When Does The Sunday Hangover Anxiety Go Away?

jtrain11 years ago

During this week’s TFM podcast, I read a letter from a guy who claimed he woke up to find the girl he slept with had left. Wonderful. Except that she had pooped on his carpet (seriously). Then she threw up onto the poop (no, SERIOUSLY). We debated the reasoning behind throwing up directly on one’s own feces outside of a bathroom; did she make herself sick when she realized what she had done? Did she even know what was happening? Or did she think, “Hey, I already pooped in this one spot, I’m not going to ruin even MORE of the carpet, so I’ll just throw up right on top,” like a plane going down that directs itself at a less populated area? It’s a more courteous option, and if so, what a lady! There are a lot of questions left unanswered here – like the consistency of her stool – but the one that’s really been nagging me is this: What was her Sunday like?

Last Sunday might have been the worst day of my life. Well, except for the Sunday before that. Whatever you call them – the Weirds, The Sunday Scaries, The Fear, Suicide Sundays, Diarrhea Days, Toaster Sundays, or as my buddy Bg Kat calls them, The Demons (His Words: “Picture a gargoyle perched above your bed watching you sleep.”) – it is the universal plight of our time. This is our generation’s AIDS. I distinctly remember thinking in college that Toaster Sundays were the small price one paid to enjoy the spoils of University life. This was the toll on the highway of Tuesday through Saturday bingeing, a tax that will clearly be paid up once I settled into quiet post-grad life. Back then, we would huddle into someone’s room like it was a bomb shelter, watching football, fading into sleep only briefly before being shook awake by a vague nightmare, and laughing occasionally at a story from the night before, only to have the laughter flame out like the Hindenburg as everyone felt a darkness creep back in. We would eat. And we would think about an exam the next day. And we would say, “I need to get some shit done,” and then we wouldn’t move, because the only thing that would feel worse than just sitting there was doing anything but sitting there.

Now when I look back, I think how simple things were then, how the Weirds were limited to a feeling of, “Did I try and make-out with that chick?” or, “Did I show everyone my penis without first working it up into a semi-erection and then claiming it was completely flaccid?” Nowadays things are much worse. Somehow your body never gets used to the anxiety brought on by a crippling hangover; in fact, it gets worse. And it lasts for days. And you think a lot about money. But I’m not here to tell you horror stories about the future. (If I was, I’d tell you about how employers expect you to work 8+ hours every day, and how masturbating without iPad porn has become a difficult skill, akin to starting a fire with two sticks.) This is not a Public Service Announcement. We’re obviously not going to stop what we’re doing. The life that leads up to it is just far too fantastic. I’m just here to say, I get it. We’re in this together. “My name is the J-Train, and I, too, am afraid of Sunday.”

And now, a story: In 2007 I was lucky enough to attend the annual “Super Bowl” of the National Football League. I’m told it’s a very big deal amongst sporting types. I’ve since blocked any memory of it from my mind, but I’m told, by my buddy The Baby, that my beloved New England Patriots were playing the Giant Men of New York. Apparently, I called him the morning of that game and told him in a croaked whisper that the previous night I had accidentally, gingerly, ever so slightly, placed an irregularly large amount of monies worth of lap dances and Champagne on my father’s “emergency” credit card. The Baby says I told him I barely remembered any of it it, save for a moment when the strippers were dragging their butts against the ground (I was shouting “WIPE HARDER!”), and when I came to long enough to find some large men fingerprinting me on the final bill. Baby said on the phone I sounded like eight wives divorced me at the same time; like the weight of the world was lying on my back; like I had to explain to my Dad that getting a semester’s tuition worth of boners felt like an “emergency.” Like I said, I’ve repressed all of that pain, don’t remember any of it. Though I sometimes wake screaming in a cold sweat, full erection, and a pen broken open next to a paper filled with inked fingerprints. At least the Patriots won, right? Baby says the Giants performed an illegal “helmet-catch” at the end of the game, but sometimes I see him shaking his head and glaring at people when I talk about that “4th Patriot’s Super Bowl ring” around others. I mean, they must have won, otherwise I definitely would have killed myself.

So, I feel bad for the Barf-Dumper. Clearly, I’ve been there. I’ve stepped out on the edge of fun and looked into the canyon of grief. I’ll be there again. So will you. And though we party separately in a thousand different ways every Saturday at bars, houses, and apartments; with liquor or beer or drugs, perhaps we’d feel better knowing we suffer together, as one, every Sunday. Let us not see our miserable Sundays as the result of large amounts of chemical depressants and spending days in a row messing with our dopamine levels. Let’s see Suicide Sunday as a result of a life well-lived, the necessary valley we pass through as we climb to new heights of partying the fuck down. And let’s all hold hands, bow our heads, and pray it passes. And somebody, please God, order a pizza.