The sun is nature’s way of telling creatures it is time to wake up. It is the closest star to our shiny little planet, and the source of all life. It is also God’s police flashlight shining in your eyes at 5 a.m. after a Saturday night/Sunday morning flip cup tournament involving you and ninety of your closest friends.
It’s always a bad sign when you leave wherever you woke up (which is invariably several hundred yards to miles away from your place of residence) and see that big glowing orb, searing its way into your brain, shoving aside the gray matter in an attempt to get to the back of your skull. In moving aside your cerebrum, it upsets things, and causes your entire head to rebel against the rest of your body. For instance, in my case, my left eyebrow tends to have a severe disagreement with the temple it is located near, and decides to convey this feeling of discontent via mental artillery, booming back and forth across my poor, poor skull.
And all the while the sun smiles balefully down, glad to see me in pain.
It smiles down as I get in a car and ride to the Holyoke Mall, where I learn that Holyoke is the birthplace of volleyball and street crime. It also seems as though everyone in that mall, from the tiniest puppy to the sweet old ladies scheming on how to beat them slots at Mohegan Sun, knows that I am completely hung over.
I am not alone.
Oh no, I know there were several others out there as well. We know. Oh, we know. We can sense it, like Radar O’Reilly with incoming choppers – we can hear your hangover beating at the air around your head like so many pissed off honeybees.
Don’t expect us to sympathize. We’ve got our own problems over here. We’re still trying to track down all our limbs after that bitchin’ party. We need a steady stream of milkshake, water, Gatorade, anything non-alcoholic and fairly palatable at this point.
And patience? Screw you. If I’m hung over and you’re in my way, expect to have a Collegian columnist-shaped hole through you. Especially at the ATM machine. I need currency to fuel my recovery efforts. I can’t expect the UN to be dropping care packages on my middle-class ass. Lady who can’t figure out which side the stripey end goes, get out of my way. You don’t deserve to get sweet, sweet fast cash. Stop rubbing the card on your leg. Your oh-so-fashionable stirrup pants don’t have the magic required to increase your intelligence or your cash flow.
Ah, but with cash in hand, or rather, in pocket, I have everything I need to procure my respite from nasty Mr. Hangover. And it is Mr. Hangover. Try calling him Hangie and he’ll kick your butt from here to Waldenbooks. But I’m nothing if not respectful of the power of my hangover, and I always call him ‘sir.’ But, after successfully negotiating the glaring monstrosity that is the ATM machine (Yes, I took my receipt, stop beeping, please, for the love of God, oh it hurts) I can now trade the little green portraitures for what I really need – food.
After a night to midmorning of professional drinking, most doctors recommend really horrible food to make you feel better. Food guaranteed to shave months off your life at the mere inhalation of its cholesterol packed, heart-clogging evil. That’s right: I’m talking about Mickey D’s.
Of course, when you’re suffering as bad as I was, the last thing you need is non-hungover contact. Hangovers, like all other miseries, are best dealt with along with people in like situations. The best companion for a hangover would be a corpse. Lacking a cadaver, the next best thing is somebody as hung over as you.
Luckily, I had such a person with me, which made things easier. For instance, I knew I wasn’t alone when I saw everyone staring at me, with looks on their faces like the ghost of Captain Morgan was arising from my back and carving mustaches on all the mannequins in Old Navy with his rummy cutlass.
And, since we had somehow forgotten how to converse in English, we could only point to what we wanted. Apparently my compatriot, lacking the hand-eye coordination that hours earlier had won her the intercontinental flip cup championship, pointed at the wrong thing, and consequently her order was messed up. Fortunately though, our milkshakes appeared in good working order and were much appreciated as we sat and wondered how wrong it would be to end the screaming children that surrounded us. Then we realized the screaming children were all in our heads, grabbing at our precious medulla oblongata with their sticky, syrupy hands and twisting, oh the twisting.
The milkshakes restored our ability to talk, and we were then able to have the most wonderful conversation, which pretty much went like this:
Me: “I hate my life.”
Her: “Kill me.”
Me: “Don’t talk so loud.”
Her: “I’m whispering; stop shouting.”
Me: “I’m not shouting.”
Her: “I hate my life.”
Me: “Kill me.”
You get the idea. This went on for hours.
But the worst thing, the absolute worse thing to encounter when hung over is someone you used to work with. They’re there, and they’re happy, and they know. Oh they know. . .
Wait, I already wrote this paragraph.
Anyway, we survived, due to massive quantities of self-pity and fluids. We were both on IV drips, just like on ER.
And as we rode home, watching the pretty trees go by our windows, singing along to the radio, we knew that we were lucky. We survived hangover paranoia, and we had learned a valuable lesson about the dangers of alcohol.
Under that brilliant blue October sky, hurtling along the yellow line of the Massachusetts back roads, we swore an oath. We pledged, under penalty of eternal damnation, that we would never, ever, drink that much again.
Well, at least not on weekdays.
