Nov 18 - You're Twisting My Melon, Man
By Stefano Blanca Sciacaluga
You're awake. Your mouth feels like a desert and your head like it’s been trampled by the camels that live in it. You fumble about for your phone, hold it up above your face and you see that it’s nine thirty four. You put it down, fumble some more and notice that five in the morning you didn’t think having water at arms reach was necessary.
And you cry. I’ve cried, I’m sure we’ve all cried. You’re not only tired but you are actually dying from the thing that cut your sleep short. And as you lie there - maybe you’ve somehow found the energy to sit up in the darkness - you start to try and remember how you got to bed, how you got home, how much poison you put in your body and why you decided to do so, in what seems like a game of Cluedo where Colonel Mustard didn’t even have to go look for his lead pipe.
Your memory through time starts with thinking about how just seven days ago, last Saturday, you woke up feeling the same but with the added fear of “I’ve lost my phone somewhere” (only to realise you were sleeping on it); and the Saturday before, but not the one before that because you didn’t go out on the Friday but you definitely made up for it on the Saturday. By this point your tongue is slightly moistened by your salty tears of pain rolling down your cheeks and you’re able to focus on piecing it all together a bit more.
After a Monday to Thursday of “the weekend cannot come soon enough”, “it should be the other way round, five day weekends”, and “I can’t believe there are no bank holidays until Christmas”, you’ve made it to Friday, and if it wasn’t obvious because you can just feel that everybody’s gearing up for the weekend, at least one person has said “werrrr ya es viernes!” and one other has sent you the video of the naked chick dancing with the guy screaming “ya es viernes, oleee, tiririririii”. And you have a flashback of the Saturday morning, and proudly proclaim in the office: “chills este weekend”. That’s at ten in the morning, mind you. By midday somebody has texted you with “options” and you’ve gone from “en la vida salgo” to “vamos a comer algo and then a couple of drinks”. And before you know it it’s three and somebody’s psyching you up to go down the pub at five for a couple of cheeky pints, because “ya pa’ la noche estamos nique for a chilled one”. But you’re better than that, you remember la ducha de Carmina Ordoñez you had last Friday, before topping up with a beer during dinner and going out bien calentito.
So you’ve made it out, proud of your strength at passing on after-work drinks, but some people did go out and some others weren’t hungry so getting food is off the menu. You’re on the way to the pub for a couple of chilled pints. Before you know it you’ve downed three pints, you’re feeling woozy, you’re commenting on some football on the telly, shovelling dry roasted peanuts (that are making you thirstier) into your mouth and you’re justifying it by saying you’re getting into the Christmas spirit. In November. By now you’re like “eff this”, you’re buying rounds, your mates are buying rounds and you’re using the bloating from the lager as an excuse to go for the rum and a shot of Jaegermeister, to ease ‘digestion’. Everything’s coming up Milhouse.
You’ve conveniently forgotten Saturdays even exist by this point, and you’re on your way to the club walking like Liam Gallagher; that is, of course, if you haven’t piled into a taxi with your mates to go just down the road and get out of it like those clown videos. First stop, the bar. No doubt about it, because you really need to lubricate them joints for the dance floor, with whiskey (you’re already mixing, you animal). You stray away from the group to go to the toilet and end up talking to someone you barely know from school or something for ages and arranged to meet for a “catch up”. Obviously you’ve taken like ten minutes for the toilet, counting the queues and navigating the seas of absolute idiots, but your mates remind you you were away for like more than a half hour. “Venga otro shot bro. No que va, Sambuca no puedo” (your brain: “yo, we can do tequila though, as many as you like, like water!”). And off you go, it’s like you haven’t even blinked and you’re surrounded by sweaty dead-eyed people on a sticky, nasty dance floor and dancing like Bez from the Happy Mondays in his prime.
I don’t really believe in guardian angels every other day of the week, but I do on Friday nights, they come at you, tap you on the shoulder and are like “yo, let’s bounce, some food or something, naked cooking at home” and you’re somehow convinced, you get your mates together and easily convince them, and you all say good night to the people from the club on the way out, like they’ve had a good night watching drunk gorillas trying to impress girls, girls crying with their heels in their hand and two or three wild card English guys who are extremely close to just lying on the floor for a kip.
Remember Enrique’s song Experiencia Religiosa? That’s what plays in my head when I see Pizzeria Plaza’s lights in the distance. You make the girls in the pizza place angry with your indecisiveness - like the topping matters at this point - and you stuff it in your body faster than competitive pizza eater Furious Pete. You convince yourself “ay, no hangover tomorrow, nique”, see your mates off in a cab and take a walk home that feels like ten hours rather than ten minutes.
So you’ve now pieced some bits and bobs together, but you’re not even sure how you got home, you know it’s walking, or you guess it’s walking, but you don’t know how you got from the pizza place to your bed. But you can live with that. What you definitely can’t live with though is how much you need to pee. So you get out of bed, in a movement that makes your head feel like your brain has just crashed against the side of your skull, and after stumbling a little you find your feet, and the bathroom (without fully opening your eyes) and pee. By this point you just know you’re not going to be able to sleep again, not with this headache, or this mouth, or this anything. So you splash some cold water on your face and sit on the couch, looking at the lovely day outside your window, feeling sorry for yourself.
If there’s one thing that unites all humans it’s a desire to self harm, to poison ourselves, our bodies, and our minds with post-Friday anxieties. And if there’s another thing that unites all humans in this very delicate Saturday situation is a desire to eat all day in a mix of “weekends are for eating what I like”, “this will fix the hangover” and “I may as well do this to my self to forget what I did to myself last night”. Of course, these are all lies, same as when you said you were doing “chills Friday”, and by eleven thirty in the morning you catch yourself firing up that Hungry Monkey, because there are options and little time. A part of hangovers, at least for me, is an unbearable indecisiveness (heightened from my regular day to day indecisiveness), to the point where I look at the time on the phone and it’s quarter to one and I’ve thought to myself “I’m having that for sure” on like ten different things. The result is predictable, it’s always the same, I end up eating something I half like, feel full and gross all day and look in the mirror at about six to find there’s chocolate or something on my face, the lowest of lows.
Six in the evening on a Saturday is also good for another weekly revelation. The fact that it’s November, so you’ve been in darkness all day indoors and it’s already getting dark out, and if you do this again tomorrow (as in, stay at home doing nothing) you’ll feel double as bad by six in the evening on the Sunday. And this gives you a sudden lease of life, oh, that and realising that if at five in the morning you didn’t think water next to the bed was necessary you did think putting the phone on silent and or ‘do not disturb’ was a superb idea. Which is ultimately good, but also means you’ve got fifty notifications of things to deal with in this state. And in between the Snaps, the Whatsapps and the Instagram messages you find a text from someone inviting you out for drinks, and because you’re an absolute idiot, you agree, have a shower, forget to leave water out, and find yourself on the way to the pub for a couple of chilled pints. Before you know it you’ve downed three pints, you’re feeling woozy, you’re commenting on some football on the telly, shovelling dry roasted peanuts (that are making you thirstier) into your mouth and you’re justifying it by saying you’re getting into the Christmas spirit. In November.
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