3-Day Weekend Day 2: The Morning From Hell

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Read Day 1 here and here.

June 12, 2010 was like every morning after an insane night of drinking.

Except 10,000 times worse.

It started with the earsplitting racket only a cheap motel alarm clock can make.
Still trying to clutch onto sleep, I threw my hand at the clock and fell out of bed.

Right, this wasn’t my room. The distance to the sidetable was off.

Sleep-deprived, head spinning from the fall, hungover yet still drunk, my mind was literally exploding from every “ANCK-ANCK-ANCK” the alarm clock was reverberating through the room.

Eyes glued shut by contacts fusing my corneas with my inner eyelids, I waded to the source, and clumsily smashed the top of the alarm clock. Which is where most alarm clocks have the snooze button.

Apparently not this one.

The mind-splitting racket from this device continued and I slapped the sides, the back, the front, the top and yet it still wouldn’t turn the fuck off.

I had to open an eye.

Usually I would steel myself but I had to turn this infernal machine off as quickly as possible. I opened my right eye…and it didn't open. Right, my contacts.

My right hand grabbed the upper eyelashes, my left grabbed the lower ones and I pried open my right eye. The eye was glued shut but slowly it began to crack open…and I reeled back as sunlight knifed straight to my dome.

“Ugmnfh.” But worse than the sunlight was the sound. “ANCK-ANCK-ANCK”

Squinting my one eye as much as possible, I crawled back to the sidetable. I fumbled with the device. There were knobs and buttons but I couldn’t read them. My mind was too disoriented because I’m not supposed to have 20/20 vision this early in the morning and my oddly sharpened sight was too much stimuli for my overwhelmed brain.

I closed my eye back shut, mercifully giving my brain respite from the overpowering sunlight and heightened vision as my dry eyelid squealed over my even drier contacts.

But still the alarm clock was happily screaming and echoing through my skull.

ANCK-ANCK-ANCK.

I ripped the shit out of the wall.

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But once I wake, its annoyingly impossible for me to fall back asleep.

And I knew I had to get up.

I once again tore one eye open, stumbled my way to the sink and proceeded to scrape out my contacts.

For those who have never had to partake in this practice—either because you have perfect vision (in which case, fuck your genetics) or because you happen to never pass out/blackout/make stupid decisions—there’s nothing quite like it.

The closest simile I have is a spotless wall with a piece of duct tape firmly affixed. It annoys you, it irritates you and you keep telling yourself your going to take it off. After spending considerably more time than needed internally arguing, you decide to take it off. It takes you many long minutes to grab that one corner, but once you do, the whole thing peels off in a most gratifying way.

But obviously there’s some gunk left on the wall and there’s an odd silhouette the tape was hiding and then you spend even more time quarrelling how you should’ve just kept the piece of tape there and it takes forever to take the shitty little duct tape particles off and the silhouette remains forever.

But imagine instead of a wall, it’s your fucking eyeballs.

So my eyes were tearing…actually they weren’t. I blinked in confusion and even my blinks weren’t smooth…it felt like a tarp being dragged over a gravel road. What the fuck?

Right. Water.

I looked around for a cup, but realized my eyes were squinted close, fruitlessly trying to evade the sunlight. Fuck it. I turned the tap on full blast and started gulping straight. For the first minute, water didn’t travel down my throat, instead getting soaked by the parched tissues in my cheeks and tongue.

How the fuck did this happen? How was I this hungover? This dehydrated?

I tried recalling events from the night prior through a throbbing hangover but just stared into a black abyss. I stumbled to the table. A fifth of scotch was gone. And quite a bit of the tequila. But that’s not enough for something this drastic.

Then I realized the temperature. It was a sweltering 95 degrees outside and in this room the heat compounded by the lack of airflow and the sun was steadily making the place an oven. The two gallons I had just drank at the faucet were already scrambling out my sweat pores.

And for those geniuses who point out I should’ve turned on the AC assume air conditioning comes standard in the ghetto.

Insane drinking added to insane dancing added to never drinking non-alcoholic beverages all night added to sleeping 5 hours in a furnace would do this.

I slogged over to Kentucky. He was knocked out cold, shoes still on, clothes drenched in sweat, snoring softly.

I shook his shoulder, nothing. I shook his shoulder violently. He groaned. Good. He was alive.

I trudged to the shower, turning the knob to the coldest setting and to full blast, massaging my temple and occasionally lifting my mouth to take gulps.

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Normally, a cold shower and a glass of water is enough to make me feel slightly human. Not today. My head was shrouded in an exploding hangover whilst my body was dull from still being drunk and the aftereffects of water weight loss.

So all I gained from 30 minutes in the shower was a nice cold layer to counteract the inferno that was our room. I plodded over to Kentucky. After ten minutes of hitting and shaking he finally awoke, mumbling a string of expletives as he stumbled to the shower.

He got out, we both dressed and staggered outside. Even with sunglasses, we lurched from the sunlight slamming into the back of our skulls. He looked at me and from his parched lips came one word.

“Deli.”

It took ten whole minutes for us to walk the one block to the deli. The deli food looked nauseating, week-old sandwiches wrapped in saran wrap, sweltering in the festering heat, flies buzzing everywhere and the whole store lighted by whatever sun managed to pierce through grimy windows covered in security bars.

We didn’t get any of the sandwiches but promptly bought two bottles of Vitamin Water which were just as quickly annihilated. We walked out. And that’s when we saw it.

A Burger King sign.

Hallelujah.

I love America.

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After eating half a meal (halfway through the meal, I felt like vomiting), we Google Mapped a sports bar. Throughout this whole entry, you might be wondering why we didn’t sleep through our hangover, and why the fuck we set an alarm for 9am in the fucking morning on a Saturday.

It was USA’s World Cup game against England.

We stumbled into a packed bar. Pushed our way in. Rhythmic clapping and shouting and singing were ringing through our brutalized heads from all directions. The drone of vuvuzelas was literally making me faint.

There is only one cure for a hangover.

“Bartender, a pitcher of Miller.”

It was 10am.

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Comments

[C-Bizzle]

hold on...
if kentucky was softly snoring, why did you need to push him to confirm he was alive?

[generationk]

shit, a loophole!
...or wait...do comatose veggies snore?