To follow up on my Starbucks thread. My first time in a bar I thought I was walking into Lucifer’s den.

I wouldn't go into a bar. I felt uncomfortable in there.

But a burger and a beer is tough to beat.

Speaking of burgers, the Burger King Junior Whopper is very good for a junior size. I had one last night to watch the calories. And it was actually filling! But now I'm craving another one just thinking about it. Sans beer.

I had mine with a Starbucks Vanilla latte. :)

I may not frequent the bars, but you cannot keep me out of Starbucks!

Well, not as much as it might have done, because my extended family owned pubs and we'd visit them, though mainly in the living quarters. Children were NOT allowed in bars in those days, though we'd sneak in.

N E V E R!!!

I resigned when I was 20; I never set foot in a bar as a TBM.

As a TBM?? Never went inside of one. After leaving?? no guilt whatsoever.

A Mormon walks into a bar for the first time and comes up to the bartender and asks.

Bartender, give me something to drink that won't offend god.

The Bartender responds.

Well god only drinks it if it's older than 12 years and from Scotland.

I still do not frequent bars. As a recovered alcoholic and from a family of alcoholics (it runs on my TBM side,) I do not feel comfortable inside them to this day.

My dad and each of his brothers (all Mormon raised, fifth generation,) were alcoholics. Why should it be a surprise that I acquired the gene? I avoid it because of that and I don't miss the atmosphere of bars nor do I miss imbibing. My mother was addicted to pain killers. Between both my parents I grew up as a child of Alcoholics.

When I went agnostic as a young adult was when I became an active alcoholic while living in Palo Alto. I could drink beer non-stop, there was no limit to how much I could tolerate. That's when I knew I had a drinking problem and decided to seek help for it.

When I recognized I had a hunger for spirituality was when I was able to both stop drinking alcohol and stop smoking tobacco around the same time ... (up to that time especially the nicotine habit had been like a ball and chain habit that felt like it was impossible to break free from.) That was around the time I said a prayer asking God if he was real would he let me know, because I didn't know. My life had hit rock bottom. Within days of my saying that prayer was when I had my answer and things began turning around for me. Like the parable of the faith of a mustard seed was how tiny my faith felt inside me, but I could feel it was there only that small and minute. Once I knew someone upstairs had heard my prayer was all I needed to know that if I mattered enough for someone upstairs to acknowledge me, a 'nobody,' then God must be a God for everyone, not just for someone else.

As an adult I went for a time to Adult children of Alcoholic s on Wall Street, near where I worked for some of their sessions. That was while I was an active practicing TBM, but questioning the religion seriously for the first time as a grownup. Some of those people at the Adult Children meetings were way more stressed out than I was feeling at the time, or in far worse relationships or very destructive behavioral patterns that they shared at the meetings than even I was as a single parent in a toxic dysfunctional cult religion. It wasn't unusual to see one of them pass out at a meeting and have an ambulance come take them to the ER because of the trauma they had going on at home. This was WALL Street ... lot of business types. But on the other side of the hall was the Alcoholics Anonymous side where the drunks would come in for their sessions. And many of them were not in recovery. They'd come in stone drunk half the time. So after a few meetings on Wall Street, I stopped going once I decided it wasn't really helping all that much and was actually interfering with my lunch break at some point. But the Serenity Prayer has stayed with me ever since. And the Twelve Step Program is really a self-help program you can practice anywhere. So it was beneficial in that sense.

Some people have that biology. Alcohol for them has the same effect as cocaine. If drinks make you sleepy, you’re probably okay. If they energize you, stay away.

babyloncansuckit Wrote:
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> Some people have that biology. Alcohol for them
> has the same effect as cocaine. If drinks make you
> sleepy, you’re probably okay. If they energize
> you, stay away.

Personally, I find alcohol makes me feel very depressed. It usually hits me the next day and can be triggered by only several drinks (two or three even). I get horrific hangovers too. For those two reasons alone I don't do it.

I haven't drunk alcohol for many many years now. I can thank the LDS for that partly, for giving me a motivation to stay off it, but I remember it well enough not to do it. Now that I don't drink I get up easily in the morning, and I never get those black moods now.

