today could have been a productive day.

Today could have been a productive day. I could have made cookies, like I said I would. I could have read The Pale King or gone for a bike ride or talked to some cute girls or cleaned my room whatever. instead, I spent the first half of the day clutching my head and wincing at the light and the second half trading off between violent diarrhea and violent dry heave vomiting. The hangover.

I've only lost a few days like this but every time has been memorable. Something about the total waste of a day, the whole 24 hours just garbage, just you paying tribute to your own lack of self-control and thinking over and over again that you'd rather be dead than ever feel like this. My stomach is churning right now and I might make another dash to the bathroom before I finish writing.

The first time was in Argentina. It wasn't my first time drinking but pretty close to it. I can remember dancing in someone's backyard, just grinding on girls and grabbing handfuls of ass and waist and back and then very quickly I'm on all fours at the curb out front, crying with my pants around my ankles and a ring of dried beervomit around my mouth. Then I'm in a bathroom with black and white checkered tiles and pressing my face against the cold of the porcelain. I spent the whole next day there, drinking fruit juice and throwing it back up - on all fours in the bathroom because why would I even leave? There isn't anything to do but feel shitty, i was just saving myself the queasy sprint to the toilet.

Another time Patrick fireman-carried me into my bedroom and dropped me there, my shitty apartment room with nothing but a twin mattress and a type writer. I walked out of the party with a 3/4 full bottle of Wild Turkey and came back with it empty and covered in beach sand. The next day I watched Fight Club on VHS and threw up in my sink while washing the dishes. Nothing else.

I'm on my forearms and knees in my parents backyard and its raining. My whole clothes are soaked and I'm throwing up puddles of oatmeal with whole cranberries, completely undigested. I may or may not be crying because I know my parents can hear me in the living room, I know I've reeked of liquor all morning. Yukon Jack 100 Proof Canadian syrup whiskey. I was too drunk to even ride my bike home. Before today, this was the most violently sick I had ever been - heaving and heaving for hours over the toilet bowl and then falling asleep on the bathroom floor. I didn't eat anything until 10pm that night and didn't look my Mom in the eye for a couple days after.



But today leaves everything else in the dust - today I felt worse than I ever have before. I could spare you the details but I'm worried about not painting an accurate picture, not giving the right sense of how truly useless and broken I was. Lets just say I spent 3/4 of the ENTIRE DAY lying on my bathroom floor in my underwear, sweating, shaking. I'd pull myself up to the edge of the bowl to throwup mouthful after mouthful of red foam, only to have to scramble up further then to let go a stream of hot diarrhea into the same water. Look at me now folks, look at how cool I am, the party animal, the hardest rager. I shit in my own pants TWICE because I couldn't make it to the bathroom fast enough. Couple this vile stomach-sickness with a piercing screaming headache and you've got a day of me spent prostrate, feeling awful and doing absolutely nothing.

I have only a couple certain ideas but this is one of them: it is possible to do anything you want, go anywhere you want to go, if you put your head down and fucking work for it. But you have to do it now. There is no such thing as waiting. Usually, I'm the kind of person that cannot spend even a couple hours watching a movie because I become anxious that I'm robbing myself of some opportunity, some time that could be better spent in pursuit of a goal or towards honing a skill. So when I think about the hours and hours I spent today wasted, clutching my stomach and squinting my eyes because I hadn't had control over my own drinking, I'm feeling like the worst kind of human. I've been given a beautiful, precious and limited gift and I squandered it today writhing over the toilet. This is showing a lack of respect to myself, to my body, to my parents and my family. I will never get that time back and surely I am a worse person because of it.

So I suppose that's my main point. Tomorrow I'll feel better and start to climb back onto the horse that is my ego - maybe sneak some pushups in or read a chapter from a book - but hopefully I'll remember at least a little bit of what today felt like, that I'll have just a little more respect for my time and my health. Because these things are very finite and very fleeting and I'd like to spend mine feeling strong and beautiful rather than sick and rotten.