I swear I’m not dead, I’ve just been extremely busy pondering whether an NFL player or a bear would win in a foot race, and trying to sell babies on eBay. I will resurface one of these days.
-Zanramon
zanramon@addictedtowords.com
Conventional wisdom tells us that drinking alcohol is an activity solely for miscreants and rabble rousers. People that contribute nothing but pitchy renditions of “Danny Boy” to society, the veritable scum of the earth. Sometimes it seems that drinking is a worse crime than say, arson, or even public nudity (all three of which can go hand in hand in hand).
Well it’s currently 6:03 AM, and what I am about to tell you is going to fly in the face of everything you may think you know about imbibing freely and plentifully. I can say to you with reasonable certainty that your paradigm will be shifted.
As stated, it’s approximately 6 AM. I realize that this is not an unreasonable hour for many human beings to wake up and begin their day. My father has usually ran 5 miles, read a novel, cooked a turkey, and saved 8 orphans from almost certain death by 6 AM on most days. Even I have been through a multitude of phases in my life where I was consistently getting up at 6 AM. Be it voluntarily, such as when I would inexplicably show up for high school an hour early every day during my sophomore and junior years, or completely by force, such as when I worked* at a parking garage one summer.
However, as my life stands now, there is almost nothing that would cause me to get up at 6 AM. My earliest class is at 9, and that’s only once a week. My days are assuredly late-afternoon/evening heavy when it comes to activities that aren’t sleeping. So, to what do I attribute the fact that I am up, alert, and productive** so early this morning? I attribute it to alcohol. It may not make sense yet, but bear with me.
Last night, I attended a baby shower for a friend of mine, thrown by another friend of mine. Such as is often the case in situations like that, there are usually lots of friends of mine present. Needless to say, we all had a few drinks***, and a few laughs, and as most of us are 21 or 22 and graduating college in less than 2 weeks****, some of us had more than a few drinks. I was somewhere in between “a few drinks” and “more than a few drinks”.
It is assumed that waking up after a night of moderate to heavy drinking leads to a state often referred to as being “hung over”. This is absolutely true. As I’m sure many of you know, being “hung over” is brutal and incidentally is also the only time I’ve ever felt like my head had gotten stepped on by one of those morbidly obese Americans. I’m not sure if you’ve heard but they’re numbers are growing at an alarming rate. Possibly in preparation for an invasion. I digress.
But it’s not always true. There’s another phenomenon tied to drinking copious amounts of alcohol that occurs just as often as being “hung over”, often at the same very same time. This phenomenon doesn’t have a catchy title like “hung over” (although it clearly needs one). It’s non-catchy title that most people use, simply for the absence of anything else, is something like “waking up way too fucking early and not being able to fall back asleep despite the fact that I went to bed at about 4:45 in the morning”. Alcohol has a funny way of passing you out, and then far too soon afterwards; waking you up and keeping you up.
Common sense tells us that getting up “way too fucking early” gives you a few more hours during the day to get things done, or in my case, shift paradigms. I alluded to it in the previous paragraph, but this is almost never true due to the fact that those few more hours are almost invariably ruined by the fact that you are “hung over” and completely incapable of accomplishing anything other than eating greasy food or laying in bed staring at the ceiling trying to figure out how your shirt sleeve got ripped off the previous night, and who has it now.
This is not always the case though. Not everybody believes me, but there is a vaunted state in which you drink the precisely correct amount of alcohol, which activates the early hour of rising, but not the effects of being “hung over”. Suddenly you are wide awake at 6 AM and feeling great. This is extremely difficult to do, but today I managed to mix the chemicals right and achieve bliss.
In light of this new information, alcohol needs to stop being viewed as the root of all evil. When used properly it can be harnessed as an alarm clock that somehow eliminates all tiredness (until about 3:30 PM). From now on, each and every night I will drink the elusive perfect amount of alcohol to add hours of production to my day. I’ve done some admittedly exhaustive calculations to discover this perfect amount for me. Unfortunately, the perfect amount differs from person to person and also varies heavily depending on the type, color, and strength of the particular alcohol you are consuming.
(Pro tip: Mixing types of alcohol will unquestionably ruin any chances you may have had to find the perfect amount.)
When I’m drinking each and every night throughout my life, I fully expect lesser people to call me such grating names as “bum”, “loser”, or “alcoholic”. Even without the “I’m rubber you’re glue” rhymes I plan on throwing back in the face of the naysayers, none of the labels pinned on me will be true. Because, despite the fact that I will be somehow surviving on an hour and fifteen minutes of sleep every night, each morning when these people are sleeping or lazily attending church or going to school or doing whatever petty activities they do, I will be fully awake and shifting paradigms.
Like I just did yours.
-Zanramon
*I mean this in the loosest sense of the word. One of my tasks was cleaning the garage and one fine day a few weeks into that job I discovered discarded needles and cotton balls in what I can only assume was a small lake of urine. After that I spent very little time cleaning and lots of time wandering up and down the parking garage looking at cars. I invented a game where I would stop on each side of the parking garage on each floor and look out over the side at the cars driving by until I spotted a BMW, a Lexus, and a Mercedes. Then I would proceed to the next side on the same floor, when all sides were completed I would proceed to the next floor down. It was really quite productive and fun.
**This is debatable. There’s a growing contingency of people who think that reading anything I’ve written is in no way productive, and may in fact be counterproductive. I know, I don’t understand it either.
***Although not the mother to be. Drinking while pregnant can lead to Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, which should not be confused with Fecal Alcohol Syndrome.
****Holy shit.
"It has come to my attention that your site and it's very existence is putting a strain on all that is good in our universe."
-Unspecified James
And when we inevitably break all that is good in the universe, sorry.
Pay the piper.
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