Bleearrrrgh

Hello. I'm as surprised to be here as you are to be reading this.¹ I spent the better part of yesterday wrestling with the worst hangover I've ever had, and the Saturday before it wrestling with select patches of Manhattan sidewalk and street.

I do not normally drink to excess. I enjoy alcohol and its effects, but I have a tendency to stop myself before I get too far. With beer, this is easy; my stomach doesn't have enough room for the amount of beer it would take for me to truly get bombed out of my mind. Wine and liquor are a different matter entirely, where it becomes a case of slowing myself down before I get ahead of my own built-in failsafes. Most of the time, I succeed.

Unfortunately, most does not mean always.

This past weekend, I started things off with a whole can of FourLoko, which might be the world's most vile concoction this side of purestrain santorum. Unpleasant going down and a significant blow to my sobriety, but not a punch I couldn't take. From there, a train ride and cab ride to a known open bar, the first of three planned stops that night. At said bar, I entertained myself with the nearby foosball table and the vuvuzela my friend Mike decided was an exhibit meant to be touched.² I also entertained myself with one, two, three, four, five gins & tonic downed in rapid succession. It was an open bar; better get my money's worth, right?

Excessive amounts of alcohol affect everybody differently. My friend Colin becomes an utterly belligerent son of a bitch. The aforementioned Mike likes fighting, with hilarious consequences. When I drink too much, I don't act like a problem so much as I become a problem. My ability to walk or even stand completely deserts me, and I find myself suddenly playing the title role from Weekend at Bernie's.³ If I'm safely in the confines of a dorm building, this isn't much of a problem--I get dragged down a flight of stairs, put to bed, and the rest of the night goes on without me. But other problems present themselves if I decide to go full-body flaccid in the streets of Manhattan. For instance, how will I get home? And how much help will my friends be if they're almost as hammered as me?

The answer is, "throw money at cabs until one of them drives us." Or "let a bunch of concerned gang members carry me down the block while my friend announces our presence by blowing his recently acquired and totally not stolen vuvuzela." The point is, due to my awesome friends I got home alright. And though the Sunday that followed might have been my worst one since the last time I had to go to Church, I'm mostly back to normal now.

This kind of drunkenness has happened to me two other times in my life. One was the result of seven Irish car bombs, and was uneventful. The first one, on the other hand, started with a chugged beer, then five glasses of wine. As I'd been planning to leave and rest for a while, Colin grabbed a bottle of peppermint schnapps left over from the Christmas season and handed me a shot, calling it my "leaving the room tax." And then he handed me another, and another, each time telling me I was "almost there." I devolved into a writhing mess, rolling in my bed and blathering about not knowing "what's real and what's false anymore."⁴

I won't be repeating this anytime soon. Like my writing, my binge drinking follows a loose calendar. In this case, it more resembles Christmas in that it happens once, and then there's a lot of time waiting for it to happen again. Except I don't think Christmas is anticipated with quite as much dread.

Moral of the story: FourLoko is fruit punch-flavored failure in a can.

-PK


¹ I jest, of course. I know there's no "you" on the other side of this screen.
² Pro tip: if you want to do something and someone tries to stop you, point to somewhere in the opposite direction and say "the guy" said you could do it.
³ And no amount of mambo music will make me mobile again.
⁴ My friends were decent enough to capture it on video. And show it to me. A month later. After they'd been constantly quoting it around me to my increasing confusion. As I said, I have excellent friends.