after the ****e

Oh, how many times have I awoken after a long night of drinking to a trembling confusion inside my head? It’s usually the same. Countless hours drowned away in beer after beer, ounce after ounce, justified, weakly, as a necessary diversion to the hardships of life that take up the rest of the time. Of course, the moments of consumption are not concerned with either hindsight – the infinite prior hangovers that have tormented the past – or foresight – the obvious and inevitable reality of the next morning. Rather, they are filled with a supposed joy, with an oblivious lifting of the spirit that carries with it a departure of such regular human traits as decency, shame, restraint, and reason. This joy is not bad in itself, for otherwise a good human being could not continue to engage in it, but it does carry with it a sense of shame after the fact. The places, both physical and mental, I have found myself during such nights are as varied as the colors of the rainbow and yet, when compared to the places where that self has been lost, that variety appears as black and white. None of it real, none of it who I truly am, and all of it carrying the one inevitability that the next morning will bring pain, a pain that will very quickly superimpose itself on whatever positive happy memories are residually implanted on the mind.

Yes, I am sure that very pain is familiar to most, if not all. I open my eyes and there’s an ache inside my head. It is confined to my head as long as I do not move any muscle, and so I try to remain in a stationary position as long as I can, either desperately trying to fall back asleep or simply re-living some of the previous night’s exploits before they become too much of a bad memory. Before long, that lovely, indispensable piece of my anatomy, the bladder, forces an ultimatum upon my aching mind – either move and relieve me or face the warm, tinkling furies. And so, with little choice, I get up and stumble to the toilet. And the pain ache begins to spread. Going from a simple head-ache it traverses the forlorn body, resulting in a stomach ache here, a muscular discomfort there, and overall punctuated by a sense of trembling and confusion, a dizziness that makes walking, breathing, and any sort of general coordination difficult. I go and I come back. I lay down. With any luck, I can fall asleep again and when I wake up anew, it is greatly reduced and although I am not happy to be up and about, I can at least do that, as opposed to lying, lamenting in bed all day. Without that luck (as in the case of drinking on a work night or some other act of unbridled genius like that), I can get dressed and continue the waking nightmare and try to pretend for the benefit of others (who can immediately see past the pretense) that I am normal, functioning, and extremely happy to be alive. Whatever the case, it is only the most masochistic and self-deprecating individuals of the human race that can possibly call the morning after experience pleasant. But it is indeed that minority of people that may be the most honest, the most genuine exemplars of our breed. For the rest of us openly agree that it is at the pinnacle of among the more unpleasant of life’s experiences and yet, routinely act in ways to bring it about, again, and again, and again, and again ad infinitum. So, you tell me, who’s the smart one?

To make a long story short, last Saturday and Sunday I had just such a night and morning. Having just ended a not-that-long-to-be-completely-devastated-yet-not-that-short-to-be-completely-over-it relationship earlier in the day, I had some Japanese friends over to the house. We walked over to a near-by izakaya, enjoying the cool yet gentle spring breeze that precipitated down from a broody sky. Once there, we had ourselves a yakitori snack or two to accompany the mug upon mug of Kirin beer, a saddened person good friend. More people added to the mix and we soon took the party back to my house, where we also moved the consumption up a notch, from the everyman’s comfort to the more exquisite combination of tastes that emerged from my not insignificant collection of bottles that had been stacking up over the past few months. We talked, reveled, and continued a gradual process of losing ourselves into a collective confusion. At some point, when one of the party had certainly had enough and was, from the looks of it, enjoying a pleasant stroll through a dreamscape, my good friend Ryo discovered two gigantic permanent markers, black and red, that I had purchased sometime earlier to make a certain sign for a certain concert which would alert the attention of certain band members to the presence of certain diehard fans in the audience. With a deft hand and a surprisingly sober amount of skill, those markers were put to use to redecorate the said dreamer’s face a bit, resulting in joyous laughter for all. It was truly funny, even more so when the affected party woke up and casually strolled to the mirror to see what the fuss was all about. So, in the next two or so hours, while the victim was furiously scrubbing away and my Japanese ability went from non-existent to phenomenal and back again, the party began its twilight hour. The inebriation and all the joys that come with it gradually faded into a fatigue and the disappearance of any motivation to stay awake. Suddenly, what I had been chasing and trying to maintain through continuous consumption all night bid its adieu and I was left with a swaying body not really knowing what to do with itself. And, so, I said good night to my friends, went to my bed, and fell asleep to the distant chatter of by this point incomprehensible Japanese. Needless to say, as is always the case, not once throughout the whole night did the multitudes of prior hangovers provide any sort of incentive to stop nor any sort of effective foreshadowing.

