I don't know exactly what that means, but I found that the gratuitous combination of an overused phrase with the word beer was fun to say. If you don't believe me, try it, especially if you're by yourself in a crowded public place. I find that that's by far the most fun.
I'm sitting here on a Friday night, freshly home from work. I'm starting the beer column now, because a certain cartoonist apartment mate of mine is getting somewhat pissy about my recent lack of writings. I need to have it done by Sunday, and know that I'm going to be far too lazy to write the whole thing tomorrow. I'm sitting at my desk, drinking a Phish Taile Paile Aile from the Long Shore Brewery on Long Island. As is my usual taste, it's a really highly hopped Pale Ale, one that almost makes your mouth drier as you drink it, with the obvious solution being to drink more beer. We're about to go out and celebrate the site hitting new highs of traffic levels this week. It actually does this every week, but this week the new levels happened to rise above some nice round numbers (at least, in our arbitrary system of using ten as a counting base). The point is, we're going out to drink. Our excuse is to celebrate. What we're celebrating is relatively meaningless, but it gives us a reasonable excuse.
Tomorrow, I'm going to wake up, hopefully in the afternoon, and I'll have to finish this, so that it can get all dollied up to make it's way onto the site. This Phish Taile Paile Aile I'm drinking right now to stimulate my beer-writing creative juices will be my enemy. I'll be sitting at my desk, wishing I was instead lying in my bed, staring at my monitor, wishing it weren't quite so bright, listening to the aforementioned cartoonist bitch at me, but at least that's normal behaviour.
Throughout my time in college, I heard of amazing ways to get rid of hangovers. The most effective ones are also the ones I don't believe anyone actually succeeds in doing. Supposedly, if you drink a glass of water with some aspirin before going to bed,, or something along those lines, after coming home from drinking, you don't have a hangover upon waking up. The essence of this plan is if you don't drink enough to be "really drunk", you don't get a hangover. In this situation, my definition of "really drunk" is the ability to perform any predetermined set of tasks.
You also hear tell of strange concoctions, involving stranger ingredients than those used in a Goat's Scrotum Ale, mixed together and ingested. The usual excuse is that it gets your body packed full of all those vital vitamins and minerals you must have lost by drinking beer. Never mind that hefeweizens are chock full of B vitamin complexes, or that you can theoretically live on Guinness alone (to get your full day's regiment of vitamins, you need to supplement your Guinness with 2 pints of milk and a pint of orange juice, bringing your total fluid intake to 50 pints of liquid after you have the 47 pints of Guinness needed for the other vitamins). The real purpose of mixing things like raw eggs, oranges and various spices together is simply to induce vomiting. Cleanses your system a little, and even if it doesn't make you feel any better, it makes your friends feel better about not being you.
My personal approach is to drink lots of coffee, so at least I'm awake and fully aware of how bad I feel. I also eat a big breakfast, usually consisting of bacon and cheese omelettes with home fries. I find that eating that much fat and cholesterol usually leaves me feeling so bad in and of itself, that I don't even notice the hangover anymore.
My favorite, and the most successful approach I've found by far is known as "Hair of the Dog". Something about showing up in the same bar you were just in 10 hours ago, to drink a couple of those same beers that left you in your present state, is strangely refreshing. The final advantage, and the real root of the success of this approach, is that you just confuse your brain into submission. On the downside, the day after that one, you're pretty much screwed.
So once again, as I do week after week, I now prepare to head off into the depths of New York City, despite the full knowledge of what I'm about to do to myself.
Sometimes, you wake up too late to effectively get the full cholesterol-laden breakfast. Coffee, however, was as refreshing as always. Sometimes you just know that no matter how you waste the day or what measures you take to alleviate the dull ache of a hangover, the body-weariness just won't leave. You feel compelled to sit on a couch, and avoid the relative struggle of doing something as relatively simple as complete a final paragraph in a beer column. Luckily, as I sit here and wrestle with the faintest attempts at humor, the solution is becoming clearer.
So I bid you all adieu, as I move away from my computer, back to the couch. I'm abandoning you for the sweetly bitter embrace of my favorite fickle mistress.
My head hurts. Don't bug me.
-- phillip karlsson, brew guru
october 03, 1998