why the drunk throw up.

to negotiate with someone drenched in their wasted is sobering. the night finally falls, affect returns to the music, and your thoughts find their weights. when all else betrays, you can count on gravity. but the wasted are burning stars, collapsing into their centres endlessly.

“then let me take care of you” i say through gritted teeth as he speaks of how nobody would help him after i leave. he had accused me of not being gentle enough in trying to lift him earlier- a bogus claim btw- but i was rapidly running out of patience. in my youth (fuck off, aadi), i loved to wait. the time my friends took, under the stars, to pick themselves up, was time i could write a substack about. as i still do, only through gritted teeth now. you see, gurgaon was an hour and a half away at 5am. i’d danced enough to deserve 6 hours recovery sleep and there is always so much work to catch up on tomorrow.

maybe i only don’t throw up courtesy the gritted teeth. in both words and wasteds. but if there’s only one thing we’re allowed to waste, it’s probably words.

i get it, there’s oxygen at the centre of you, of course you burn. there’s metal in your heart, soldering its own cracks shut. your liver is weighed down by its acetaldehyde, your stomach lining is thinning, there’s a red “DON’T DRINK AND DRIVE” sign flashing in the back of your head, some tangential thought about that car seat headrest song, and someone’s anecdote about an accidental drunk pregnancy, and wait, why killer whales?

of course you look for someone to blame for this madness and see only one variable pleading guilty- a faithful old compound, hydrophilic hydroxyl, name derived from ‘the kohl’ in arabic, yeah exactly, lining your eyes, dear friend of our lot from the ages, so much so that we also affectionately call it another name for what we declare to be our vital essence- our spirit.

we blame our spirit for our misery and hope to throw it up & out. un-al-kohl-ed perhaps we find our bodies again.

see, i think i’m very clever for being able to bring everything back to spirit vs body if you can’t already tell. but i’m mostly just playing with words so i can hold two perspectives on the same thing simultaneously and synthesise them into one conclusion.

it’s never just the spirits. if life were a game with defined rules, then yeah, as long as you play with the proverbial sportsman’s spirit, shit will turn out fine & gay. but the drunk don’t always throw up the same with the same amount of alcohol in their system. their food & water intake throughout the day, how a person in the party perceived them, the reason they drank in the first place, what they’re avoiding, what they’re yearning for, all try to be thrown up. and something. specific. sets. you. off. a passing moment, that no one else seemed to notice (spoiler: they did), a subtle, implicit reminder of your powerlessness, your capacity, wedges itself between your stream of consciousness and your body is triggered because it doesn’t know how to re-act. because there is no way to act, you spiral to spirit again.

i think keeping track of the trigger is like a compass, it keeps your oriented even while you don’t know the way. i personally like to have hope to find some way to act, if i’m patient with the trigger, but it is exhausting. a ‘leftist’ read on structures helps locate the trigger quicker though.

when we try to locate our despair, if we find ourselves looking inward, it’s usually a feeling of guilt that’s responsible. now that can be guilt you’ve been shamed into internalising or a genuine regret, but regardless of where the blame really is, it’s important to forgive yourself for either. that’s when the trigger passes through you gently before you grab hold of it by the throat, pissed, and shake it aimlessly.

so the drunk decides interestingly to waste his misery. to carry all the weight of the party’s subconscious and lay it all out in a pool. that’s the kind of waste i call art. it’s almost a ritual of confrontation.

fuck shame. pride 🤙.

and between you and me, it’s probably not your fault.