Alcohol is not a stimulant, but a depressant on the central nervous system. So it's no surprise that it acts as one; that's what it does best.

babyloncansuckit Wrote:
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> Some people have that biology. Alcohol for them
> has the same effect as cocaine. If drinks make you
> sleepy, you’re probably okay. If they energize
> you, stay away.


I recollect some surgeons at Stanford University Hospital telling me following a surgery I'd had when I lived there that I was talking all the way through the surgery. The more anesthesia they'd give me didn't really make much difference because I continued to talk more throughout the operation. I don't remember a damned thing. I was talking in my sleep ... I could have confessed to anything !! I was only 18 years old at the time and had been living on my own since I was 17. I still wonder what kind of things I was telling them in my sleep?!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/02/2019 09:26PM by Amyjo.

I don't blame you Amyjo, there are a lot of dubious people in bars especially when they're drunk. I agree with your comments on alcoholism which is one of the biggest problems in our society.

I do go into bars - not out of personal preference, I still don't drink - mainly because my friends like to meet in them. But I still don't like everyone I meet in them.

I made the mistake for a while of going to business meetings in bars. It rapidly became clear that not only was one of my colleagues alcoholic, but that drunks will make all kinds of promises to you that they have no intention of keeping when sober. Some of them will buy things off you when drunk - if they have the money with them, but drunks are extremely unreliable. I can't be doing with that in business - I'm happy to allow some time for a customer to decide, but I despise time wasters and bars are full of them.

Yeah, I hear ya. I had my fill of bars when I lived in Palo Alto.

I was never carded when I lived there and I was under age.

Funny. But that was the go-go 70's and just about everyone was drinking it seemed like at least there. I'd moved from Idaho and Utah. Even Idaho and Utah had its share of teens who did that, but the bar scene in Idaho and Utah was not as free wheeling as Stanford, California was in the 1970s.

There was only one or two places I really liked to hang out at, but they got old really fast.

And then there were the beer parties. I got to really detest those. Maybe because the people there were like strangers and you really didn't know any of them, yet they were all hanging out together to get drunk. And what joy is there in that? It just became kind of a joyless, deadsville thing to do. But then I needed to grow up, and move on with my life. And hadn't gone to college right from high school, so that was part of the problem. I put that on hold for a while.

Then I moved back home to Idaho and put college on hold for five more years. By the time I started college I was super motivated to go, but was a proverbial late bloomer because I'd waited so long to start out of high school. Yet ... I was the first in my immediate family to graduate with a bachelor's degree, and a middle child and the ONLY girl. My oldest TBM RM brother went back to college after I graduated so he could finish his bachelors and went on to earn his PhD because he said he couldn't let his little sister "show him up." :)

My other brothers earned their degrees after I did as well. I was the first even though I was the "late bloomer." (Better late than never!)

Amyjo Wrote:
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> from a family of alcoholics


And that's why I never will be a drinker. There are way too many alcoholics in my family. I've seen lives destroyed and even lives lost due to alcohol.

When I had my DNA tested, they did find a gene for addiction. Not that we had a tendency towards addiction, but a tendency to consume a lot more of a substance if we did become addicted to something like cigarettes or alcohol.

I'm not even going there. It's not worth the risk.

I've seen lives destroyed too, Greyfort. Too many. And some too close to home. So I hear ya.

Not always from alcohol. But it's a killer, or can be.

I wasn't as much of a TBM when I got to drinking age.

Sooooo..... there was cocktails, live music and dancing,

and a ton of friends. Needless to say I didn't feel guilty.

Exactly. Social drinking with friends is completely different than drinking by yourself. Especially when there’s food involved. Alas, I’ve built up a tolerance and don’t want to put on more weight. Fortunately, there are much better ways to get smashed.

I'm a loner. I can only remember one time walking into a 'bar' bar. It's a long, pointless story and I'll save it for posting on Facebook, once I figure out how to make sure no one can read it.

so I never felt guilty about going into a bar. Never went frequently to bars, but occasionally did due to unusual circumstances. When traveling, sometimes in a small out of the way area, the local bar would be the place you could go into to use the restroom, get a sandwich, get directions, etc.

