Dealing with Your Hangover

Good morning. If you’re reading this, you’ve survived last night’s adventures and are most likely not under arrest or locked in the trunk of a car. Good job. Now let’s deal with your hangover. It’s a doozy, I’m betting.

First thing. If you feel like you might throw up, just go ahead and do it, even if it requires inducing. It’s unpleasant, but it’s going to be way easier getting the poison out of your system directly (there’s a reason they call it intoxication) than it is to put the extra load on your liver and kidneys, which are likely already working overtime. Seriously, you’re going to feel a lot better.

But maybe it’s not as bad as all that, or you just aren’t ready to take that step. That’s cool. There are other things you can do right now to help yourself out.

The best way to process out a hangover is vigorous athletic/aerobic activity. Work up a sweat. Get your heart rate up. You’ll feel really sick at some point on the upswing (and again, go ahead and puke if you have to), but even twenty or thirty minutes should be enough to burn up all the poison and replace it with adrenaline and endorphins.

I understand that most people will also skip this option. It’s a perfectly reasonable response, and one I’ve given many times, myself.

Lucky for all of us, there are less radical steps that can also be taken. Continue reading “Dealing with Your Hangover” →

How to Get Good Service in a Busy Bar

Another year is about to come to an end, and New Year’s Eve, that most amateurish of amateur nights, is upon us. Many of you will have the sense to stay out of the bars, and attend house parties or ring in the new year at home with friends and/or loved ones, far and away the safest, smartest, and, to this cranky old curmudgeon, most enjoyable thing to do on a night when the whole fking world likes to come out and get stupid. But I understand that I do not represent the mainstream view on the biggest party night of the year. That for many going out and painting the town red is both desirable and the done thing, that the madding crowds, the turbulent sea of celebrants washing against the bar in wave after wave to negotiate their social lubrication are in fact a source of attraction. To those folks I’d like to offer some insight into the lives and experience of those harried souls on the other side of that negotiation, that you might use that knowledge to the benefit of all involved (but especially you).

The first thing you have to understand is this: for the staff, this is the worst night of the year, rivaled only by St. Patrick’s Day for biggest shitshow and highest douchebag-to-cool person ratio among the customers. Even the money isn’t that good, not for what it costs you to earn it, anyway. So a basic understanding that the bartender and the server and the door guy and the manager are having literally the opposite of your experience is helpful. I’ve worked bars where the crowd at the bar was ten across and two or three deep from nine-thirty til the lights went up and the clock on the wall said go, and every one of them wanted to be next. Even for someone who’s done it half a thousand times, it’s stressful as hell, and while you try and be as fair as possible getting to people, you find yourself making decisions about whose turn it is and who gets expedited service and who gets ignored til there’s literally no one else who wants a drink.

Here are some things you can do to be that person who gets helped quicker, who as a result gets to spend more time dancing and carousing and enjoying time with friends old and new instead of waiting in line for a drink because the bartender doesn’t like or remember you. Continue reading “How to Get Good Service in a Busy Bar” →

This Guy Last Night

So I’m outside the restaurant last night, taking a break while we run down the clock, hanging out with the kitchen boys and soaking up the night air. There’s lots of bars around where I work, and weekends we’re overrun with revelry and the shit-show that goes with it, so it took us a minute to notice the guy on the corner, screaming his head off at his woman, who is sitting crumpled in on herself on the trim of the building while her friend stands helplessly by, unable to do anything. After another minute I decided I had to intervene, and I wondered if things were going to get violent. The guy was really riled up, so it looked like a real possibility, but my guys had my back and it’s not like I haven’t dealt with ten thousand drunk people in my day.

I walked up to him, and asked how it was going. He kept ranting, but I got him to start paying attention to me and not the woman, so I figured I was ahead. I kept asking questions, got him talking, distracted him while the friend got his woman away. I could’ve called it good right there, but I wanted to buy her some time, so I kept asking questions, kept the guy talking. What he told me broke my heart a little.

