Bring on the ice water! What can I say, sobriety makes even more sense to me when it's a zillion degrees out and the Angry Orb is blazing down...

I've got five months' sobriety under my corset (I don't wear belts). I still keep connected with my secular sobriety group at unhooked.com, but I thought I was finished with the reading-everything-about-drunks-I-could-find stage of detox. Then I picked up Deadly Persuasion by Jean Kilbourne (author of the classic documentary "Killing Us Softly: Advertising's Image of Women"), thinking it was another adbusting feminist rant. Which it is, I'm happy to report. But it's also about alcoholism, and addiction in general, and what it's like to be a freakgirl in America.

"I made the near-fatal mistake so many girls and women make of thinking that alcohol and cigarettes set me free, helped me to express my wild self," she writes. Feel like a rebel, an outlaw (or outcast)? Somehow, by conforming to the advertisers' goal, consuming what they tell us to, sedating ourselves, we are supposed to be enhancing that rebel image. (If you want to be a whole person rather than an image, that's even harder.)

Kilbourne writes: "There is great debate about whether alcoholics share any personality traits. Most knowledgeable people think they don't. However, some research indicates that the personality traits that influence high-risk drinking choices that can lead to alcoholism include gregariousness, impulsiveness, and rebelliousness." Advertisers of alcohol use these traits constantly, especially the appeal to rebelliousness. They also "encourage and normalize personality change via drinking, one of the symptoms of alcoholism." She adds that "all the images of magical transformation are not sufficient to influence us in and of themselves. They probably wouldn't matter very much if they didn't connect with the core belief of American culture -- that we can recreate ourselves, transform ourselves, indeed we should. Advertising has reshaped this into a belief that we can do it all effortlessly if we just use the right products." And "this belief in instant transformation is at the heart of addiction."

Well, yeah, so.... since I've already admitted to being the addictive type (one taste and you can't get enough of me...), um, I mean the addictED type... now that I'm sober, I find myself expecting "instant transformation" in other ways. I should be superhealthy, superfit, superunmoody....

Nothing that's happening in my life is instant. (Even those blue and green dreads don't happen overnight... well, they can, but then it takes all night.) I'm studying these issues in the landscape of myself -- what it means to rebel, to be an outsider -- what it means to connect, to belong. When is rebellion conformity, and when is making a real connection with another person a revolutionary act?

I wasn't sure if I should keep writing about addiction, but Kilbourne's talk of "rebelliousness" and image and belonging stirred echoes of that interminable online conversation about what is and isn't Goth; individualism vs. conformity (while my black nails and blue hair make me the wild woman of the office, they make me exceedingly mainstream at Alchemy).

Kilbourne even cites an ad for black nailpolish -- she notes that it's a pretty harmless way to rebel, unlike, say, taking up smoking. And my reaction was somewhere between a smile and a cringe: you mean there are ads for black nailpolish? Well, duh, we've been faithfully buying the stuff for years; it's no great shock that the suppliers have noticed.

So yeah, the rebelling-vs.-belonging yin/yang is one I've contemplated before, long before I started ordering cream soda in bars. Outsiderness is probably what did drive me to drink. By ninth grade, I was already smart and awkward and morbid and hyperselfconscious; our drug of choice, Coca-Cola mixed with Jack Daniels, made me unselfconscious, cheerful, confident, stupid. Perfect for surviving high school and even making a few friends. Well, most of them weren't friends; they were Drinking Buddies.

"Ten percent of drinkers consume over 60 percent of all the alcohol sold. At least one in ten drinkers is an alcoholic. You don't have to be a mathematical genius to figure out that the alcoholic is the alcohol industry's best customer. Although the industry says it wants people to drink 'responsibly,' the truth is that so-called responsible drinking would put it out of business."

"Females have less gastric alcohol dehydrogenase, an enzyme that digests alcohol in the stomach, than males do, so alcohol passes more quickly into the bloodstream. Thus females tend to get drunk faster, become addicted more quickly, and develop diseases related to alcohol abuse sooner than males. In addition to sharing the risks of addiction and early death with men, young women who drink heavily are more likely than their nondrinking counterparts to be the victims of rape and sexual assault and to have unwanted pregnancies."

I was lucky, or at least I was not unlucky. I didn't get assaulted when I was drunk. I got groped a few times, but I took that as the price of being female. See, kiddies, this was before the Web... I knew about Siouxsie Sioux but had never heard of "Goth"; my headbanging buddies kept confusing punk and New Wave; and if Riot Grrl existed, it was far away in the big cities or on the West Coast. I had a few strange skinny friends who read Poe and Lovecraft and didn't know how to dress. They drank almost as hard as the headbanger kids.

Alcohol let me nurture the illusion of rebelliousness and the illusion of belonging at the same time. I never could get the hang of the regular kids' protective camouflage, I dressed like a catburglar, and my way of fitting in was to get stupid giggling drunk.

Now that I'm finally surfacing, I expect all those old anxieties to swim up and grab me again. But I've drunk myself past the age of nubility -- I have a lovely steady relationship and a RealJob(TM) and I can wear whatever I want, listen to and read and not buy whatever I choose. I want to hug all those isolated insecure girls who remind me of me, and promise them it will get better -- but that's such bullshit; who says it will? We invade Iraq tomorrow. It's an uncertain world. I never did like things falsely prettified; that's how I fell into my graveyard aesthetic in the first place.

When is rebellion conformity? For me, it was when I drank to be invisible, or to be cheerful among stupid people, or to be confident in places where I wasn't truly safe. I dragged myself into conformance.

[Sign outside high school at 16th & Irving, NW: "STUDENTS WILL BE UNIFORM"]

When is connecting with another person a revolutionary act? When we dare. When we strip away pretense, and image, and definitions; when we face one another without judgments or anesthesia. When we are not afraid to speak our minds, or (even harder) to listen.

Sappy, eh? Go ahead, file me under "perkigoth" [bounce!] as long as your goth codes are a playful creative game and not a new way to build old walls.

Oh yeah, and this month's coffee review gives 3 1/2 stars to the Bucks County Coffee Co. in the Union Station food court. Perfectly situated for meeting friends before a movie, the Bucks stand has a smooth wooden bar with plenty of highback chairs, regular coffee that does everything it should, and a caramel vanilla latte concoction that tickles all my dessert receptors while delivering two shots of espresso to keep me scribbling this drivel at top speed. And the amiable baristas let one sit a mighty long time for one moderate price. Not actually cheap, but train station prices do beat the airport's.

Flightless lives in Columbia Heights, where she drinks a lot of ginger beer and creates anime mermaid hair. Excerpts from her zine dodo are online at www.mwmw.com/dodo. Say hello to her at www.livejournal.com/users/dodogrrl.