The "morning after" should be re-named the "mourning after" to better capture the agony following the ecstasy of the night before. Regrettably, you have completely forgotten the ecstasy. The sunlight flowing through the window upon your wounded body is creating the same effect as it always did on Dracula, only you don't, unfortunately, begin to melt into green goo which would be a relief at this stage. You peer down at your decimated body, astonished that you were actually able to get it in the bed and your P.J.'s relatively unscathed.

Now great waves of dread begin to activate the guilt as tiny half images of remembrance filter through the outer parameters of your quivering consciousness. "Oh, no, I didn't say that, did I? To my boss? Oh, no—worse yet—it's coming back: I told that filthy joke to his wife!"

And now you have arrived, overwhelmed with self-loathing and entertaining suicidal notions, at the place where another drink could shut down those Memories from Hell. However, the first and most important rule in attending to your hangover pain is this: DON'T START DRINKING AGAIN (the Hair of the Dog routine) because that's not treating the hangover. It's a continuation of the drunk. And in spite of feeling biodegradable and seriously thinking that you're living in an Edgar Allan Poe story, drinking destroys any possibility of dealing with the condition. Continuing the drunk becomes a massive failure of the imagination, and precludes the only source available to you now: the energy of the imagination, the creative force. Remember Luke Skywalker's: "May the Force be with you?" Well, it's the same one.

Now for the most of you, even the thought of drinking the next morning will have approximately the same effect as the Dracula Sunlight Syndrome; that is, formally vowing that you will never touch that stuff ever again! Well, at least for a very long time, anyway.

But the major problem of the Hangover can be simply stated: How do I get through the day, salvage it? How do I handle the anxiety, the existential dread that could be with me for at least twelve hours? This book is about creative suffering and how to use that pain to invent a tolerable, productive, interesting and, maybe, enjoyable day.

You can accomplish this Herculean task in spite of a frazzled nervous system by plugging into and availing yourself of the energies of guilt. Actually, a lot of modern American and British literature was written with hangovers and the accompanying guilt. One of America's permanently hung over writers, Dorothy Parker, epitomized perfectly the hangover condition in her classic admission after a dedicated night of two-fisted drinking with her fellow New Yorker cronies: "My nerves are so bad today I'd cry over card tricks." But then she and her drinking buddies at the Algonquin Hotel wrote some of the wittiest stories of the modern era. "Hangover Guilt" is one of Western civilization's great, unrecognized creative energy sources. Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, Sinclair Lewis, James Joyce, John Cheever, Ray Carver, and Barry Hannah and many other writers suffered from what the Irish call "Boozer's Gloom," but they channeled that pain into creating fictions for us to enjoy. Our Chapter V on what to read with a hangover will detail their accomplishments as well as suggest other appropriate readings.

Copyright © 2004 Patrick Meanor. All rights reserved.