Let’s begin with a
hangover. Let’s begin in the
existential badlands where the night before wakes up, looks forward to the day
ahead, and then curls up and cries.
It’s a day begun with what Hemmingway was wont to call a Mastodon
Hangover, and inevitably, your thoughts turn to the pub. Nothing quite so quaint as the hair of
the dog that bit you, because for one thing, it wasn’t a dog that gave you the
once over last night, but a whole pack of wolves. Rather, where hair of the dog is conscious decision –
manifestly more than you’re capable of this morning – this is deferring a
decision. This is deferring your
hangover until tomorrow, or perhaps next week, by when it will have become
something altogether more sinister.
The best that could be said is that you
are continuing with the logic of last night, that your body, unable to engage
your mind (which is clearly absent without leave), is carrying on from where it
left off. Or perhaps this is
merely your body, denied the guiding light of mind and so of experience,
refusing to put up with the pain in which it finds itself. Resolving, of its own accord, to do
something about it. In any event,
it’s happening regardless, and you resign yourself to spending the day
somewhere between drunk and hungover and completely insane.
And there you are. A pint in your hand and a brick in your
head, and oddly enough, a smile on your face. Whence the smile, amidst the pain that inhabits you body and
soul? You’re in free-fall, and you know it, and there is something glorious
about it. There is something
life-affirming about this headlong chase to oblivion, something ennobling in
this decent towards spiritual and financial insolvency. All fetters have been released, and you
are in your element. At one with
yourself and the world, no doubts, no guilt, just the possibilities inherent in
the day stretching out ahead of you.
There will always be time to sit at
home, clutching your head and counting your pennies. The will always be time to be bored and frustrated. Tomorrow, perhaps, or perhaps next
week; but until then, cin-cin.
