The Metaphysics of the Hangover

October 20, 2021 7:39 PM

"We feel as if we've succeeded in poisoning ourselves, and the word is that we have. The word "toxic" hides in the midddle of intoxication, like a rat in a gift box." Mark Edmundson, English Professor at the University of Virginia, goes beyond just the gruesome hangovers from drinking, and considers hangovers of all sorts, the downsides of intoxications of all sorts. re The Hedgehog Review
posted by dancestoblue (52 comments total)

There are some fantastic quotes in that piece (Kingsley Amis' in particular made me laugh; and I'd swear Douglas Adams cribbed it in one of the Hitchhikers' Guide books though I wasn't able to find it in a quick'n'dirty Google*). But the article itself felt like a collection of appropriated observations that never comes to an actual point.

*which frankly sounds like exactly the sort of salacious activity one might get up to while highly intoxicated
posted by Greg_Ace at 8:58 PM on October 20, 2021 [2 favorites]

I went down a rabbit hole and found A Literary Drunk Is Still Just a Drunk that focuses on Amis.

The drunk genius is a fascinating parallel to the stigma of being a drunk. An alcoholic "genius" - for example, Bukowski - is he a poet or a drunk or a poet who's a drunk?

How does being hungover influence the creative process? The next day's fuzzy brain, inability to focus...

I've lost the plot.
posted by bendy at 11:01 PM on October 20, 2021 [5 favorites]

This is relevant to my interests but I will have to read it later as I am busy pouring nightcaps now.
posted by vrakatar at 11:05 PM on October 20, 2021 [3 favorites]

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was certainly the painter to go to for this one.
posted by Literaryhero at 11:05 PM on October 20, 2021 [2 favorites]

There are some fantastic quotes in that piece ...
I listened to the soundcloud edition -- I didn't read it -- I kept on stopping, rewinding, listening again, ET CET and ET CET; it really is jammed full of ear candy. I would have posted here on the strength of that alone.

I kept thinking, as I listened and rewound: Would this make a good pull quote? Or how about that, would that be the right quote. I (briefly) considered copy/pasting in the whole essay, italicizing it, the whole thing as a pull quote.. (OK, so not really. But it sure has some rich writing.)

But the article itself felt like a collection of appropriated observations that never comes to an actual point ...
He seems to me to be a "shotgun" writer, pull the trigger and watch it all hit the wall, a big spray of words and ideas, all over the map. But he covered a lot of ground, hangovers of all description, and not just hangover from alcohol, and I thought it a good ride, worth posting here.
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:58 PM

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was certainly the painter to go to for this one.
I couldn't place the painter; looks so much like The Potato Eaters by Van Gogh.
posted by Literaryhero at 1:05 AM
posted by dancestoblue at 12:31 AM on October 21, 2021

This is why the only drug I still do is Delta-8 edibles. Smooth, trippy, good sleep, no hangovers. Screw literally everything else.
posted by Chronorin at 4:12 AM on October 21, 2021 [1 favorite]

There must and shall be aspirin.
posted by BigBrooklyn at 5:20 AM on October 21, 2021

Oh wait, here's great chaser to this post via Vice Magazine.
posted by BigBrooklyn at 5:57 AM on October 21, 2021

I went down a rabbit hole and found A Literary Drunk Is Still Just a Drunk that focuses on Amis.

oh God back when I used to hang on r/stopdrinking all the time, these dudes would turn up wanting to quit drinking but worried that they wouldn't become great writers if they did. Step away from the Bukowski, sir, and put down that handle of Captain Morgan.....I have bad news for you.

