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.