Ain’t no way to explain or say
How painful the hangover was today
In front of the toilet, hands and knees
Trying to breathe in between the dry heaves
My baby made me some coffee
Afraid that if I drink some it’s probably coming right back out me
Couple of advil, relax and chill
At a standstill with how bad I feel
I think I need to smell fresh hair
So I stepped out the back door and fell down the stairs
The sunlight hit me dead in the eye
Like it’s mad I gave half the day to last night…

If you asked the 1996 version of myself if he ever thought he’d be tweeting and blogging at 8AM in a Philadelphia airport on a business trip he probably would have hit you in the face with his skateboard.

Either that or he would’ve locked himself in his room in a fit of passive aggression and thrown a West Side Connection cassette in the boombox.

We’ve all had those nights.  Not the kind where we total a car or wake up saying, “Where are my pants?  And why am I in the women’s bathroom…at Wendy’s?”  (Although, I’m sure plenty of us have had that experience on at least a couple of occasions – I’m looking at you Frankie Kickball.)  I’m talking about the kind of night where we’ve said, “Well, if Pabst is good enough to win the blue ribbon, it’s good enough for me.”  The next thing you know you are punching a police officer’s horse in the mouth in Millennium Park.   Ok, maybe I’m still thinking of Frankie Kickball.  Maybe you are a little more tame.  Still, your stomach is a wreck and you know what comes next…

The morning after.  When The sun shines through your window like God’s flashlight.  When your alarm goes off forty-seven times over the course of 6 hours because you keep hitting the snooze.  When you finally wake up because you hit your head on the edge of the futon.  When your temples pulse on the corners of your face like night club sub woofers.  When you’re so dehydrated you gasp for air like someone poured Irish sandpaper down your wind pipe.  When your head spins like helicopter propellers and you can’t tell if you need to down a gallon of water or throw up a bucket of vodka.  When you have to face the moments you can’t remember or don’t want to.  The next morning.  When you have to call into work.  The next morning.  When you turn to this blog.

The entries you find here are the cure to your hangover… but it’s not that simple.  This blog is not just about your trip home from Margaritaville.  It is a metaphor.  It is the exploration of finding the remedy to what ails you.  How do you deal with a bad breakup, getting laid off, your rent check bouncing, or the Jonas Brothers dying in a tragic Six Flags teenage mob stomping? How do you deal with the day after? It is looking back in retrospect, not to prevent it from happening again, but how to deal with it better the next time.  This is a career poet/bartender’s take on the path to feeling better and moving on.