It strikes me that, unlike other drugs, alcohol does not provide you with a sense of coming down. Or at least, the rather calming connotations of "coming down" do not work with alcohol. A more appropriate term would be "coming up," and your consciousness is like a deep-sea diver attempting to avoid the bends.

You can do it, sometimes, you can keep your consciousness swimming back and forth, slowing working its way to the surface with vertically-oriented switchbacks, but the quick rush from the depths of being drowned in alcohol straight to the needs and demands that usually accompany sobriety (work, family, et al.) is what kills you, what threatens to snap your bones in half.

I took a shower but was unable to wash my hair - my head feels very sensitive.  Thoughts run through my mind, isolated from each other but potentially containing a significant amount of meaning.  "I pick up female friends like they are strays," "With hangovers your senses heighten but your reflexes don't," "Will pregnancy make me unable to live in an industrialized world without throwing up?"

I can't bear even the thought of the taste of toothpaste, so I brush them with faucet water only and try not to tickle my gag reflex.  The holes in the bone in my head want to close up - shutting my eyes does not seem sufficient.  Hot water is nauseating.

There is not much to reconstruct this time.  Last night I sat in the kitchen, drinking with my lover and rambling about from topic to topic, constantly promising to return to ones we've interrupted and constantly forgetting to do so.

I have also not washed my face.  I briefly stood up just now to examine my skin and sitting back down intensified the hungover feeling.  I consider smoking pot or taking a Vicodin, then decide not to because it will tarnish the purity of the hangover.  The best cure will be water, a walk in the sunshine, and time.  I will slowly return to my self, become social.  Before that will be calm surfaces with raging currents underneath.

Slow deliberate gestures betray a violent belly that threatens to empty itself in any direction possible, steadied breathing is a measured attempt to pacify the fires in the back of my throat.  Every small pain, from cavities in my teeth to itches to peeling skin, is louder and stronger and the natural response is to play dead, to try and listen to the symphonies of pain instead of succumbing to them with a primitive complaint, or worsening (toxifying) the situation with coffee or pot or headache medicine.  Those things can arrive at the end of the scene as a means to help pass the last bit of time, not to "cure" what you're going through.

The build up and tear down of the mind, the hangover as consequence, feels all too responsible.  It feels adult to know and embrace even the negative consequences of my actions.  And what were my actions?  Certain topics this previous night were broached and little balls of anxiety were capable of being tossed out the window because certain of the right words were paired together and aimed at me, and I cannot remember the topics, the words, or the pairings, just a sense of lifting, of relief.

It is a shortcut, in many ways.  Do not detangle those Christmas lights, just buy new ones, because these tangled ones are all old and fucked anyway - the bulbs don't all work and the cords are weak next to the electrical plugs at the end.  You could slowly, like Psyche, work at the task, one step at a time, detangle, identify and repair weak spots in the cable, replace broken bulbs, and so forth.  But sometimes the damn lights, the damn topics, the damn buildings in your mind, are too worn out to be worth it.  Just toss them out.  There are consequences - if you ever need those lights, you can't get them again, you lose the potential sense of satisfaction you would get from untangling and repairing.  You lose as you gain.  You have a hangover.

I have come to enjoy the calm of a hangover. Everything in the world seems profound, every physical sensation sparks and crackles. My hair on my face, my feet held snuggly in last night's shoes, the mid-level volume of a guitar coming through the speakers.

Sitting in the sun is never so welcome as during a hangover. Everything is resolidifying.

My surroundings are key for the enjoyment of a hangover. Using a computer right now is even dampening it. Being inside is making it worse. Huge portions of the internet, anything superfluous to the deep rhythms of life, are stripped bare - I can see them clearly. Pure sobriety is also a drunkenness - it requires caffeine and small amounts of various poisons in order to function. A problem, yes. But completely melt into a bender, lose all shape and form, allow your brain to explode into water, and then as it reshapes you can regain a sense of control.

I almost always look beautiful when I am hungover. I allow the stress to completely leave my face, I experience the world the way a child does. There are BAD things and GOOD things, and most things are good, worth smiling at. I am not afraid to stare at people on the train, I am not afraid to be kind, to tap into humanity, to be alive and present in the world. It is beautiful and I am beautiful with it. All of time slows down and you don't have to keep being a hummingbird.

A hangover is a reminder that it is sometimes best to allow yourself to simply move slowly.

Stress is impossible. All neurons are focused at the forepart of the brain, pressing against the forehead, weighing down the skull. But it's not stressful, or even entirely unpleasant. It's warm in here, but the warmth is, like the headache, merely tolerated. Machines make their noises, I have assignments, I answer the phones, it is all going by as if I am sitting on a train and watching it. My actions are reflections in the window, shining back at me, always from an angle that necessarily strikes the familiar as alien.

But there is no stress. Somehow, it is all palatable. The phone rings and I answer it, although my boss is in front of me. No stress. The call is from a collection agency, they want five grand that I don't have. No stress.

Everything seems very deliberate. Every minute has its duration, every action has its gestures, every motion has a purpose or at least a reason. The world is opaque, it solidifies. The gray areas slip into more contrasting darks and lights. I like my job, I love my boyfriend, I am making all the right decisions. It is easy to swallow these things now. Or, they have always been in the pit of my stomach and I've heaped so much else atop it that I could never taste them. But these are the truths, the fixtures, the brick in the bathtub conserving water - put there long ago, serving a good purpose, reasons why forgotten in the midst of aesthetic recontemplation.

All is right. I am settled, congealed, drying, setting - and it is not a reason to fear anything, because within my settling is the easy acceptance of the knowledge that it's all a fallacy. Everything you could say about life, your own life, can be (and probably will be) proven wrong, by yourself, before you die. It's fine, though. It's all okay. Don't panic. No stress.

I am not writing this to calm myself down, I am merely astonished at my own calm and wish to record it.

I can feel my blood rethickening. Airy fantasies from the previous night about who I am, what I'm capable of, are all clogging up and sinking back down to earth. I can see everything about the future – not only what I will do, but what what I do will cause. How everything will end up. The shivering consolidation of self, the sludging sanguine, it resembles a divinity in the style of Aristotle: an Unmovable Mover. But not how he meant it.

A mover, an agent of free will, reduced to sedentariness. A brain once raging against its bars has been fed, has been drugged, is calm and attempting to digest all it has taken in. Too much. And this catatonic body, softly moaning, covered in terry cloth or pajamas, wrapped up in a sleep suit well into the afternoon, houses an immense assemblage, it is a warehouse meticulously analysing, categorising, and labeling even the slightest traces of emotion and memory. And it has two swollen windows, the glass warping within its very frames, watching the sun sink down, watching a whole day slink away without any commendable or recognizable activity. To other people, the cars on the highway, this building does not move, hasn't changed, might as well be empty. And yet, the molecules that make up every brick in its walls sigh a bit, push away and relax, in the wake of the highway breeze.