I Drink, Therefore I Puke

by Das Messer

I’d been lucky enough, before expat life, to have never have suffered a true hangover. Many Sundays of my adult life had been spent sympathizing with my groaning brethren, serving them bacon and eggs and scouring medicine cabinets in an attempt to replenish their collective loss of electrolytes, while they sneered enviously at my sprightliness. After moving to Korea, however, I watched helplessly as my golden youth slipped through my fingers and the once elusive hangover became more than a vicarious pain. What follows is an account of both my very first real hangover, and the most tragic one thereafter.

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The Beginning of the End

The morning after. There are a few peaceful moments before I register what I did the previous night at the bar, but as the kettle hisses away, the brain-piercing begins and haunting angst descends. Slight recollections trigger thrashing shame. I only have vague memories of binding the wrists and duct-taping the mouth of my superego, watching her helpless gaze disappear under a wave of Jameson as I proceeded to flirt shamelessly and pound at the tables of men who disagreed with me. Reams of internal rhetoric corrode my already chaffed ego, salting my tender and scored person-hood with crystallized guilt. No amount of head-hanging or face-gripping alleviates the nausea pulsing through me. In the few minutes I’ve been standing and present, my mind has upended itself.  I begin to weep. It was just a drunken night, you were obnoxious, nobody really cares. Stop thinking about it, just drink the coffee.

I sit down and pick up an essay to read, in the naive hope of steadying myself against retrospective vertigo. There is an appropriate time to read David Foster Wallace, but a Sunday morning in the throes of a significant hangover (let alone your first) is not it. It’s too much. All mental energy is feeding physical recovery, my emotional firewalls have been obliterated and this literature asks too much of me now. Perhaps the news will reunite me with my humanity— another fatal error. Whatever daily defenses I have against the anguish of reality don’t exist today, somehow my sense of empathy is off the charts and I begin to panic whilst I read about the most recent gang-rapes and incomprehensible war crimes, famine, poverty, genocide – the general demise of the entire world, whose apocalyptic nature seems to inflate in proportion to personal fragility.

Shame morphs into severe white guilt, later mutating into concentrated self-loathing for being a participant in the human race. Eventually I resign with bitter disgust, and conclude that peace will reign only when humans perish altogether. I’ve been awake now for less than two hours, and I’ve successfully managed to ensure that any enjoyment I may have gleaned from a hot shower and a panini will now be tainted by the notion that there are people being burnt alive at this very moment, and worse, that I spend my life oblivious to it until I’m reeling from over-indulgence.

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This was my first, and certainly not my last, real hangover. I’ve come to learn from hundreds more like this one, that lucidity of the human absurdity and transparent self-loathing peak the morning after a heavy night. We invite bleary eyed debauchery and then we weep from clarity. I have wished through every one of them that I could be gifted with a simple headache or biliousness instead of incessant mental paper-cuts, but all to no avail…until the most devastating morning of my adult life.

The End of the Beginning

 A severe calf-cramp viciously yanks me from dead-weight REM. Opening my eyes seems to invite an entire world of agony directly into my soul. I moan aloud, and the sound of my own voice is terrifying. Everything is viscerally loud–I can’t differentiate between sound and pain– but I’m fairly certain that there’s a spoon scraping away rust on the inside of my skull. Ugh, four pm. Dear god! Why is this happening? Drink water. NO. Don’t drink anything – ever again. Ugh, fuuuuck! Don’t move. If you don’t move it’ll go away. If you don’t breathe the nausea will forget you. Revolt against your body. You are in control. I remain still but it won’t last long, there’s some sort of centrifugal bond between the contents of my gut and the toilet. Throwing up is weak, don’t even think about it. My eyelids flog away ceaselessly, slaving away in the name of moist equilibrium. Why can’t I see? This isn’t right. Am I dying? Jesus. I might be dying. I beg for sleep. Groan, writhe, beg, and sweat.

I am atrophied. Strength and will are hemorrhaging at an urgent rate. My heart rate feels like the white noise of every Nine Inch Nails song. I know for a fact that this is not a natural temperature for a human being to reach, yet I continue to shiver in a puddle of whiskey sweat. At an atomic level I am consumed with absolute, genuine terror at the very real prospect of my looming death. I’ve done it, I’ve poisoned myself. I’ve gone and fuckin’ killed myself – accidental suicide. Why do I do this? Argghh. No thinking.

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Nature resumes control and in a motion that is completely foreign to me I’m ejected onto the bathroom floor to disgorge the most vile and luminescent poison. Terror has now reached a nuclear level. That color is not found in nature. This is toxic. Did I swallow napalm? Is this what it looks like when you melt your liver and then vomit it? I have absolutely no control over the violence gripping my abdomen. My body owns me now, and she is taking the wheel with fury and vengeance. I am condemned from this moment forth; I am nothing but subject to the laws of physics.

My head hangs awkwardly close to the recent evacuation in the toilet, tears dribble down my cheeks and into the globules of bile, warping them to form the face of god himself. In a sobbing fit I realize that prayer is all that will save me now. Please, Jesus, please – I’m so sorry. I realize now, but don’t want to be an addict. I don’t want to turn into my father. I can’t die like this. I couldn’t bear the humiliation of diabetes at 24. I refuse to do this to my parents. Please, lord, pleeeaaase just put me in a coma for a few days and I will be better, I swear.

Even in the privacy of my own home, I am stripped bare and bitterly humiliated at how grossly weak I am. The related etymology of the words humility and humiliation makes sense to me now. The hangover is a force of nature, compelling us to face our fickle reality and brittle flesh. It rips us of the hubris that we are anything more than hopelessly decaying organic matter.

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I recount the story for my friends a week later, sincere and humbled. I explain that I found god in neon pools of puke, and that my once-off devastation (because it is impossible to feel that way more than once without actually dying) led me to decide not to be an alcoholic. “I’ve never, ever felt worse in my entire life. I mean, I even pleaded with the lord!” Ralph looks at me, incredulous: “Really? That was the first time you’ve prayed a hangover away?”


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