You ever had a two-day hangover? That's alcohol poisoning, champ. Why I ever got drunk again after the first one of those is beyond me. I think this comes from AA......an old saying, if you drank a quart of orange juice, and it made you sick for two days, would you rush out and get another one as soon as you felt better?
posted by thelonius at 6:22 AM on October 21, 2021 [9 favorites]

After spending last weekend with friends from college I haven’t seen in two years, this was a great read.
posted by glaucon at 6:29 AM on October 21, 2021

One of the mental tapes I play forward when I think about alcohol in rose-coloured glasses is: oh hangovers it is so nice to choose not to have those anymore
posted by Kitteh at 6:41 AM on October 21, 2021 [12 favorites]

Why I ever got drunk again after the first one of those is beyond me.

narrator: because he was an alcoholic
posted by thelonius at 7:13 AM on October 21, 2021 [6 favorites]

I am an alcoholics' alcoholic, one of those cursed creatures often referred to as a "high functioning alcoholic" and I come from a family filled with such people.
We, each of us, has carefully built a hedge around our drinking so that we don't tumble to the bottom - indeed, I'm the first in any generation to call the thing what it is (alcoholism) - the truth is that my kin have only disdain for alcoholics who "get caught" (i.e. get arrested, go into treatment, lose their jobs, etc.)
My trick is the same as my father's - absolutely no booze before 5 p.m.
Others have other tricks, "only white wine" or "a patient and helpful spouse" or "drink until your BAC is utterly and irrevocably high enough to function without inebriation" - the family term for this last one is usually something like, "he'll piss it out faster than he can drink it."

And we have methods for drying out.
I borrow from the Russians who take the pill that threatens to kill them if they drink again - a few tabs of valium and the shakes vanish and you sleep the sleep of a sober man, but should you have even one drink you will surely die. Like my father's words as he demonstrates the operation of a table saw, "not even one beer."
Two days is all it takes. And never more than two days, followed by however long I can manage to last in the bliss of sobriety, curled up in the warm hay "on the wagon."

The curse of the high functioning alcoholic is that you function.
We don't have a good model for understanding this process - though it is thought to effect roughly 20% of heavy drinkers.
It was very, very hard to find a therapist knowledgeable enough to walk with me on this journey.

Tonight I'm drying out again, another week or two or God-please three or four... my sober friend says that sobriety is giving yourself the gift of a vacation every single morning. But I don't have to. I can work through it, if I want. And the finger-waving 12-stepper can fuss at me all they want, "It'll catch up with you... you'll end up alone... you can't escape it, eventually..." and it falls on the deaf ears of a child who grew up surrounded by marvelously prosperous people who lived long and successful lives without ever getting sober.

It's just a long and drawn out process. And it's generational. In the same fashion in which my siblings and I have all agreed to never employ corporal punishment with any of our children, we've all-on-our-own decided to speak plainly about our collective alcoholism, shamelessly and without shaming, and to discuss plainly "where we're at with our drinking" and so we don't experience the crushing isolation of the previous generations. And perhaps our children will be liberated from another generational curse.

As an aside, there absolutely *is* a word that describes the spiritual process of getting drunk and experiencing a hangover with God. The work of worship is called "anamnesis" - it is not the opposite of amnesia so much as the "unforgetting" of the things we call true. Anamnesis is being reminded of the way the world "really works," the secret conspiracy of joy and blessing that hides beneath the ugly facade of reality.
And reality, the "world," the experience of Monday through Saturday, is the experience of getting drunker and drunker (or soberer and soberer) until that blessed time on Sunday morning when we can gather and together soar once again and slap our foreheads and exclaim, "I can't believe I'd forgotten how good things really are."
posted by Baby_Balrog at 8:13 AM on October 21, 2021 [63 favorites]

I'm not an alcoholic, but I think Mitch Hedburg had a great answer for why people deal with hangovers.

"I like to drink red wine. This girl says "Doesn't red wine give you a headache?" "Yeah, eventually! But the first and the middle part are amazing." I'm not gonna stop doing something 'cause of what's gonna happen at the end. "Mitch, you want an apple?" "No, eventually it'll be a core."

Caveat - he died from drugs.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:45 AM on October 21, 2021 [2 favorites]

It seems like the drunk brain has a different relationship with time, and might not feel so much for the poor sucker left inhabiting the body in the morning.

Speaking of time, there was another post about this a few years back.

