Annotated Anniversary Omake
A minicomic originally posted in February 2013. “Susan Glenn” was the theme of a contest — I’d never heard that name used to mean “the one who got away” before, but the concept was familiar enough, especially to Cohen.
Turns out the whole term was coined in 2012, as part of a viral marketing campaign by…Axe Body Spray. (I don’t think they had “running art contests on DeviantArt” as part of the marketing strategy, but who knows?)
So, yeah, Cohen would not actually say it.
At least the rest of the strip is still a canon-missing-scene level of authentic. (No surprise, he’s talking about Jessica.)
Cohen: A “Susan Glenn”? Sure, I have one. Anybody who’s single at my age probably has to, right?
She was . . . amazing. Brilliant, obviously. Never backed down from a fight. We were at each other’s throats all the time — wouldn’t have had it any other way.
Never once went on an actual date. She wouldn’t have accepted if I’d asked. Too busy with her career to have any interest in a personal life. Which suited me fine. I didn’t want to risk getting tied down with a family anyway.
But, you know, looking back on it now, I could have at least told her how I really felt. Might have been worth a mention. And, well, now she’s dead — eight years ago today, actually — so, so much for that idea.
Don’t look at me like that. If needing a few extra drinks on a day like this meant you had an alcohol problem, everyone in the world would be in AA.
1. Alcohol doesn’t work like that for me. I’m not sure it works like that for anyone. I do know that it doesn’t work like that for a lot of people who think it does.
Alcohol is a depressant. People think it helps with depression because it also suppresses memory, but mostly it suppresses the memory of how you were feeling while you were drunk. If not remembering feeling shitty is your benchmark for happy, being drunk in retrospect tends to seem pretty good.
Source: I’ve spent *way* too much time around drunk people, almost invariably while I was sober.
2. Only people who admit they have problems or are going to support someone else who’s admitted to having problems go to AA.
3. Only people who can tolerate the heavy Christianity go to AA long term.
4. No wonder I completely missed the reference the first time around. I mean, I understood the implication, but I tend to be ad blind and also don’t own a TV.
Alcohol definitely doesn’t help me with depression, but it’s great (dangerously so) with my anxiety. I could picture a case a lot like this where the issue was actually anxiety: less “Well, damn” and more “How could I have been so stupid?”
anxiety and pain. when I’m drunk I’m much more bubbly and social, and I won’t get as much of a headache from doing normal social things somewhere quiet enough nobody’s trying to yell over music. (my body responds to non-prescription painkillers the way the borg respond to phasers)
the anxiety-hangover the next day sucks, though. anxiety does *not* like me being out of its control. o noes, I said *words* to *people*, clearly this will destroy the entire planet! 🤦
…and I totally forgot to quote MASH… I forget the exact wording but it was something like “we don’t drink to feel better; we drink to stop feeling.”
I’m frustrated by people who drink to feel better and tell other people they should drink to feel better, when I’ve seen that’s clearly not the case for basically everyone I’ve seen drunk.
That said, if you’re drinking to stop feeling, I totally get that and support it. I’d probably do that myself, except that neither of the times I was drunk did I stop feeling or forget. Instead, I was super-conscious of how incredibly clumsy I was, and how much worse I was at social.
To be clear, it wasn’t that I wasn’t drunk enough. The first time I was drunk, it was on roughly 1/6th of Jim Beam over the course of about 3 hours. The second time was a shot of Everclear in under a second. (Do not take that stuff straight. DO *NOT* TAKE THAT STUFF STRAIGHT! I know, because I did. Well, discounting about 1% lemonade powder and sugar by weight. I wasn’t trying to get drunk, I learned from the prior time. But I was feeling stupidly impervious from the prior experience and, well, peer pressure.)