The next round is on me

This Friday, I turn 21. I've been waiting about 18 years for this, ever since I was first told, "You can have more when you're older."

I had yet to understand the allure of the drink, but I already felt excluded. Dad gets Beefeater's gimlets and I get Shirley Temples. They called them Buck Rogers, but I knew. God, did I know.

So this Friday, I get to make good on the government's promise that on that day, I get to consume all the alcohol I can afford and/or endure. Whichever breaks first, the bank or the body, I will have my day.

It will be difficult not to celebrate in a way that would stray outside the bounds of good ideas.

I've been drinking since I was 14 years old, if you don't count family functions, when I wasn't the one deciding when enough was enough. Illegal, I know. That's what we are gathered here to today to discuss.

I don't believe I am a statistical outlier to the mean first-drink age with a submission of 14 years. Most of my friends had already gotten drunk at an infamous summer field party between 7th and 8th grade. They got busted and grounded. They got a good talking to, because any God-fearing parent, or at least authority-fearing parent, would give one. But that's the problem.

It's not the job of any outside party, congressionally authorized or otherwise, to decide what is a healthy age for a child to start drinking. Yes, drinking is a responsibility. Yes, one takes one's safety into one's hands when one takes a drink to one's lips. But there are plenty of high-risk activities that don't involve drugs or alcohol in which a 14-year-old may participate that have yet to be forbidden in any US legislation.

Playing football, concert-going, wrestling, dirt bike and ATV-riding, farm equipment operation, sexual activity with other minors and the carrying of a lethal weapon for hunting purposes are all well within the rights of the American 14-year-old.

An American 20-year-old can be given capital punishment, may engage in sexual activity with any non-minors and, in Nevada, with prostitutes. For four years, I've been allowed to drive a 3000-pound missile in excess of 75 miles per hour without being pulled over. And a couple years ago, I received a draft card which told me that I could be chosen, as a capable male, to die for any cause deemed worthy by the United States Congress.

They didn't mention the disillusioning fact that if I was fatally wounded in action, it would be criminal of me to consume alcohol in any effort to quench a blood-dry thirst or kill the pain that comes along with a bullet lodged in the chest cavity. That is, assuming I'm dying on my mother country's soil. In most countries, it's bottoms up.

Mind you, this is a law the penalties of which have not been difficult to avoid. I've been turned away on a mere two occasions out of dozens, but that tension never really left the moment of exchange. There's a moment of reckoning when one hands a vendor or bouncer one's ID, and when that vendor or bouncer either does, or does not, hand it back. The sensation which accompanies that judgment is not one I should have to feel as a responsible member of society.

I've never been arrested, I've never done anything to put anyone else's safety at serious risk.

Not when I was drinking, anyway.

I'm not a heavy drinker. I'm certainly no animal in the party kingdom. Most of my consumption takes place in living room while watching catalog episodes of "The Sopranos." But because I have been drinking of my own discretion for almost 7 years now, I know how to drink responsibly.

Anyone who abides by the law in question is ignorant of his or her consumption capacity at the age of 21, when he or she is figuratively tossed into the alcohol pool, left to learn to either stay afloat or call for help from under eight golden pilsner feet.

Because a law can be so ineptly instituted as to attempt to strip me of my freedom to learn my limits, I do not find any law morally binding. They're more like suggestions.

Nonetheless, it will be nice to be free of the hassle and get to the hustle Friday night.