I can’t quite put my finger on causation, but for the mid/latter five months of 2021 I experienced an unbreaking string of hangover-free mornings. It was this dream-like period I look back on with awe and question how exactly the extended clear-headedness occurred. It seems a miracle; for once again, my life is replete with hangovers, and I just can’t stop them coming.
They’re unpleasant. They fill my head with diesel exhaust and pack my inelastic skin with lima beans. If I were to argue ‘God is evil,’ hangovers would comprise eighty percent of my evidence because they serve no practical purpose. They’re like mosquitoes, shellback ticks and so called “entrepreneurs.” And they’re nigh on impossible to dodge; consumption is necessary, you see: we must drink if we want to live, and yet sometimes this drinking has consequence, sometimes it forces us into unsavoury states. And for this I have a prescription, a strict routine which, when done correctly, serves to cure a hangover—without fail—always exactly an hour after noon. My flawless routine is this:
(1) Retrieve the water pitcher from the fridge (which, since Refilling the Water Pitcher, consistently contains an adequate quantity of filtered water) and pour 490 mL into a 500 mL capacity cup.
(2) Skull the water and refill the cup.
(3) Stumble through darkness to bed, sleep, and wake from bladder pressure at the appropriately named wee hours of the morning (4:38 am).
(4) Ingest 500 mg of ibuprofen with the remaining 500 mL of water in your cup before returning to sleep so that when you next wake, you have some painkiller in your system.
(5) Here, upon waking, it is imperative to have a B&E (Bacon and Egg roll) asap (as soon as possible). But in your current state you can’t cook so you’ll have to go to a café, and you can’t go to a café without a shower first, and there’s no point in showering if you haven’t yet pooped, and you can’t poo without a coffee, so execute these tasks in reverse order and I guarantee, 45 minutes after your B&E it’ll be 1 p.m., and at 1 p.m., you’ll be cured. It’s a perfect routine. It always works—except, except, not always.
On Saturday 27 November, circa 2 a.m., after a duet of negronis, pint of ale for each hand and seemingly Mobius round of jugs, I started my hangover mitigation routine. I did the water and the ibuprofen and the shit and the shower and the B&E, and for some inexplicable reason, at 1 p.m., the hangover persisted. I’d done everything right, everything that usually works, the whole clear-cut procedure right on schedule and yet the product of the routine was the undesirable continuation of headache and body soreness. I and the world felt wrong. So at 1:01 p.m. I grew frustrated, took to pressing my thumb and forefinger to the little skull-divots between my brows. I did fifteen push-ups and a twenty-second handstand because blood flow apparently helps with such things—it didn’t. I ground my molars, tried to flick the headache from my head in several back-and-forth whipping motions, none of which helped. Then, at 1:12 p.m., I forsook my endeavour to heal, sunk into acceptance of my unhealthy state, and all this exacerbated the problem. My frustration extended the hangover’s duration. My desperate off-the-cuff cures intensified it. My routine, which I’d spent years formulating, I discovered in this moment, was flawed. I hated the inconsistency of my body and the world.
Between the ages of six and nine, my youngest sister, Alex, had a portable DVD player (first the family’s which she claimed for herself, and then her own because my parents couldn’t deal with the backseat bickering that accompanies a shared entertainment device). The DVD player was silver, ran off 12 volts and resembled a miniature laptop but instead of a keyboard had a DVD door that popped up like a car bonnet and a screen that was too reflective and dim for daytime watching, a screen that did not deter my sister. Blanket tented overhead on road trips, she’d watch no matter the conditions. And the movies she selected were never a surprise. She’d pick one, say Home Alone 2, and go on a exclusionary multi-month binge. She’d watch Harry and Marv slip on some ice fifty times over, watch Kevin McAllister reunite, reunite and reunite with his mom. And this is all she’d watch, the same movie every day, sometimes twice a day, until the player rejected the lacerated disc, or until the disc mysteriously disappeared. The periods of her life in that era were not defined by seasons or months, but by what was her trending motion picture. She watched Frederik Du Chau’s Racing Stripes (a zebra’s ascent to horserace victory) until she knew every joke, every Easter egg, every line. She watched High School Musical until its songs were imbued in her system, more important than blood. She watched My Big Fat Greek Wedding until the disc was so scratched it skipped once a minute. She watched Spy Kids, View from the Top, The Parent Trap, Herbie Fully Loaded, Freaky Friday and Just My Luck (apparently her’s was the era of Linsey Lohan) long past the point where the magic of the films dried up.
