Am I Going To Die From This?

*Full Disclosure Guys…I wrote this on day 2 of one of quite possibly the worst hangovers of my life and I thought to myself…do I get these worse than other people? Has anyone actually ever died from a hangover? I decided to brain dump that day and then approach it a few days later to see if I could tap into the brain space.*

So…here is what my Sunday/Monday was like this week:

Time: 7:36am Sunday

It’s almost like a hundred voices suddenly stop yelling all at once. Your eyes open and you’re on about a 25-second countdown to the pain of being awake and the reality of the way you feel. Before you can even begin to enjoy this microscopic amount of bliss or at least relish it as the best you’re going to feel for the next 24-48 hours, your brain starts to ask you some great questions:

Who has my sunglasses?

What floor of the house am I sleeping on?

Wallet…phone…keys?

Is this just sweat from sleeping in clothes or did I piss myself (oh boy)?

These questions are packed with intermittent flashbacks to the night prior, and honestly none of the fun moments are featured. It’s flashbacks of you stumbling back from taking a piss outside, or entrapped in some deep conversation of which you had no business having after that many jagerbombs…oh jagerbombs… and just like that the flashbacks change to a montage of the litany of disgusting liquids you dumped down your gullet. Why tequila and THEN champagne? Who needs that much diet coke? Shots? Who do you think you are Hayden?

It’s as if every single question you ask yourself ramps the speed at which you’re about to reach hungover faster and faster.

Now that my mind was moving 110 mph, you start to realize you gotta start combating that inevitable. Water, Ibuprofen, Mouthwash, phone charger, hopefully in that order and hopefully completed without throwing up. But here’s the problem, you’re effectively paralyzed. You just lay there and try to count down from 10 to get up but buddy…it aint happenin’.

This is where the real fun starts, you just go into a pattern of being not quite asleep but not quite awake. Like flashbacks from last night and people you saw become characters in the borderline fever dreams your body is producing as it tries to claw its way back to sobriety. And they’re never quite dreams either, someones always yelling or bad things are happening.

Side Stories about Hangover Dreams

I remember back in school my friend lived by train tracks, and I was too hungover to move from where I was so I subjected myself to 3 hours of rail road crossing *dings* rather than reach 2 feet away and grab a pillow to cover my ears. I heard those train crossing sirens my entire next day whenever there was silence.

At this point in writing this I feel like i’m the only one, but then I remember that same friend and I on a road trip back from Spring Break with 4 other guys in like 2015 (Trust me, the 2015 Hayden is not a great look). We were in the way back and incredibly hungover from our final night, and my friend had such a vivid dream that he and I were fighting that he woke up out of a dead sleep and took a swing at me.

Anyways, what a segue.

Then the rest of the day is made up of some of the worst traits of a bad hangover and to be honest I wasn’t sure how to write them so I am just going to list them.

1. Memory goes to shit

You always try to replay the night in your head, and I’ve joked to people that its like a tape that destroys itself as you play it. You remember it once and then if you try to recall it again the memory is just gone as fast as you think of it. Which…honestly not a bad thing, I mean who wants to remember falling over hammered and having people help you up? Right? Just me guys?

2. Hollow-Body

Beyond just a stomach ache or headache, I call it hollow-body. Its as if someone reclined the seat of the car, like you’re juuuuust a little too far away from the steering wheel to feel comfortable. Like you’ve been zoomed out 10 percent, your eyes are hurt, you feel like it takes longer for each foot to do its job walking, your stomach isnt hungry yet you can’t stop eating.

3. Holding a conversation becomes torture

You know how on a regular day if someone asks how you’re doing you can easily keep that conversation going with just a few additional “how about you’s?” or “oh really?”’s? Not with this beast of hangover. It feels like everyone is speaking a different language. I’ve had too many times where I’ve had to try to keep a conversation on life support when i’m not quite sure if i’m even alive.

4) Hangxiety

This is the big one, folks. It’s truthfully what keeps me to getting drunk once a fiscal quarter, Hangxiety. You can have the greatest night of your life, but if you drink too much your brain makes you pay the troll toll. A comic in our area said its “getting drunk is borrowing fun from tomorrow to use today’ and honestly that could not be more true. You make a deal with the fun gods for a night. Every action you did last night is now revisited by your brain with a nice negativity filter.

“I talked too much”...”I fucked up that handshake”...”everyone saw me dancing and spill that drink”...”I annoyed the bride and groom”.

(Side note: No bride and groom wants a drunk asshole coming up to them and telling them how much their relationship inspires and means to them. Enjoy the free booze and stay out of the way.)

Look, to wrap this up with a bow: was this a long winded humble brag that I got drunk last weekend? Maybe. Did I lose steam on the back end of this article? That’d be a fair criticism. If I could give any advice to combatting these earth-shattering matrix hangovers: don’t drink. But if you do drink, do the prep work. Get your nest ready for you, stay up late and have a water chugging competition before bed, and turn your phone off the day after.

Alrighty, onto another poorly written blog.