Something weird is happening. Every time I google “Gerard Butler naked” (every day), I’m finding endless pics of Butler leaving Los Angeles and New York bars. In most of the photos, he looks half in the bag. Eyes puffy and bloodshot, face red and sweaty with either a “happy drunk” or an “angry drunk” look on his face.

What’s weird is that in nearly every profile of Butler cites his alcoholic early days, when he was studying law in Scotland, his early benders and his subsequent swearing off of alcohol and the law to pursue acting. Celebitchy covered the territory in September.

Honestly though, Butler goes “on the record” about his alcoholism very sparingly. Most of the time the profiles of him just mention it in passing:

“After spending so many years in law, I was becoming really disillusioned and I feel as a person I was becoming more and more unhappy,” says Butler, with an expansive sigh. “And I think a big part of that was not even necessarily the law, but just doing something that I knew wasn’t for me.”

He had been drinking heavily, getting his kicks not from legal text books but from playing in a rock band called Speed (with other lawyers, no less), and generally building a reputation as Scots Law’s answer to Jim Morrison.

He took time out, travelling in North America, during which he fell in with an Irish crowd, with whom he spent an entire month drunk, and worked in a carnival. He was still drunk when he came back and went for a job interview as a trainee lawyer. He got it anyway, an early sign perhaps that his future lay in acting. But he could hide his disillusionment only for so long.

“I wasn’t thinking ‘What are you going to do?’, because I couldn’t imagine carrying on as a solicitor.”

[From IOFilm.co.uk]

If he’s not really an alcoholic or a recovering alcoholic, I find it hard to believe his publicist would let so many profiles of Butler go on and on about his early drink-soaked days. So I feel pretty good about saying that, at some point, Butler considered himself “in recovery” from his alcoholism. There’s never any mention about a formal rehab, so it’s more than possible that one day Butler woke up and decided to stop drinking. Much like George W. Bush, minus the spiritual awakening or ultimatum from Laura Bush (“It‘s me or the Jim Beam,” Laura allegedly told Dubya).

I believe experts call this condition being a “dry drunk”. Experts also consider “dry drunks” at a high risk for falling off the wagon. Judging him solely by the number of times he’s pap’ed entering or leaving a bar, I’m worried that Gerry is back on the sauce. Maybe he’s just depressed and unfulfilled again? This time because he hasn’t found his one true love? (Me?)

Picture note by Celebitchy: Gerard Butler is shown on 12/11/08 looking inebriated. I hope he was photographed in his car before he entered the bar and not afterwards. Credit: WENN and Fame