I’ve mentioned before that I suffered from severe cystic acne as a teenager.  Although I tried my best to conceal it with my shaggy hair, it only exasperated the problem and I eventually had to seek professional help. For a year, this meant enduring weekly extractions at the hands of a sadist who loved to regale me with stories of her post-divorce sex life almost as much as she loved to see me squirm/bleed. After an hour of being poked with a needle that I was told could only be used legally in the state of Texas,  I would lick my wounds and wander over to Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, get an iced mocha, take sad pictures of myself on my camera phone and cry.  The photo above appeared on my Livejournal with the caption: “Keep going. I can’t.” L O L.

As I said before, it took me a long time to actually get wasted in high school. It wasn’t so much a moral issue (I never had those) as it was a matter of taste- I thought booze was disgusting. My perception changed, however, when I met Cook’s brut champagne. Cook’s is a white trash champagne that retails for a terrifying four dollars. At eighteen, however, I thought it tasted like a million bucks and one night, I was struck with the brilliant idea of drinking an entire bottle of it and going to a local show. My plans turned out to be too ambitious when, after I arrived, I realized I was only capable of having a drunk photo shoot in front of the venue. After about ten polaroids, the ground started to wobble and I high-tailed it back to Mom’s house where I immediately passed out in my cowboy boots. The next morning, I woke up with the gnarliest hangover and I wore that shit like a badge of honor. After all, people were supposed to feel like hell and eat greasy foods and commiserate with their friends the morning after, right? And it’s fun, right? I continued this cruel champagne cycle all year, waking up each morning feeling like I had been shot in the head and it was only until my freshman year of college when I switched to whiskey that I realized that champagne is a particularly unkind alcohol-an alcohol that often puts the “ass” in class- and that it didn’t have to be this way. Oh well. You live and you drink.

The house I grew up in had a detached workshed that was originally intended as a place for storage. Things quickly changed, however, when my siblings and I reached our teens and decided we needed to have a den of sin. My sister lived there first, under the vague excuse of needing more privacy. Since my bedroom window faced the workshed, I understood why. At 19, she needed a safe space to get drunk and pee freely on the lawn, entertain mysterious visitors at all hours of the night and the option to recreate every Cheech & Chong movie with her pot habit. When she eventually moved out, my brother took over the room and used it as a place to film his amateur porn. I once had the misfortune of walking in on a “scene” and nearly died choking on a Milano.

Somewhere between the porn, the booze and the one-night stands, my friends and I managed to use the room as a space for our drunk dance parties. Compared to my siblings’ debauchery, these nights were tame. They invariably involved drinking Mike’s Hard lemonade, declaring our love for one another and replaying the Moving Units EP 4,000 times.

The room also has the distinction of being the place where I lost my virginity. In my defense, I was seventeen and really horny. Spiderwebs, the potential for catching scabies and empty bottles of alcohol did little to abate my sexual appetite.

You’re probably wondering where my mother was during all of this insanity. She was holed up in her own den of sin- drinking vodka-tonics, drunk-dialing old boyfriends and blasting Keith Sweat records. She was the true queen of the teenage brats.