A drug commercial for your consideration:

The screen is black. A heart monitor rhythmically beeps in the background. The screen slowly blinks twice. It reveals two, faintly blurry masked doctors standing over the camera. “How’s he doing?” says one. He sounds grim. “Not good,” says the other. “He’s still IBU deficient and his ethyl levels are critically low. We tried an emergency THC transfusion, but there was nothing we could do.” The camera blinks again and fades to black. The beeping of the heart monitor changes to monotone. Beeeeeeeep. Words fade onto the screen and a deep voice reads them aloud: “Sobriety Kills.”

A scene taken from the Twilight Zone?  I think not. Sobrietitis — a fate I would wish on no man, woman or bro. How cruelly ironic then, that like a character I once read about named Job, I seem to be the butt of some divine practical joke.

Yes, I have been stricken with sobrietitis. The cause was simple, and I think, not unique.  Recently, my endowment curve took a mild hit, and, before I could shotgun a Natty Light, my budget got smaller than a bikini during Floatopia.

Don’t worry. It’s not terminal. I can still cage beers at parties, if I can sneak past the bros guarding the keg. I’ve even been privy to some jungle juice. If it’s happy hour, I might be able to bum a draft IPA off a buddy if it happens to tickle his fancy. My foraging skills are still sharp, so a shot, a strikeout or a slugged beer purloined from a homie’s fridge isn’t out of the question. I can keep the ganja gremlins at bay by inserting myself into certain daily circles of fellow degenerates dedicated to puffing the reefer. But it’s just not the same.

Indeed, my soul has been restless of late. The inability to accompany my daily life with the appropriate condiments has been quite heartbreaking. The walk to class down Pardall, my simple midday meal and the quiet contemplative sunset have become unsatisfying and under-spiced without the seasoning of life. The delicious debauchery of midweek bar excursions has given way to the harsh coldness of temperance. The glint in the eyes of dangerously cute women has dulled, and the glory of beer pong has given way to the relentless boredom of the under-stimulated. That, and I feel like I’m less focused in school, more boorish than usual around my friends — and for some reason, I swear I’m not tanning as well as I used to.

But that’s not the worst of it.

You can understand where my head was at, when, on a sunny Saturday afternoon, I was offered some salvia. Let me just say that salvia, even concentrations of 40x, is totally legal, and no one should ever, ever do it.

Yes, when I took that torch lighter to that bong, which was easily large enough to brain a zombie, I had no idea what I was in for.

I lived what felt like a whole lifetime in a small house under a black and yellow sky. There appeared a hole in the sky, and I laboriously climbed and climbed through the air until — ‘POP’ — I snapped back into reality.

I immediately thought I had gone permanently insane. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t think! My body tingled with an insidiously unpleasant feeling. Who would have thought that a man with such an illustrious psychotropic career would meet his match in such an innocuous wild herb?

Unable to reach out and communicate my terror, my friends laughed and giggled and joked, thinking I was still innocently under the sway of this supposedly harmless psychedelic. The bong still had smoke in the chamber, and my friend went to clear it. I violently fought my paralysis in attempt to stop him, lest he accidently suffer my terrible fate! I could not escape the grip of the unpleasant drug, and failed. But he hit it, with no adverse effects, and I suddenly had hope for my recovery.

Luckily, the salvia wore off after half an hour and I was restored to my normal degenerate self. Thank God.

But it was a tremendously unpleasant experience. Terrible, really. And so I write this column as a word of warning — sobriety kills. Take the time to enjoy ‘your debauched health’, and if you are able to give back to the community, donate to SAS (Students Against Sobriety) and do what you can to maintain respectable levels of inebriation in our lovely ocean town.

The good news is that I’ve made some very suave investments in small breweries, so my state of sobriety should be sort-lived. Let’s hope it stays that way.