Your eyes take a minute to adjust to
the cruel sunlight blazing through the window. More than a few grunts
of discomfort as you right yourself from your slumber on the living
room floor. Eyes burn, stomach rumbles, mouth filled with moss. You
have a hangover.
This awful beast known as a hangover
is one of the unfortunate side effects of having a drink or ten, and
we are all familiar with it to some degree or another. There are
myriad guides for how to get over one, but they almost always begin
with the advice of not drinking so much. This, dear reader, is simply
not an option. There are some
general prevention tips I have picked up and use to some extent, such
as the “Sinatra Rule” of having a glass of water between every
alcoholic drink you consume. (I generally start after round 6) Others
would have you drink water and take aspirin before bed, still other
well-intentioned fools say to only have one drink per hour. Some of
these preventive measures have merit, but most only exist to take up
space on the Interweb.
For the purpose of
this article, I am assuming that you are afflicted with a true-blue
five-star hangover. This is one of those hangovers that comes with
three hours of sleep and no less than five receipts for you to make
sense of. Upon waking you find yourself with a pain running up your
left side that feels like you had a stroke. If this hangover had
formed in the Gulf of Mexico a state of emergency would be declared
before it even made landfall and Jim Cantore would know it would be
worse than some terrible ancient warlord and used his executive power
to name it Agamemnon. You had a great night is what I'm saying.
One
final caveat before we begin: this is my personal hangover regimen.
Nearly everyone has their own cure that they swear by, but they all
suck. Use mine and you will
conquer this hangover and make it clean your house.
The
first order of business in combating a hangover is to fill your
belly. Water is key, even more so than food. Just in case you aren't
aware, one of the biggest factors in a hangover is dehydration. After
you have drunk the second of your many glasses of ice water, it is
time to shift your focus to food. The English get a lot of crap for
their terrible food, but they know how to have a king-hell breakfast.
I don't generally go for the full
English breakfast, but it is certainly one to cure a hangover.
My
personal preferred breakfast is scrambled eggs with salsa, sausage
patties and bacon, biscuits and gravy, and perhaps some potatoes. The
key here is to eat greasy food, whether you cook it yourself or not.
As a result pretty much anything at the Waffle House will help cure
what ails you. Whether or not I go all out and cook the fantastic
spread above, I will always
have the bacon and eggs. I'm a big fan of routine, and that's what I
eat pretty much every morning. The twist for the hangover breakfast
is that I put on Guy Clark's album Some Days the Song
Writes You, not only because
it's a great album, but because “The Coat” comes on as I sit down
and it's just got that hungover feel to it.
There are those
who advocate the hair of the dog method of hangover cure, and from
time to time I have engaged this tactic. However, I have found it
mostly useless before lunch. If you decide on this method I would
suggest using only lighter and simple alcohols. My few successes have
been Corona and eggs, or leftover Jameson with fresh ice cubes and
Meet the Press.
The
second step for dealing with the incessant pounding in your head is
to relax for a few hours. This is the time to find a couch and lay on
it for a while. In a future post we will discuss the finer points of
Hangover Theatre, but suffice it to say that the movie shouldn't be
complex, or loud, or even outrageously funny. Although the title
would lead you to initially believe it perfect for the job, The
Hangover is one of the worst
movies to watch when you are actually hungover – it's just too damn
funny. The movie you're looking for is the kind of movie they used to
play on TBS until they got all weird and became the Tyler Perry
channel and dropped the Braves for those ridiculous BoSox. You're
based in Atlanta for Christ's sake! Spaceballs is a good hangover
movie – funny, but not gut-bustingly so after the first viewing.
You can try and take my man card for this, and I will beat you to a
bloody stump with your own legs, but I also like Julie and
Julia for this. It's simple, it
has food, and it has Meryl Streep so you can all just go to hell.
It's Complicated is
also nice.
If
you don't feel quite like a movie you can always fall back on music
to help you through, but it's not the music you think. Apart from
while I'm cooking and eating breakfast, I'm not wanting music with
lyrics and themes and anything that might require me to think. What I
like is Aphex Twin, especially Richard D. James Album,
and any of the Selected Ambient Works
series are great for a hangover. Some of the Aphex Twin records are a
little too far out there and strange for this fragile state, but this
type of electronic/ambient music really helps me with the healing
process. Old Tom Waits will be a great choice as well, but nothing
newer than Franks Wild Years.
You
could also read a book if you wanted, but I never have since I
couldn't concentrate enough to pay attention, which is the reason for
the easily digested hangover movie. If you do choose to read, I would
suggest some simple, paint-by-numbers novel by the likes of John
Grisham or James Patterson. Most of the greats are simply too heavy
for this operation. Can you imagine reading The Road
hungover? No thanks, I already feel like death twice warmed over, I
don't need a book where that is every day life.
Now
that you've spent a good portion of the day being lazy and feeling
sorry for yourself, it's time to act like a grownup. No later than
2:00 you should be pulling yourself together and trying to unravel
the story that your receipts are telling you in order to brag on
Monday about what you did on Saturday. How did I spend $80 at the
last bar? Why did we keep going from one side of town to the other?
Surely I did not drink
a dozen rail whiskeys by myself.
This is also a
good time to get your house back in order. If for some horrible,
unforseen circumstance you didn't grab some Waffle House before you
came home, you likely cooked something so that your stomach was
settled and you didn't throw up. As a result your kitchen is a wild
landscape of dirty dishes and beer bottles. Go ahead and deal with
this now. You are already miserable so cleaning won't make your day
any worse, and with any luck you will run into a neighbor as you
throw a garbage bag full of bottles into the dumpster and can
acknowledge them with little more than a grunt from your sore throat
you got by singing Bohemian Rhapsody at top volume during the cab
ride home. This has the effect of cementing your neighbors suspicions
and ensure they don't pester you to come over for a barbecue.
As an honorable
mention, I must bring up the specter of exercise. Obviously with a
hangover of this magnitude a workout is out of the question. However,
when you have a stage-2 or a light stage-3 hangover, half an hour of
vigorous exercise can work wonders. If you are traveling and find
yourself in a hotel with a steam room, use it. Those things are just
the tits after you make a run on the continental breakfast.
In
conclusion, you can choose to treat your hangover as a curse, or as a
cleansing experience as the good Modern Drunkard advocates. Obviously
I choose the latter. I have been lucky enough to have developed the
fortitude of liver so that I rarely get hangovers more than 3 or 4
times a year, regardless of intake. For myself, it is more an issue
of sleep as I am a morning person and can rarely sleep past 7:00 no
matter when I finally passed out. However, when I do come down with a
hangover I embrace it. They remind me that I'm human, and to quote
the Modern Drunkard again, it's not all rum and games.
Frank Nichols makes Ron Burgandy look like a classless hobo
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