"Like a rat in a gift box." So good.
posted by silentbicycle at 9:24 AM on October 21, 2021 [3 favorites]

The point was that there might be many types of hangovers: substances, yes; but also: religion, sex/love, politics, art...that after the evening of ecstatic achievement, of communion, we are faced with a new day in which we have to become less-than again. Just ourselves, not the great thinker, the speaker, the dancer, the flirt, the leader, the mystic, the con artist, the lover at the heart of the world. Bills to be paid and babies to be fed and neighbors to endure, when the night before we'd sorted it all out and were bathed in the glow.
I can agree, finishing a piece of art (not great art, mind, but still it was art) was oddly alienating; I just couldn't take much satisfaction in the thing sitting there, now it is its own self and I'd just sort of accompanied it into the world. It was the process that was so exhilarating.
posted by winesong at 9:28 AM on October 21, 2021 [6 favorites]

Now that I'm old and practiced, and able to afford a slightly better class of hooch, I am able to be fairly strategic with my hangovers. It helps that I'm small--I can get good and sauced long before I have actually ingested enough physical quantities of booze to ruin my next day.*

But it's definitely an art, rather than a science, and those rare occasions on which the night got WELL away from me and the morning punches me in the face actually feel rather delightful, metaphysically. It is nice to remember that I have somewhere within me a sloppy dipshit capable of an ill-advised good time.

*The wild card is an early morning post-party; I can sleep off most any hangover, or certainly the worst of it, by 10:30 am, but if I have to be up for a flight or a meeting or something, woof.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 9:28 AM on October 21, 2021 [5 favorites]

Back when I was in college people would be surprised that I didn't drink, and a great friend of mine always found it amusing (and, perhaps, more accurate than he cared to admit) that the shortest, most succinct version of my answer to the question of why not was, "because I'm afraid I'll like it." When I finally allowed myself to try drinking at all, I started with whisky neat. And I did like it, proving my point.

It took me a really long time, along with a slowly decreasing tolerance, to figure out that while I do enjoy drinking I quite dislike being drunk. I also used to have a pretty good sense of how much I was actually drinking and how fast, but I've learned over the past few years that I can't trust that sense anymore so I have to be much more mindful about keeping an actual count. Meanwhile my hangovers have gotten much worse (see: decreasing tolerance) so I know the "here be dragons" part of the map starts around n ≥ 4 (hard to be sure because after n = 4 things have a tendency to keep going).

Meanwhile my wife's three brothers have all died as a result of alcoholism, at the ages of 50, 50, and 51. The eldest, after failing rehab twice, fell down the stairs in a halfway house and was unconscious at the bottom of them for most of a day before anybody thought to try to rouse him; the second was found with a bottle next to him when his estranged wife called the cops for a welfare check after not hearing from him for a few days; the third died this year, in the ICU, of multiple organ failure precipitated by advanced cirrhosis. We try to avoid calling her mom after wine o'clock.

All of which is to say I used to enjoy the Kingsley Amis sort of hangover writing but somewhere in all of that it has stopped being amusing. We're probably drinking more days out of the week than we used to (because we're home, because of the pandemic) but we're also both much more conscious of every drink than we used to be. Still, I think every time we go past n ≤ 2 we both wonder, sometimes out loud, "do we have a problem?" That's definitely new this year.
posted by fedward at 10:33 AM on October 21, 2021 [4 favorites]

sorry for your loss, fedward
posted by thelonius at 11:02 AM on October 21, 2021 [1 favorite]

I had a hangover once. It was horrible and I resolved (successfully so far) never to have one again.
posted by cyanistes at 11:15 AM on October 21, 2021

The point was that there might be many types of hangovers

Maybe this is just, you know, a melancholic temperament, but I have been certain for a long time that, emotionally speaking, what goes up must come down. As a general rule. So yes, that’s the thing about hangovers and drug comedowns as a literary theme - it’s a ready-made metaphor.
posted by atoxyl at 11:26 AM on October 21, 2021 [1 favorite]

Homeostasis, man.
posted by atoxyl at 11:28 AM on October 21, 2021 [1 favorite]

I also like the Townes van Zandt line

And time was like water but I was the sea
I wouldn't have noticed it passing
Except for the turning of night into day
And the turning of day into cursing
posted by atoxyl at 11:29 AM on October 21, 2021 [4 favorites]

Two whole drinks is a big Saturday night for me these days. I think I've had one hangover in the last twenty years.
posted by octothorpe at 11:30 AM on October 21, 2021

the "here be dragons" part of the map starts around n ≥ 4

Can confirm. If I've fucked around with weird beers anywhere in there, though, anything is possible. Liquor then beer, you're in the clear my ass, maybe in 1995 when the most harm you could do yourself was some Heinekens. In this brave new world of 8% beers on tap everywhere the potential for surprise chaos is high.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 11:36 AM on October 21, 2021 [2 favorites]

maybe in 1995 when the most harm you could do yourself was some Heinekens.