With the alarm set for ten, I woke up without hearing it to the all-too-familiar yet never anticipated trembling. Just as my mind regained that degree of consciousness which it had lost sometime in the previous evening, I began to mentally prepare myself for the coming discomfort. And yet, as I quickly realized, the trembling was far louder and more powerful than it had ever been before. In those instants after waking, it also dawned on me that it was not just inside of my head. The entire room was trembling, vibrating with a sort of unearthly noise. My mind raced and quickly I remembered that during severe thunderstorms, the thunder sometimes rattled the entire house like it was doing now. As I calmed down a bit, assuring myself that it was a loud thunder boom that had awaken me, its refusal to stop made me jump out of bed. I looked around and, seeing my lamp make tiny leaps on my dresser toward the edge, my tired, hungover brain quickly jumped into an adrenaline overdrive. That which was never expected was happening. It was not my mind that was shaking, but rather the earth.

Often in life we find ourselves doing things and having trouble justifying them by any sort of plausible reality. Like fire drills back in school. Of course, we’d always be happy to get out of class for a while, but we never saw it as practical for none of us ever expected a real fire to break out. Similarly, especially living in Japan, there are constant earthquake drills and from way back, I remembered that the one thing to do in an earthquake was to stand in a doorway, the supposed strongest part of a house. And here I was, standing in the middle of my bedroom, panicking. The room was swaying to and fro, and while I remembered the doorway training, something told me the truly safest place would be outside, out in the open. I ran in my pajamas through the rumbling hallway and out the front door. A slight rain was falling and literally the whole world seemed to be moving in gigantic vibrations. It was as if something was trying to break through from beneath, breaking through deep layers of earth, sending the rumbles up toward the surface and shaking whatever lay on top. I stood there looking out in complete awe. I do not recall which was louder, the quake or my own heartbeat. Amidst all this was a sudden excitement at the fact of a truly new and previously unhad experience. And then, it was all over. Not more than thirty seconds had elapsed since I woke up. The earth stood still, as if nothing had happened. The only evidence to the contrary was the lamp, which had fallen over and some stuff hanging in my closet was now on the floor.

Painted face man and his girl friend were sleeping in the living room and did not even have time to get up before it was over. At first, looking at their initial reactions, my excitement appeared to be exaggerated. They seemed as if it was normal and expected. But soon, I realized that they were still disoriented from having just woken up and that the experience was as new, as exciting, and as scary to them as it was to me. We drank some coffee, calmed the nerves, and watched a bit of T.V., which within eight minutes of the quake was already full of news, information, statistics, and videos concerning it.

It was a magnitude of 6.9, which, I guess, is a middle of the road strength for an earthquake, but luckily it was epicentered off the coast, so the damage it caused was much less than it could have been. The hardest hit areas lie about one hour’s drive north of me and the town where I lived received about half of its strength. Whereas there was considerable property and road damage up north, in addition to about 150 wounded and even one death, where I am, it left no discernible effects. As we sat drinking the coffee and watching the news, there were sporadic shakes, aftershocks, that jolted the house but ceased in an instant. Later in the day, there were a few more major ones, lasting several seconds, but nothing with the original intensity of what happened at 9:42 AM on March 25th, 2007. Moral of the story – the discovery of the surest, most potent, and most reliable hangover cure yet…