Taking a Break
On Tuesday night, I got ridiculously, fantasticly shitfaced while playing the State of the Union Drinking Game, in which the Pweznit’s stock phrases, stock lies, and numerous facial tics and twitches are the foundations upon which one drinks a lot of booze. “Bipartisanship”? Knock wood and drink. “Mispronounces ‘nuclear’”? Drink. “Mentions a Democrat other than Joe Lieberman by name”? Drink twice. And so on.
I could see Christina looking at me occasionally from the corner of her eye, and knew that I’d had more than my share (I’d already knocked back three pints or so at Drinking Liberally), but by the time I went upstairs to get our coats it was too late to do anything about it: my eyes were glazed over and googly. I think the proper expression is “pie-eyed”, or perhaps “blotto”.
Luckily, I didn’t wake up with a hangover. But that doesn’t do justice to the night I only halfway slept through. Around 2:00 AM or so, I began waking up every ten minutes or so to either let loose with a fart, to squeeze out some turds, or to drink some water. I began to get heartburn that tasted like stale beer foam, and when I laid on my back, I could actually feel the foam sliding up my esophagus, as if the beer were raw wort fermenting in my belly. If you’d stuck an airlock in my alimentary canal, you would have seen the CO2 bubbling out, and with every swallow of water, it just got worse. I think I got maybe 5 hours of sleep tops.
As anyone who visits this blog knows, I like to drink beer. Lots of it.
In some of my songs, I’ve casually mentioned
The fact that I like to drink beer:
This little song is more to the point
So roll out the barrel and lend me your ear
I like beer!
It makes me a jolly good fellow!
I like beer!
It helps me unwind and sometimes it makes me feel mellow.
–Tom T. Hall, “I Like Beer”
I like beer. You might even say I LOVE beer. I like drinking it, reading about it, talking about it, and even making it. I like breweries, brewery history, breweriana, the whole shebang. Beer! Beer! Beer!
However there comes a time when enough is enough already, and as I’ve been on a bit of a bender lately, that time ahs come. “Bit of a bender”: try the past six years of hardcore beer pounding.
My liver and I are taking a well-earned break. We haven’t decided if this is a one-week break, a one-month break, or a year-long break, but so far as I’m concerned my body rang the bell and hollered “last call” Tuesday night.