For a long while I pinned this tendency for rewatching solely on a child’s lack of understanding for the language of stories. A major part of what keeps us engaged in stories is our innate desire to predict what will happen. Will Batman catch the Joker? At what cost? Will Jenny ever accept Forrest Gump romantically? Can Jack Torrance overcome the madness within him and the Overlook Hotel? And it feels good to guess correctly. Empirically, we enjoy stories more when we know how they end. But because children don’t yet understand story tropes and their typical trajectories, it’s difficult for them to predict the plot beats and where the story will turn. So they rewatch, and they rewatch, and surprise, surprise, they feel smart for guessing what happens.
Whilst I still think this is part of the reason children like to rewatch films, there’s something deeper here. I recall Alex lying on her stomach in her pink bedroom on her pink-sheeted bed, opening the lid of her DVD player and hitting play on Charlie’s Angels for the thirty-second time, and I can see on her face a kind of alert interest, an anticipation for what is to come. Her shoulders are forward. Her feet kick gaily in the air above her glutes. She expects the story to surprise her. Each time she rewatches a movie, she approaches it as something new, as if she expected the movie to have changed in some way between the previous watch and the current. Which, I have come to accept as true.
My favourite Murakami quote reflects this. In the Wind-up Bird Chronicles, May Kasahara, an independent, cigarette-smoking, teen prone to philosophising, posits that worldly inconsistencies feel more real than regular physical laws. She says, “It’s like when you put instant rice pudding mix in a bowl in the microwave and push the button, and you take the cover off when it rings, and there you’ve got rice pudding.” And she questions “what happens in between the time when you push the switch and when the microwave rings.” Because “you can’t tell what’s going on under the cover. Maybe the instant rice pudding first turns into macaroni gratin in the darkness when nobody’s looking and only then turns back into rice pudding.” While this would freak me the fuck out, I understand the sentiment. Sure it’s reassuring to define the physical laws of nature; the knowing gives us some comfort, boosts our chance of survival and avoidance of pain. But reality, interpreted through the lens of our limited brains, is chaotic, is unknowable to us, and is (legitimately) probabilistic, such that we can never know with absolute certainty what the future holds. If every prediction you made for the next twelve months turned out correct, how unreal would the world feel?
Every time we adults watch the same movie we kind of expect the same experience. The same pixels flash the same RGB makeup at the same intervals at the same intensity and to the same score, soundscape, foley, and speech. The stimulus delivered in one watching of a film is identical to the stimulus of a rewatch, and we think, ‘Ahh, this is just a repeat.’ But my little sister understands that the world is chaotic, that her environmental (backseat, bedroom, cinema, lounge room, wherever you can take a portable DVD player), experiential, and neurochemical circumstances will change her experience of the film. Each viewing will be unique, and uniqueness is a whole lot more real.
I’m sure I’ll get another hangover soon, likely multiple (despite my morning-after tendency to assert I’ll never drink again). And eventually my near-flawless headache mitigation method will fail because nothing ever works one hundred percent. But next time I won’t hate my bodily inconsistencies, won’t let frustration exaggerate my unsavoury state. Next time I’ll revel in my imperfect method and persistent hangover because my sister taught me that this is the way of what is real.
(Jokes, I’ll probably hate hangovers all the same.)
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