I've always found low alcohol beers to be kind of amazing, comparatively. If you did a 'power-hour' with soda (one shot of soda every minute for an hour), or did something like drink one soda or juice an hour for 6 hours straight, I'm pretty sure you'd do more harm to your body and feel worse than doing the same thing with beer.
posted by The_Vegetables at 11:59 AM on October 21, 2021 [1 favorite]

In this brave new world of 8% beers on tap everywhere the potential for surprise chaos is high.

Sometimes a craft beer is actually three beers in a trenchcoat.
posted by silentbicycle at 12:00 PM on October 21, 2021 [28 favorites]

Some of my friends, who used to like to drink but weren't really problem drinkers, report that, in their late 40s, they found that even one or two drinks made them feel pretty poorly the next day. Poorly enough that some of them just don't drink now, although they enjoyed it and, as I say, they weren't close to drinking like alcoholics.

If you did a 'power-hour' with soda (one shot of soda every minute for an hour), or did something like drink one soda or juice an hour for 6 hours straight, I'm pretty sure you'd do more harm to your body and feel worse than doing the same thing with beer.

ok but Tide pods are probably even worse
posted by thelonius at 12:14 PM on October 21, 2021 [3 favorites]

Drinking in middle age is an attempt to cure the hangover of youth.

At this age, imbibing must be done at home in a controlled manner, after sunset but never after midnight -- Gremlins rules. Sipping 4% beer like it's fine brandy, or putting two molecules of rye in a glass with lemon and a stack of ice cubes. Going out drinking at this age is to play Russian roulette with five bullets. The optimal case for the next morning is a barely-perceptible hangover, a slight vibration that masks the shock of existence, treated with coffee and computers until eight or ten hours have passed.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 12:27 PM on October 21, 2021 [7 favorites]

Sometimes a craft beer is actually three beers in a trenchcoat.

15+ years ago some friends planned a night at a place with a lot of Belgian beers. As we helped one of the planners of that night get out of the bar and into (the back seat of) a car he said, "but I only had three!"
posted by fedward at 12:33 PM on October 21, 2021

Recently, I have realized that my least favorite aspect of my early-30s hangovers is the crippling sense of anxiety & dread that I wake up with. It sends me back to bed faster than the pounding head. Which is a cool new development.
posted by Grandysaur at 1:00 PM on October 21, 2021 [3 favorites]

Hourly dose of wine

I will never forget hearing a radio version of this, while on the highway.
posted by elkevelvet at 1:11 PM on October 21, 2021

Recently, I have realized that my least favorite aspect of my early-30s hangovers is the crippling sense of anxiety & dread that I wake up with.

No that's not the booze, that's just your 30s. By your 40s your whole day is anxiety and dread and honestly you won't even feel most of the hangovers. ASK ME HOW I KNOW.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 1:19 PM on October 21, 2021 [11 favorites]

"but I only had three!"

Ah, yes, the Belgian Tripel.
posted by silentbicycle at 1:29 PM on October 21, 2021 [5 favorites]

My brother and I called it "Cringe 'n Flinch" - that singular state of extreme physical discomfort combined with the inevitable mental/moral recriminations as pieces of the pieces of the previous evening jarringly reappear as jagged shards.

I could not find my copy of Bright Lights, Big City, but McInerney's opening description of Jamie's daily hangover is a doozy.

