hangovers

The other night I got drunk.  Zoe had come home from Brooklyn—she’d been away all summer and we’d missed her—so me and Caroline and Zoe picked up a pizza and a bottle of wine and took them back to their apartment to celebrate her return.  I disappeared between ten and eleven PM to say goodbye to Emily who moved to Brooklyn the following morning.  When I returned, Caroline and Zoe had not moved from their seats at the table.  I assumed that they had continued to drink wine, but they had not.  I alternated between wine and beer and said a number of harmless but inane things, much to their amusement.   The next morning, I woke up to a terrible hangover. 

In five years I have made five hundred posts here, and I would be willing to bet that at least ten of those posts were written under the influence of the anxiety ridden euphoria bad hangovers can provide.  Similarly, I know that at least a few posts were written whilst totally drunk.  There is always the temptation to hit “publish” or, when writing e-mails, “send,” when you are drunk, but I am here to tell you that you should not do that.  E-mails especially do not disappear into memory the way inane conversations can.  If you say something dumb to your friends when you are drunk, they can only rely upon their memories, but when you write a drunken e-mail, a permanent record of your stupidity is created.  If I ever deleted a post early on a Saturday morning, it is because I was feeling shameful and wanted to retract it.  I have retracted many posts for many reasons over the years. 

This should come as no surprise to my loyal readers, many of whom would probably readily admit to having done the same—or even better, readily admit to reading a post written on a hangover whilst having a hangover themselves.  Such was my station in life for a period while creating this blog, suitable for poets I suppose.  If you want to know why I chose to show a picture of a compost tumbler on this second-to-last or third-to-last post, it is because compost symbolizes death and renewal—death to that which has come before and renewal for that which has yet to come.  I must now make my dinner: stir fried green beans and brown rice, a recipe I learned from my Chinese boss in Bloomington, Indiana, many millions of years ago.