Occasionally, as a teen ager, I would get odd jobs to earn some spending money. Sometimes I would be hired by local bars on a temporary basis to do some clean up or help with unloading delivery trucks and things like that when they were short-handed. Guilt was always about intention for me. I did sometimes worry that if another TBM saw me they would misunderstand why I was going into a bar, but I figured it would be no big deal...and if anyone asked me, I could easily explain.

As a TBM, being inside a bar was like getting an inside look at a type of place where spiritually weak people went to be tempted by Satan. I told myself that it was important for me to see these kinds of places so that I would be better informed when dealing with benighted souls who needed help to find the Gospel and break free from their bad habits.

I never went in them while I was in the cult. I could now but if I’m going out a restaurant would be preferable, if a friend wants to drink nice restaurants will have alcohol on the menu.

So many crimes and homicides seem to start in bars, seems like good places to avoid. I think for me at least, sugary desserts are more a risk to be habit forming than alcohol. :)

As a TBM, I felt uncomfortable walking into a Starbucks or other coffee shop!

I was in Italy on tour with the BYU Folk Dance team and sick to death of room temperature Coca-colas and my dance partner and I found a bar and had a coke with ice in it. Heaven. It was so hot out I could have cared less if the bartender was Lucifer, hisself. I wanted a cold drink and would have sold my soul to get it.

I worked with a bunch of mormons and nonmormons. The mormons weren't extreme TBM and even they told me which bars had the best food in places like Sun Valley and Jackson Hole. It never bothered me to go into a bar and I was pretty TBM.

When I was a member, I’d rarely go in bars, but would go occasionally with a friend if a good band was playing. I figured that if anyone from the church saw me inside, they couldn’t say anything because they were there too, even though I wasn’t drinking. I’d feel guilty if I was with people who drank coffee though ,because someone was more likely to see me, since coffee is everywhere , like restaurants .
I never was into drinking, definitely not to get drunk.
I get filled up with liquid of any kind, so I’d be too full to get drunk.

I'd become an alcoholic. Probably if I had been a drinker around the time my husband left, no doubt I would have been a drunk laying on the couch all day drowning out the reality of my life. I do have an addictive personality and my family didn't really have alcoholism in it, but I have 3 siblings who drink too much. I didn't take a drink until I was back with my nonmember boyfriend 14 years ago and he gave me my first drink--BRANDY. I told him I'd been drinking NyQuil for a long time. I thought it was disgusting. Once in a while I'll have a margarita and I have been in bars since--2 while at his son's wedding. They had the whole bar reserved. I didn't have any alcohol at the wedding. (Wait, I had champagne--2 glasses--didn't even bother me at all. I have a high tolerance.) My brother told me I should. I realized the reason everyone was dancing so wildly is becuase they had a lot of alcohol and I didn't, BUT the wedding was not ruined because nobody got very drunk. It was an absolutely beautiful wedding.

My family, although 3 of my siblings drink too much, are all very productive and have had never had problems in their jobs. My nephews all drink and my son used to, but he quit it and drugs by himself except for being on suboxone for a few years to help with opiate addiction.

But I've never been drunk. I've barely had a buzz. I'm not even sure of that. For one thing, I think alcohol is way too expensive and I'm not willing to spend that much money on it.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 06/03/2019 11:02PM by cl2.

My formerly-TBM* wife enjoys going with bars with me. She likes the burgers and atmosphere, particularly if there is live music. But she loves the smell of beer and enjoys trying to figure out what's in it, and will take a sip of mine..."just to nail down the ingredients I'm smelling."


*I don't know what she is anymore. Though she claims to still have a testimony, she's hardly TBM.

No. I never felt guilty about enjoying a beer...but I was never a TBM either.

I never felt guilty at all, then again I was an adult hormonal convert so I wasn't exactly a TBM. To me, one of the nice things is to have some beer with friends at a bar. One hobby I've taken up after leaving Mormonism is home brewing, and it's also a nice thing to share what I've brewed with friends who love good beer.