"What does cocaine make you feel like? It makes you feel like doing some more cocaine."
- George Carlin
posted by thecincinnatikid at 2:21 PM on October 21, 2021 [3 favorites]

The last time my friend D got passed out drunk, he would awaken every little while and bellow, "POISONED!" and pass out again. After we got him home we placed him near the toilet for the inevitable. The next day he woke up on the hard tile clutching the toilet. The hangover was legendary.
posted by a humble nudibranch at 3:14 PM on October 21, 2021

crippling sense of anxiety & dread
I've been told there is a clear neurological basis for this, once you enter hangover town. That sounds legit! But does anyone know about that?

"What does cocaine make you feel like? It makes you feel like doing some more cocaine."
- George Carlin
or Robin Williams: "Cocaine makes you feel like a new man. Then, the new man wants a line"
posted by thelonius at 3:26 PM on October 21, 2021 [1 favorite]

"What does cocaine make you feel like? It makes you feel like doing some more cocaine."
- George Carlin
"Cocaine makes you feel like a new man. Then, the new man wants a line."
- Robin Williams
I am extraordinarily fortunate, in that cocaine did not blow my skirt up at all. By the end of my running one of my best friends was dealing, he laid out a big fat line for me, up my nose it went and I was totally "That was 50 bucks? That's nothing more than strong coffee."

"Fifty bucks? That's 3 bottles of Johnny Walker Black Label. Fuck that jive." And from what they told me it was really good coke, I saw it when he got it and it was still on the rock, with that brown crystalline shit in it.

Probably if I'd have put it into my arm, but that is a line I just would not cross and I am ever so grateful that I somehow stayed this side of that line. My veins are like garden hoses, they really wanted to share what was over there, no less than a Jesus jumper wanting to jam a bible up your ass -- they wanted to share the beauty they lived in.

But I knew that alcohol owned me, and any downs I could find, bath-tub speed, which they wanted to put into my arm also, but I just snorted it.

The hangovers just got worse and worse, if I were to be in my body through that today I just can't imagine it, or, worse, I can imagine it. Being a cigarette/cigar smoker just make it ever so much worse -- I was a walking poison factory. I'm such a candy-ass now, I feel bad just from too much sugar.
posted by dancestoblue at 4:20 PM on October 21, 2021 [2 favorites]

Tom Wolfe, from Bonfire of the Vanities:

The telephone blasted Peter Fallow awake inside an egg with the shell peeled away and only the membranous sac holding it intact. Ah! The membranous sac was his head, and the right side of his head was on the pillow, and the yolk was as heavy as mercury, and it rolled like mercury, and it was pressing down on his right temple and his right eye and his right ear. If he tried to get up to answer the telephone, the yolk, the mercury, the poisoned mass, would shift and roll and rupture the sac, and his brains would fall out.

The telephone was on the floor, in the corner, near the window, on the brown carpet. The carpet was disgusting. Synthetic; the Americans manufactured filthy carpet; Metalon, Streptolon, deep, shaggy, with a feel that made his flesh crawl. Another explosion; he was looking straight at it, a white telephone and a slimy white cord lying there in a filthy shaggy brown nest of Streptolon. Behind the Venetian blinds the sun was so bright it hurt his eyes.
posted by lumpy at 4:46 PM on October 21, 2021 [3 favorites]

crippling sense of anxiety & dread
I've been told there is a clear neurological basis for this,

I've been told it's all about the cortisol.

Also I went out for the first time in weeks and had a Manhattan served in a styrofoam cup so AMA.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 6:47 PM on October 21, 2021 [4 favorites]

Ok: How many seas must a white dove sail before she sleeps in the sand?
posted by Greg_Ace at 7:49 PM on October 21, 2021 [1 favorite]

I must take the 5th and simply quote Elvis in anticipation of the morning: "My mouth feels like Bob Dylan's been sleeping in it."
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 7:53 PM on October 21, 2021 [2 favorites]

Shoot, now I'm never gonna find out the answer!
posted by Greg_Ace at 9:16 PM on October 21, 2021 [1 favorite]

It sounds like quite a few of us should form a group chat.
posted by bendy at 11:34 PM on October 21, 2021 [1 favorite]

Malt-a-filter!
posted by Greg_Ace at 11:42 PM on October 21, 2021 [2 favorites]

Tom Wolfe, from Bonfire of the Vanities:

Yes, that's the other one I was thinking of, the poison sac, that's perfect.
posted by thecincinnatikid at 8:05 AM on October 22, 2021

Also I went out for the first time in weeks and had a Manhattan served in a styrofoam cup so AMA.

did they at least use the good cherries?
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 8:25 AM on October 22, 2021 [1 favorite]

I've been told it's all about the cortisol.

