This is Annie Grace and you're listening to this naked mind podcast where without judgment,

pain or rules, we explore the role of alcohol in our lives and culture.

Hi, this is Annie Grace and welcome to this naked mind podcast. I'm super excited to be here with Mark. Hi, Mark. Welcome. Hi, thanks for having me. Yeah, thanks for being here. So why don't you like kind of take us back to the beginning, take us back to your early days for strength childhood stuff like that.

Yeah, first that's a while ago because I just just turned 40 last week. So I'd say I'd have to go back to probably when I was about 15 years old. I want to say so I would have been sometimes like sophomore in college or so and I remember the first drink I ever had and I got, you know, very sick on it was a Zima, which is a nasty malt beverage type of drink.

And I just remember the, you know, drinking a bunch of those and getting very sick and throwing up and saying, I'll never do this again and how could anybody drink this stuff. So that's my first day. It's memory of actually drinking alcohol.

Not a pleasant one is probably most people would agree with on that. But I didn't, I wouldn't say that I really started drinking much after that. I think it was a little bit later a few years later where I really started, I guess getting more into it in college and so forth.

But 15 about 15 was probably when I first had my first experience with it.

And so what you didn't like it, you did like it. How did go from there?

Yeah, I mean, I definitely like to taste the mean that I never grew accustomed to liking the taste of malt beverages anyway, but it was pretty, it was pretty gross. But I think, you know, you like that feeling that you kind of got at the beginning, which is the part that kind of keeps, keeps bringing you back right as you start feeling good and your ambitions are down and that sort of thing. And of course, it's cool to do it. So, you know, why not?

I said, I didn't get heavy into it in high school. I'd say we do the typical like Friday night football games. Let's go to a corner store that would, you know, illegally sell 100 each kid's alcohol and we would buy more of those kind of fruity type drinks that sort of stuff that people are used to.

And those tend to the taste a little better right because there are tons of sugar in them and cool aid basically with the alcohol. So, but, but, yeah, that first drink was I didn't like it, I would say it was, it was just more the feeling and then of course, the hang over the next day was pretty rough being being that age.

And then so, didn't drink much in high school, then what happened after high school? Where did it come from there?

You know, high school again, I played sports and then I was working. So, I didn't really, I guess, get too much into the heavy drinking crowd and keg parties and all those types of things that you typically hear about.

I went to four year university in Austin and pretty typical party school, but I was still a, you know, I was working full time and actually going to school full time. So, it was a little bit different of a student. So, I didn't have as much free time to go out and party and do those things until my junior and senior year, I would say in college, which is obviously when I turned 21 as well.

So, then I had the ability to go out to bars and hang out and I had some friends that, you know, we would go out with pretty regularly. Usually Wednesday Thursday Friday night.

Thursday Wednesday through Saturday nights, we would go out and, you know, there's a very famous street and Austin as most people who have been there know and so you would, you would have found me there quite a bit in the early 2000s and, you know, just going out with some friends and having a good time.

And of course, most of those nights ended with, you know, pretty heavy, pretty heavy drinking because you'd start early and.

And so I'd say that's probably where the bulk of that. The heavy or drinking started was during those college years.

And did you feel pretty similar to your peers or did you kind of feel like you were doing things differently at the time or.

No, I'd say we, we, it felt normal, I guess I'd say as we all were doing that and there wasn't anything abnormal about it, like occasionally you'd get sick, of course, you'd have too much to drink and so you'd be dealing with that the next morning, but at that age, you could rebound pretty quick and.

Shava hamburger in your mouth and a shake from somewhere and you were back at it the next day, so the ability to bounce back was a lot different then so I think we just sort of.

I felt like that was just part of the cost of going out and having fun. I still made it to work every every morning, the next morning or made it to my classes, but never impacted the ability to actually get up and do my job probably because I was 21 and had that ability.

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