Hangover

    People just aren't what they seem to be. I just had a revealing, thoughtful conversation with someone that my best friend thinks is a pea-brain. There was a program for the youth services summer reading volunteers this morning, in which they were challenged to match library staff baby pictures to their 7th (or so) grade pictures. I see these people every day and had no clue which person was in which photo. Spent last night listening to 3 people talk about a topic in which they're all extremely interested, then sitting in a loud, over-crowded bar struggling to find something about which to speak with them. Eventually drank enough to cover not only that discomfort but any sense I might have had. By the end of the evening I was pretty close to plastered. As I've made the mistake of mentioning a couple of times today, if there'd been a guitar nearby, I'd have been strumming it and spontaneously writing songs about my dog getting kicked and my pickup falling into disrepair--I was a woeful drunk, but I covered it by taking dozens of [relatively unflattering] pictures of the rest of the crew. My liquid of choice was Red Stripe, the distinctive container of which, one of my comrades said, looks "like a bottle of cough syrup." I woke up this morning with a fuzzy tongue and a headache that extended beyond the bounds of my brain. The tongue ailment was quickly remedied, but the brain problem continues. Is it the alcohol that caused it? Or is it the pain of knowing that I would do things differently, if I could go back and do them without the excess alcohol? I suppose it doesn't matter, in the end. The best I can hope is that the same medicine will cure either problem.