From what I could tell, he wasn’t even specifically mad at the woman. He was just worn down from working seven days a week to support his wife and mother. He was literally in tears with frustration at a paycheck-to-paycheck grind in a bad economy, and it’d got to him so bad he couldn’t believe that anyone could understand. He was so at his wit’s end that he wasn’t ashamed to cry in public, and he kept reverting to fight postures out of a lack of any other options to express himself. The guy was literally having a breakdown, right there.

There’s only so much you can do for a guy like that, but we did what we could. We let him speak his truths, and validated the good parts. We shook hands all around a few times. Then we walked back in and closed the restaurant the rest of the way, and he went off to who knows where.

It’s a real shame, I think, that the only coping mechanisms most men are taught is to turn pain into anger, and to hold it in until it bursts, usually under the influence of alcohol. What this guy needs is a safe place to explore his frustrations, but he’ll probably never have it, because the only way he knows how to give himself permission even to engage with the whole tangled mess is to undo his inhibitions with an intoxicant. I’m not saying it excuses his public berations. I’m just saying it’s a shame. I’m just glad I didn’t have to fight him.

My Beard Is a Lie

Okay, that’s not entirely true. I just wanted to get your attention.

My beard is not a lie. My beard is actually more of a metaphor, which is a useful sort of lie because it carries a resonance of truth inside it. With any luck, I’ll manage to tease that resonance into some manner of cognitive audibility before all’s said and done here, and the clever idea/minor epiphany that’s been tickling me the last few days will airlift a version of itself into your brain, for you to make of what you will. But let’s get back to my beard.

My beard is, by all accounts, a pretty freakin’ fantastic example of the species. Customers in the bar and random passersby on the street compliment me on it. Women with whom I’m not personally acquainted are, on occasion, unable to stop themselves from touching it. When my girlfriend nuzzles her face up against it she sighs with such contentment you might think she’d just finished a day at the spa with a bath in warm chocolate while a small team of experts rubs her feet and shoulders and sings Pachelbel’s Canon in D in four-part harmony.

Anyway, you get the idea. It’s a good beard, the kind of beard that defines a face, and I am grateful that it grows there because without it I would not look like me, nor be half so pretty as I am with it (that was certainly my opinion when last I shaved it clean; thankfully no records survive of that traumatic period).

But here’s the thing: my beard has a weakness Continue reading “My Beard Is a Lie” →

My Two Cents on the Shutdown

Many people have said and written some very cogent, passionate words on the subject of today’s commencement of the 17th shutdown of the United States Federal Government, which is going to cause a great deal of unnecessary pain and suffering for a staggering number of people and likely derail whatever recovery our national economy has made since the bankers and sociopaths on Wall Street tanked the economy back in 2008. It is entirely the choice of the Republican majority in the House of Representatives that it’s happening. They are, in effect, shooting the hostage to prove that they’re serious about stopping the implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Why would they do that? It’s an important question to ask, I think, and one with a definite, if complicated, answer.

It begins, I think, with the election of Barack Obama. For a significant chunk of the population, that was a real shock, something heretofore impossible, and it represented not only a major electoral defeat, it signaled the emergence of demographic trends that meant the end of their way of life. America was no longer a majority-white, center-right nation. The son of a black man could ascend to the land’s highest office. The easy swagger of the Bush years were over, and had left such a bad taste in our mouths that we all tacitly agreed to forget them. This was not the America they grew up in, the America they loved and believed in with all their hearts, and it freaked them the fuck out. Think about the Tea Party’s early days, their eruption onto the scene as the result of an offhand comment by a finance pundit on CNBC. Remember their passion and outrage. They were (and are) fundamentally incapable of recognizing the election of Barack Obama (or the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act) as legitimate, because neither of those things were allowed to happen in the America they believe in.

This was (and remains) an existential crisis for them. Extreme measures are not only permissible, but necessary. The United States federal government has become an occupying force, and invasion from otherwhere, and their duty as citizens of the real America is to resist with whatever means are at their disposal. Continue reading “My Two Cents on the Shutdown” →