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" You could have one drink. You won&amp;#039;t. But that&amp;#039;s what you could do.  You could order each drink with a &amp;quot;water back.&amp;quot; This is the apocryphal &amp;quot;Sinatra Rule&amp;quot;: One glass of water for every drink. The Sinatra Rule is the drinker&amp;#039;s law of displacement: If you&amp;#039;re drinking water, you&amp;#039;re not drinking booze. You could try and remember. What you remember is up to you. You could remember the last time you were lying on your bathroom floor. You could remember that you recently possessed a sense of restraint and that maintaining some connection to that state is worthwhile. You could remember that there are laws against making too much of a fool of yourself. You could remember That Time. Every man&amp;#039;s That Time is different. It could be an illegal act. It could be an immoral act. It could be both illegal and immoral. The important thing is that the memory is humiliating. After a few years of drinking, everyone has a memory like that. It&amp;#039;s a helpful memory. It only works if it makes you shudder.  You could drink light beer. Which is not preferred.  You could have a weak drink. Which is. You could leave. Leaving is underrated. Leaving a bar is an unconditional pardon that you grant to yourself. Nothing bad can happen after you leave. You won&amp;#039;t be drinking. You won&amp;#039;t be saying anything stupid. Because you&amp;#039;ve gone. The most effective way to leave a bar is to do so without comment, which is called the &amp;quot;Irish exit.&amp;quot; (Though it seems misnamed. &amp;quot;Irish exit&amp;quot; connotes a teary ritual of embrace and song.) To perform an Irish exit, you just leave. Maybe you hit the john. Maybe you go outside for a cigarette. But the point is, you don&amp;#039;t come back. (Note: The Irish exit doesn&amp;#039;t work if you came with someone and they&amp;#039;re expecting that you&amp;#039;ll be departing with them. And it doesn&amp;#039;t work if it&amp;#039;s early on in the evening. The former makes you an asshole. The latter makes you weird. The Irish exit is done only when everyone is drunk. That way, when you turn up missing, no one will wonder about you. Drunk people don&amp;#039;t spend a lot of time wondering. They acknowledge a lot. They contemplate very little.) You could be aware of your limit. An empirical study of your drinking history will suggest exactly where this is.  To not drink too much, you have to try. At your most lazy, you have to try. You have to access wisdom that your brain doesn&amp;#039;t want to call up, strength that your muscles refuse to activate, courage that your soul has abandoned. It&amp;#039;s a forced prudence: Ask yourself what you&amp;#039;d like to do, then don&amp;#039;t do it. If you feel like yelling, whisper. If you feel like going over there, stay here. If you feel like you should have a seventh drink, nurse your sixth.  Or, you know, leave.  This is the latest in an ongoing series of instructions, or at least suggestions, regarding how to comport yourself while drinking. We call it How We Drink. Have a topic? E-mail us. And on a slightly related note, this. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/food-drink/drinks/how-to/a8676/how-to-drink-less/>