwilling of being out around people for whom my slurred speech and constant shadow boxing have become an anathema?

It really seems unlikely that beer is going to surpass a night of X-tube, Cheez-its, and Monday Night Football as primary entertainment. If anything, it might just enhance the whole damn thing. And really, unless beer disables my OCD completely, there is no worry that I will stop showering any time in this century.

I do, rightly or wrongly, associate drinking alone as a bit of a lonerish activity, one that seems to emphasize my lack of anything more productive to do or anyone to do it with it. (I can hear the London symphonies now.) Not unlike going to the movies by yourself. Sometimes having nothing to do is alright, in fact, is the ideal way to spend a evening, beer or no beer. But that notion prevents me from casually indulging myself in a couple of beers on any given night or even stopping by the package store no matter how badly I need that damn drink.

So maybe what I need to do is set up a reverse hotline of sorts. An SOS distress call to all my friends that says “Andy Needs A Beer. All Available Units Respond.” Or start a club on Facebook called “Tonight I Need a Drink and You’re Coming With Me.” You’d sign up, you know it.

I recently did an informal poll of my friends on this very topic and found them all wholly receptive to the idea that spur-of-the-moment drink invitations. So far, I haven’t put out the alarm call despite a couple days at work that left me in need of either inebriation or sedation. Instead, I took myself home, sat down on the couch with my laptop and turned on the TV for background noise, sans beer. Not because I’m afraid of being that guy that drinks alone but because even that guy needs a night off once in a while.

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