Masks and Bubbers

In the interest of not making an ass of myself while working on last year's NaNo, I went back to doing a bit of research on opiates. Despite my lack of interest in actually using drugs, that one in particular I find oddly enthralling to read about. Perhaps it's because it goes so well with the whole Victorian-Steampunk thing.

Thus, I'm picking through Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater in search of something more anecdotal than dry medical reading, and have come across this gem:

...certainly it is most absurdly said, in popular language,
of any man that he is _disguised_ in liquor; for, on the
contrary, most men are disguised by sobriety, and it is when
they are drinking (as some old gentleman says in Athenaeus),
that men [Greek text]--display themselves in their true
complexion of character, which surely is not disguising
themselves.

I've been saying that for years. I have never bought it for a minute when anyone blamed hateful behaviour or split personalities on inebriation, but instead see it as stripping away all the polite repressions and masks to reveal whatever one truly has inside; sometimes something very ugly. The only person I personally know to have been an angry, violent drunk had a violent temper when stone cold sober. Alcohol merely peeled off the rest of the facade.

Or maybe I just feel that way because I never did anything but giggle and daydream and be more forthcoming with my sympathy while drunk: all core elements of who I am, but not ones that I readily put forth.

Who knows?