We watched the movie Tin-Tin the other day. It’s a good movie, but one of the main characters is a total drunk. As we were driving home afterwards, we talked with the kids about alcohol.<\/p>\n
“But,” my wife said after we were done, “there’s nothing wrong with a drink every once in a while for people that don’t have a problem. They just have to be responsible.”<\/p>\n
“The key is staying in control of yourself,” I chimed in. That’s pretty much my favorite lecture these days. Homework, church, exercise… I’m always trying to get the kids to keep their brains in charge of what they do.<\/p>\n
“Yeah,” my wife said. “Have you ever seen me drink myself silly?”<\/p>\n
“No,” my oldest answered.<\/p>\n
“What about Daddy? Have you ever seen him get silly when he’s drinking a beer?”<\/p>\n
An awkward silence settled over the back seats. I couldn’t believe it. My drinking days ended long before the kids arrived. I average about a beer a month these days, if that.<\/p>\n
My wife looked over her shoulder. “Well?”<\/p>\n
“Well,” my youngest said. “He’s always<\/em> silly.”<\/p>\n “Yeah,” his older brother chimed in, \u00a0“but it’s not because of alcohol.”<\/p>\n Yep, that’s me.\u00a0I live in a state of perpetual intoxication.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In which an uncomfortable truth is revealed about me and alcohol. Don’t worry. It’s not what you think. At least, I don’t think it is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[123,118,122,120,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1463","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-cute","category-daddytales-c","category-daddytales-n","category-daddytales-embarassing","category-daddytales-funny"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DpYi-nB","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1463","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1463"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1463\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}