Booze and Creative Boost





I’m drawn to people so I draw them. Naturally, people watching while doing life sketches is a sound excuse to break my abstinence. Not to mention the temptation of getting a boost to my fragile ego. (Don’t confuse humor for self-deprecation.)Turns out, seeking validation in a fun social setting, while sipping on a substance that turns us into stupefied superheroes in our own minds, is not helpful when you’re trying to ditch a bad habit.o, several months ago, I found myself at a local bar, once again, drinking and drawing to ease my mind. I was sipping on my usual Yuengling draft sketching the crowd, when a young guy surprised me with his question:“Does alcohol make you better or worse at drawing?”, he asked.“Hmm, that’s a good question.” I said, stalling to give myself some pause to think. “A little bit of both.”

In the “Stoned Ape Theory”, developed by Terence McKenna and Dennis McKenna, the brothers suggest that our early ancestors expanded their brain capacities by consuming mind-altering substances around 150,000 to 200,000 years ago. Seems that calling such compounds consciousness expanding could not be more appropriate.In his book “Food of the Gods”, Terence McKenna argues that early humans expanded their brain’s capacities to think abstractly, giving birth to language, by journeying into the unknown depths of our consciousness. Indeed, our ancient ancestors may have given our brains a major boost to the imaginative capacities by eating magic mushrooms, purely by accident. So the belief of consciousness altering as the gateway to creativity runs in our DNA.