Bill Cammack

… continued from Detox [Part 1]…

Anyway… “Not As Drunk As I Was Earlier” is the worst!

It’s tolerable to a degree… but basically, you want to maintain your level of drunkenness within a certain range until you fall asleep. I found this out the hard way. :)

I went to a frat party that a friend of mine threw and ended up staying over. Up until that day, my experience had been that once you go to sleep, that’s it! hahaha :) So I woke up in the morning, probably only 4 or 5 hours after I had gone to sleep. When I woke up, I retrieved my mountain bike and started riding back across the Mass Ave Bridge to go back to Cambridge. Now, I’ve been riding bicycles forever, and it’s just as easy as walking… but for some reason, It wasn’t so easy this morning. :) About halfway across the bridge, I realized the problem… I was still DRUNK! :O smh

Being that I didn’t know this was possible, I had no idea of how to deal with it OR that I actually NEEDED to deal with it. So I rode back to the dorm, and I’m wide awake and I start hanging out with my homegirl. Next thing I know, I’m just feeling worse… and worse… and WORSE… AND *WORSE*!!!! I mean, it’s funny NOW.. but at the time, I was like OMG!

After that very day, I made a vow to AVOID that situation forevermore! :D

The best thing I can advocate (besides not drinking in the first place, haha) is just plain NOT WAKING UP until you’re over it! :D Know what kind of person you are. I’m a morning person. I can go to sleep @ 3am and wake up @ 9am without an alarm. If you know your body’s going to reactivate in the morning, don’t keep drinking @ 4am. Of course… this is tip is useless, because if you’re still drinking @ 4am, you aren’t THINKING about waking up at all! :D

Another good tip is to drink A LOOOOOOT of water before you go to sleep. Do your best to dilute your blood alcohol level ahead of time. Even if you don’t end up with a hangover, the thicker your blood gets, the tougher it is for it to pass through your capillaries, and you’ll have headaches and just overall feel poorly.

At some point, I became aware of “Hair of the Dog”, or, as I believe it’s properly known, “the hair of the dog that bit you”… Regardless… It’s the Top Gun technique of pulling out of the dive like Tom Cruise in Top Gun and letting the enemy fly right by you. Pull yourself out of the nose-dive of coming down while being awake by starting drinking again! :D Instantly, you switch your body from becoming increasingly less drunk to increasingly more so. I wish I could remember where I found out about this so I could properly attribute credit.

The reason I was thinking about this was that like twice in the span of a month, I was forced to pull myself out of the nose-dive. One of the two I don’t remember at this point. The other one was that at some point before I crawled into bed @ 5am, my cousin had left me an email saying she needed my help moving some furniture to storage the next morning. I only found out about it after I woke up and was WAY LOOKING FORWARD to a morning/afternoon/early-evening of detox, flickr and facebook sets. All of a sudden, my detox time was out the window, and I had to figure out how I was going to be functional, in the street and feeling decently by 1pm.

I could have pulled off ONE of those three in the state I was in when I read her email. I could have been in the street, non-functional and feeling poorly… NOT in the street, funtional, but feeling poorly… or feeling well, NOT in the street and NOT functional (= asleep :D). The only way I was going to be able to make it happen for my cousin was to “hit the brakes and let them fly right by”.

Needless to say, this technique is USELESS if you have work the next day, hahaha. If that’s the case, you’re an idiot for drinking so much into the wee hours of the night. Too Bad… So Sad…. Some people think coffee’s going to save them. Nope. Old Wives’ Tale.

Water, sleep, more alcohol or not getting drunk in the first place… You decide.