You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy.™
The hangover. Not the one in Vegas with chickens and Chinese Mafia.
Not the one with Mike Tyson, a missing tiger, and a lost tooth.
No I’m talking the real hangover. I’m talking about the sand storm inside your head that blows the paint off your cerebellum and knocks the shingles off your medulla oblingota. I’m talking the hangover that pours out of a bottle and comes courtesy of one too many adult beverages.
There are hangovers that make you wince. There are hangovers that make your knees weak. There are hangovers that make you taste your breakfast more than once.
What kind of hangover am I sporting right now?
ALL OF THE ABOVE.
Ouch. Just typing in all caps makes me angry at myself for typing too loud.
I feel like banging the broom stick on the ceiling of my own skull to tell the guy upstairs to walk quietly.
My hangover is the kind that rings like a church bell inside your sinus cavity. There’s a priest at my front door. He’s armed with a crucifix and he’s trying to exercise the demons from my liver.
I’m talking about the kind of hangover that produces a fog so thick in your mind, you’d swear you were in Golden Gate Park. My hair hurts and my skin is crawling like it’s hooked up to a car battery. My eyes are so blood shot, it’s like I’m staring at the world through a pair of Elton John’s glasses.
Going to bed is the easy part of the hangover. It’s easy like turning off a light switch. What’s hard is waking the next morning.
Just opening my eyes is arduous. It’s like swimming through kelp wearing a wedding tuxedo. If the kelp doesn’t slow you down, the fact you are getting married surely will cause you to go into cardiac arrest.
That first breath is a beast. I inhale, only to find the foul stench of Limburger infiltrating my nasal passages. The smell almost makes me regurgitate right there.
Getting out of bed is laborious. It’s a game of naked twister on a tilt -a- whirl covered with razor blades and pain.
My foot hits the floor. Blood flows to my toes. Who could think blood flow hurts. It does.
Both feet now on the floor. The room is experiencing G-forces from a NASA test flight.
I stumble to the fridge. There are two handles. My brain is a cob web with spiders devouring their dinner. I look at the handles and suddenly can’t decide which one to pull. Which way do they open?
Man do I feel like crap.
I yank on one of the handles.
WAHSUCK
The door opens like a vacuum seal being opened on the space shuttle.
Man, I didn’t remember the door being so hard to pull open.
“It’s always been that way,” the spider in the cob web in my brain shouts, looking up from its meal.”
Shut up stupid spider!
I stare into the fridge.
Damn has that light always been there. It’s like the sun blinding me. I feel like Lawrence of Arabia and I am staring at the desert sun, the sun of the equator, the sun that is exploding like a gigantic super nova. My pupils cannot handle the illumination and I shield myself from the refrigerator’s brilliance.
I have to step back. It’s like the scene from Close Encounters where the alien ship’s hatch opens and fluorescent light ignites the night sky. I feel like I am not wearing enough SPF at this moment to adequately reach in for a water bottle.
I steady myself like a sailor with scurvy and move back to the fridge. The air is cold and I feel a chill on my neck.
My hand pushes into the fray, not sure where it is going. A close up of my hand reveals nervous fingers wondering if the monster in the fridge is going to suddenly grab hold of me and suck me into the other dimension that lives beyond the milk.
I find the Desani Water and pull it out. The bottle is cool and moist.
I struggle with the cap. How can this be that hard. I twist, but the skin on my hand is soft like butter. I cannot get a grip.
“Jeez,” I lament, falling back against the counter. “When did they make a child proof cap on a water bottle?”
I smack the bottle top against the counter. I saw my mom do that with a Spaghetti jar once.
Woosh.
The space shuttle seal of approval and the cap is off.
I raise the bottle to my lips. I stare at the light blue nectar and notice my hand shaking as if it is hooked up to a four stroke engine.
“Man I feel bad,” I mutter pushing the bottle to my lips.
I pour a splash of cool water into my throat. I expect instantaneous resuscitation.
Somewhere in my brain I pick the wrong letter on Wheel of Fortune.
BUZZZZZZZ.
The water, if this is possible tastes stale, like it’s been filtered through a dirty wash cloth.
“It’s your mouth dummy,” the spider says from his cob web lair.
The spider is right. I have yet to brush my teeth and who knows what is lurking in this mouth of mine.
The last thing I remember was nachos and cheese and a bar filled with smoke.
I almost Yak just conjuring up the memory.
Thanks you little spider bastard. Eat your fly and shut up.
I shuffle slowly from the kitchen to the couch. I reach out for arm rails that have yet to be installed in my house.
The air molecules bumping into my face are heavy. They are so irritating, they scratch like sand paper.
This is the mother of all hangovers. The kind of hangover that makes you question your role in the fabric of existence.
It’s the kind of hangover that has you promising the demons in the dark that you will never drink again as long as you can weather this storm.
I am a Pirate of the Caribbean and I swear I will be an alter boy if the God of Navigation and tequilla shots delivers me safely to a port with a lot of Tahitian bar wenches.
Thank you Gods of Navigation!
As I sit down and dribble water that tastes like it came from UNICEF down my throat. I think back on how I got here.
Images from a Pink Floyd video blast past the spider and fill my frontal lobe.
Shots and laughter and crazy bar tenders and girls with plunging neck lines.
Ahhhh. It’s all coming back.
Getting to this level of despair takes a grandiose effort. It usually
sails on a sea of beer and catapults over the castle wall with a few shots of Only God Knows.
To achieve this level of heinousness, you need a total lack of concern for your body, and a total devotion for staying the course.
It’s this kind of dedication to singular purpose that helped Christopher Columbus sail on, toward the edge of the world, even as his scurvy laden crew was ready to throw him over board and turn around.
Getting the hangover after a night of general insanity is easy. Avoiding the hangover after a night of random debauchery? now that is what separates the men from the boys.
Avoiding the hangover is an art. It first requires the ability to know that you are on the road to the hangover. It’s a steep mountain pass in the dark of night. All around you are rock walls covered with moss and moisture. The asphalt is dark and the reflective yellow stripe flowing under the front end of your car, interminably, one after another after another. The sign for hangover remedy is small and not well illuminated. Unless you know this stretch of road, you could very well miss your exit.
And if you miss your hangover prevention exit, then you get home like me, wasted, your mind infiltrated by crazy spiders who are eating flies in your skull and laughing at your stupidity.
But if you can exit, you have a chance.
First you need to remember to drink water at the bar. Water down the evil percolating in your pours. 2nd: take a few Advil when you get home. 3rd: you need to drink a glass of water even though your brain is a saturated sponge of booze. 4th: I would recommend eating a slice of bread to soak up the poison that is in your gut. 5th: climb into the center of your bed, once you get to “pass out” status, and the room begins to tilt, you might just end up finding yourself sliding off the mattress like a jello shot sliding off a spoon.
Step 6: Fall asleep fast. If not you might find yourself on Mr. Toad’s wild ride on a mattress spinning like bed knobs and broom sticks into an oblivion of light and synaptic lightning bursts.
After three Jeigermeisters and a gold schlagger, sometimes keeping the spins at bay is easier said than done.
If you are on a Mexico trip with the boys, sadly you will eventually be asked to start again, sooner or later. Someone will yell out “hair of the dog” and order a bloody mary way too early in the day. They will drink one and look at you and call you a wimp and ask you why you even came. You will ultimately feel bad and decide they are probably right. And then all the rules I have just stipulated are mute.
But if you are alone, in the sanctuary of your own home. I would recommend reclining on the couch. Nurse your UNICEF water and wait for the brain spider to fade. It will. It always does.
And that is crazy.