The 5 Stages of a Hangover

I’ve done a lot of practical research on the matter and determined that there are exactly 5 stages of a hangover, and god damn I hate all of them and everything else breathing after what I went through this morning. Here they are. Also, I need like 60 Tylenol and a gallon of water so if anyone wants to hook that up, I can pay in puns and nonsexual favors.

Denial
You wake up and the guttural flood of curses and pleas for death are directed at the explosion in your head and the black mulch in your gut instead of your standard morning mantra. The first thing that trudges through your tar-coated brain is that ‘this can’t be happening.’ You hike to the mirror or a particularly reflective pool of your own discharge and look at the marvelous trash heap you’ve become, and you cry skyward ‘What have I done!’

Anger
You throw the empty bottles away with the enraged vigor normally reserved by people losing at board games. You cuss–mostly inarticulately–at the world, at the people who made you drink, at your cat, but mostly at yourself for being a colossal fuckwit with a mortal form. You curse the heavens for not giving you the body of a Norse god and the liver of an average German child. Everything is to blame for the wretch you have become and you punch your five-fingered ham-clubs at the walls and the mirror and whoever else is nearby and blame-able for your awful decisions.

Bargaining
You’ve punched a hole in everything that didn’t already have a hole in it. You’ve aggressively regretted everything available to be regretted. And now you beg the world not to twist and shout like it seems to be set on doing. It’s at this point that you come to a fork in the road, but not a good fork because it only has two options and most forks have like 4 prongs. You can resign yourself to the roiling sick-storm you’ve built for yourself, or you can trade money for more of the poison that brought you down. Bargaining is the shortest stage because you either skip it by engaging with the sickening monster you’ve become or you bargain for more alcohol and prolong the suffering you probably deserve.

Depression
You’re garbage and you earned your suffering, and after a certain stint in the throes of the hangover, you goddamn know it. You don’t feel like you had a great time last night and it was worth the headache and rotten guts and new personal relationship with your bathroom floor. You feel like you’re a rotten bit of juiced by a train. You wallow in the mess that is your body and see no future in which you aren’t prostrate on the ground begging the void to love you too.

Acceptance
This world of a pulpy body and a head of hurricanes is your life now. You’ve spent so long at the mercy of your rotten body that you can’t imagine a life unafflicted by it. You are an egg tossed in a blender, a potato lit on fire and thrown off a bridge, a bit of ham slathered in bile and lightly sauted in tears. There is no world beyond the hangover, nothing left for you. You resign yourself to what you’ve become and begin looking for a job you can do from your bathroom floor.