I thought it was more the rebound effect from removing alcohol’s enhancement of GABA (inhibitory) and blocking of NMDA (excitatory) signaling in the brain? So basically mini-withdrawal.
posted by atoxyl at 9:22 AM on October 22, 2021 [1 favorite]

The blues are often the song of mourning and the song of the hangover, a hangover sometimes being essentially no more than a case of mourning —mourning for the night before. But one often feels that when the work of mourning is over, when the hangover has passed, the singer will be of f pursuing love and joy once again. Truth is truth: She can’t be satisfied.
And that’s a sad enough condition. But those who can be satisfied on this earth, what’s there to say for them? Perhaps they are not asking for enough.

I think that's a great closing paragraph to a great essay.
posted by Mister Bijou at 8:05 PM on October 22, 2021 [2 favorites]

Re: the anxiety rebound aspect of a hangover... yeah.
That started happening to me in my 30's, with an ever decreasing quantity of alcohol. Granted, some of my favorite beers were of the 3-beers-in-a-trenchcoat variety. (Great phrase, btw)

Could be cortisol, could be some other concoction of brain chemicals bashing around and knocking over the furniture. Either way, ugh! Not a fan of anything that makes me feel that way: alcohol, world events, the entire pandemic, Monday mornings...
posted by SaharaRose at 12:30 PM on October 23, 2021 [1 favorite]

I must take the 5th and simply quote Elvis in anticipation of the morning: "My mouth feels like Bob Dylan's been sleeping in it."
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 9:53 PM on October 21
I'd gotten to the point where it was like a four day dead rotting rodent was in my mouth, plus some of it swallowed, maggots and stuff. I'm pretty sure I wet the bed some nights-mornings but I was able to bullshit myself by saying I'd spilled a beer or something.

I know for a fact that a lot of my misery was tobacco toxicity, along with alcohol poisoning. I'd smoke at least a pack a night, when on a drunk. At least.

Alcoholism made me a very attractive person.

It was a very romantic lifestyle I lived, there at the end.

So many employers were so good to me, gave me a pass *way* longer than I deserved. Funny thing about me, my experience, is that once I became unemployable it was all over but the crying, as the saying goes.

The work ethic carved into me by my family really, really ran deep, if you are not working you are not worth anything; speaking with my father long distance, he'd say "What are you doing?" and he wasn't asking if I was in psychotherapy or had found love, what he was asking is "What is your work?" and it didn't much matter, I could be putting in acoustical ceilings or building our grocery stores or working sheet metal or maybe commercial metal carpentry or wood carpentry or cabinetry or what-the-fuck-ever-else came down the line; what mattered is how did I fit my life around my work, which was of course my worth. And, really, as a member of my family, it was pretty much my only worth, though that was deeply unstated, if that's a word, if that's a sensible sentence or not.

No, none of that came to light until The Telling Of The Tale^TM, in this therapists office, in that therapists office, with this sponsor, with that sponsor, spending time and money which I absolutely could not afford looking back at what shaped me into the person I somehow became; I spent time and money looking in goddamned rear-view mirrors because I'd learned that if I didn't I'd get run the fuck over by my very own life. So, though I absolutely could not afford it I even more absolutely could not afford to not do it.

Which is to say: I was fucked.
posted by dancestoblue at 5:06 PM on October 23, 2021 [1 favorite]

Which is to say: Alcoholism is about way, way more than "just" alcohol.

Alcohol was just what beat me into a state of reasonableness.

Which has enabled me -- one tiny, tiny bit at a time, stubbornly fighting every inch -- to accept the grace given freely to broken people.
posted by dancestoblue at 5:32 PM on October 23, 2021 [2 favorites]