“Men and women drink essentially because they like the effect produced by alcohol. … They are restless, irritable and discontented, unless they can again experience the sense of ease and comfort which comes at once by taking a few drinks” (The Doctor’s Opinion)
The ease and comfort it gave me was the same ease and comfort it gave everyone.
Ease and comfort are a cheap commodity if you have them liberally purveyed by many activities. They are premium goods if there’s only one provider.
Some people were in ease-and-comfort deficit before they ever drank. The ease and comfort were nothing special in themselves, but they were special to such people, like those remarkable films of Muscovites eating a Macdonald’s for the first time in January 1990. Our fast food was their gourmet experience.
Other people started out like regular folks, but alcoholic drinking gradually switched off all of the other sources of ease and comfort, leaving alcohol the snorkel providing the only source of air to someone who would otherwise drown.
Lastly, an imperious urge, if resisted, will torture the individual. Cough when you want to cough and you do not notice anything. You often do not even notice you are coughing. Try to suppress the cough and then become aware of what is going on in one’s consciousness, and one discovers panic and suffering during the experience, yielding to ultimate failure. It’s impossible not to cough. One is tortured until one coughs.
I experienced the restlessness, irritability, and discontentment of not drinking only when the impulse to drink hit and I did not immediately yield. They were the poison pumped into the system by the parasitic creature of alcoholism to ensure it would get its own way.
The pleasure thus provided was the pleasure of taking off wet clothes or tight shoes. There’s no great pleasure in being dry unless one’s been wet, or of being discalced unless one’s been wearing tight shoes.
The pleasure of a smoker who has stopped for two days and suddenly starts again in order to beat the torture of the cravings (the restlessness, irritability, and discontentment) is not experiencing an inherent pleasure in the nicotine (your first cigarette probably made you feel dizzy and sick) but relief from the sudden disappearance of pain.
The restlessness, irritability, and discontentment of a thwarted smoker are not signs of a chaotic life, incompetence, emotional maladjustment, childhood trauma, or any other external or internal mental or emotional cause; they are the function of a physical system trying to impose a particular course of action on a resisting subject.
Thus with alcohol.