I used to romanticize drinking when I was younger. I read a lot of Charles Bukowski (a "laureate of American lowlife" TIME), watched the movies that glorified drinking, etc. But over time you begin to realize that you are wasting your life. Besides what alcohol did to my life, (or better, what I ended up NOT doing), I remember two things that made me realize that it was time for me to stop drinking - When I read the Paul Williams quote, "You know you're an alcoholic when you misplace things like a decade," and when I watched Charles Bukowski kick his wife repeatedly in a dunken fit in the documentary Bukowski: Born Into This.