I'm So Vain, I Probably Think This Blog Is About Me

I said a smart thing at work yesterday morning. What makes this remarkable, aside from the fact that saying smart things at work is not my job, is that I was hungover like a hooded corpse dangling from a gibbet on the city walls to warn intruders not to pickpocket. I was half asleep, my mouth tasted like asphalt, each eyeball was wilting like a neglected grape, and there was a high-pitched gnat-like whine in my ears. While I was speaking, my only active, conscious thought was how much I'd like to be in a bed wrapped up in the biggest, softest covers like a downy burrito, blissfully continuing my nightmare about ice dragons. I tuned back in to the sound of my own voice just long enough to realize that I was forming a coherent sentence, and the sentence was solving a technical problem, and it contained a neat little metaphor to boot. Unaccustomed to me saying anything coherent or intelligent before lunch, the other people around the meeting table attempted to raise objections to my plan out of sheer habit, but the idea was sound, and adopted, and maybe even marveled at a little bit.

So I might be a functioning alcoholic.

The hangover was sponsored by Bogle and Marcus James and Optimator and Lone Star and Pearl, which, when mixed, will produce an unpleasant sensation of poverty and sadness, but taken singly, make for a jovial podcast. (Look for it soon, hopefully before Christmas, if I can figure out which bits of the 2.5-hour conversation are worth excerpting.) While it was instrumental in producing my one good idea of the year, I still don't think I'll be repeating that particular experiment on a work night anytime soon. I'd rather be soberly drooling through a meeting about binary assets than hypnotically channeling my inner hacker while remnant alcohol performs invasive surgery on my nervous system.

This is where I could probably get away with talking about how hangovers get worse as you get older, but they don't and that's a myth. I remember my hangovers with the same instinctive clarity with which a vole remembers the screech of a barn owl, and they've always been this bad. I suspect that when people trot out this statement, what they really mean is, "I no longer believe that the punishment fits the crime, Your Honor." 

I remember one hangover I had that happened suddenly the morning after an overdone night, smacking me out of my stupor as I sat on the north sidewalk of Colfax Avenue just outside a barber shop, wearing a smock and waiting for the black dye in my hair to set. (Some drunks get into epic fist fights and end up in jail. Some get tattoos. I'm apparently exactly as reckless and bad-ass as Emo Spider-Man.) I'm not sure what possessed me to get black hair -- or, more precisely, which particular beverage did the possessing -- but I do vividly remember spending three months looking a lot paler than normal. 

Another good hangover was my first, after a camping trip in the mountains where I drank straight Malibu because when you haven't learned how to drink you grab the nearest rum and pretend it tastes like candy. On the ride home, I tried to kill two birds with one stone by "chasing the hair of the dog" with remaining sips of Malibu mixed with flat Coke from a muddy two-liter. Not advised. Especially on a mountain pass with a fast driver. I managed to avoid throwing up, but to this day I avoid coconut rum like an ex-girlfriend who gave me crabs. (Meaning if I happen to run into it at a cheesy bar, I'll have a brief conversation with it, but it will be awkward and shouty and I will regret it and probably have too much beer right after.)

What I don't remember happening during any of these hangovers is a brilliant thought. So maybe hangovers don't get worse as you get older, maybe they get better. Maybe the pain of a hangover is the temporary, zombie-like revivification of the previous night's slain brain cells, shuffling through the cortex with arms outstretched and producing workmanlike, dogged thoughts that pursue concepts as if they are prey. (Dear children of America: Alcohol does not bring brain cells back to life. I am an idiot and not a certified health instructor.) Maybe lots of practice at this whole drinking thing produces a parallel brain that throws its hands up at the drinking part and goes outside to wait in the car with a sour look, then drives the drunken sot home, forces it to drink some water, and does all the work the following day as it tries to remember what possible reason it had for hooking up with that useless hemisphere in the first place.

Then the two halves go on a date, and they laugh at the same jokes, and they remember that one night in Boise with the skinny, freckled policeman who tried to give him a jaywalking ticket but was too distracted by her cleavage to do the job so they were let off with a warning. And they drink, moderately, together, so everything's forgiven.

Anyway, the day after a drinking bout, my nose always produces extra skin oil, and I spend all day trying to discreetly wipe it off with my fingers, and my iPhone screen ends up looking like it's simmering in EVOO, so I'm going to go clean that now. Sorry if we shook hands yesterday, because that wasn't Burt's Bees, that was my brains leaking out through my skin.