On the Hangover

The hangover is that which is expected, that which is coming, is destined, and is, of course, deserved. Thus for the hungover person to lament his condition the morning after as if a bus had run over his leg, or his cousin declared she fancied him, totally shirks the responsibility which one simply has to take upon oneself for getting so inexplicably rat-arsed. And it is this double-loaded weight, that we are an absolute mess, and that we have willfully allowed this to happen through an excess of experience, an excess of the marginal experiences - not solely alcohol, but dance, drugs, laughter, sex, and fear - which really courses through the wilted and hungover body. Look at the symptoms of a half-decent hangover - apathy, irritability, shaky hands, aversion to light, inability to get comfortable, general disgust, lack of libido, menacing headache, melancholy, phantasmagoric memories - does this not suggest a concept list of some self-lacerating Existentialist International? The responsibility we are forced to face physiologically is but a reflection of what has occured experientially. It is my contention that the later Romans, the Nero's and Caligula's, did not experience the sheer angst of the hangover that the modern, necessarily elite, man experiences every weekend. With History ending every Friday, we fiddle and fiddle, drink undiluted wine, and spend ourselves upon marionette's, tasting all the liquor cabinet has to offer to find the blend which results in an awareness of being aware of being on the floor of an apartment, the remains of a party sticking to your ear with that peculiar sensation of heat and grog-melt-fuzziness in your head. Is this a radical affirmation of our youth, our capacity to drink, our ability to become intoxicated and liberated from the conservative-leaning mechanics of the human biochemical system? If so, then why, like Nietzsche's scholars, do we emerge from our hole hunchbacked, creep and crawl, shudder and stutter, ache and fret for home? Because in this age we cannot experience the decadence, the autumnal sense of decline, and the pre-televisual symbiosis between the body and the mind, which allowed for such unbridled intoxication in the past - the kind of intoxication which leaves one radically embodied, not unified, but multiplied within the shell casing, dispersed like a psychoactive mortar bomb. I write all this with an acute foreboding of the hangover to come this Sunday, for precisely such end-historical reasons - the celebration of an Irish identity wholly fictional, yet not mythopoetic, not libidnal, imaginary, or in anyway potential; just as is. Perhaps Kingsley Amis, writing about a milieu familiar to the kind of people who yearn for intoxication in 'Lucky Jim', expressed more accurately the condemned sensations of the hungover academic, or of post-war Europe. The hangover does not descend upon one but resides in our experience receptors, warning us that such expenditure is not part of the 'will to life', the purpose of which is, eventually, to die.

'Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he'd somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad'.