Imagine having a terrible hangover in 8 AD. How would you make sense of the pain, sickness and waves of anxiety? Probably feeling worse than Ovid writing his Black Sea Letters: the exile from the world of your people, your life; feeling as though you’re on the brink of death and clinging to the hope or recovery. Every time you puke up the water you drink to try to hydrate yourself being like the unanswered requests to be welcomed back to your life. Embarrassed. Forgotten to the world. You get the point: Hangover as Exile.
“I’m ashamed and embarrassed to be forever making / the same requests, afraid you’ll get bored (as well you might). But what can I do? My desire’s boundless. / Gentle friend, pardon my fault. Though I often yearn / to write about something else, I find myself slipping / back in the same old rut.”
“So, Malice, sheathe your bloody claws, spare this poor exile, / don’t scatter my ashes after death? / I have lost all: only bare life remains to quicken / the awareness and substance of my pain. / What pleasure do you get from stabbing this dead body? / There is no space in me now for another wound.”
If anyone knows of any ancient writings on hangovers, please let me know.
I was getting WRECKED the other night, listening to Pantera, Realicide, SWANS, things like that. (There always comes a point, about 3-4 beers in, where Pantera has to come on. Other things just won’t do it. There’s way heavier choices out there, but the IDEA of Pantera is what I’m after as I listen to the 1-2-3-4! and opening riff of “I’m Broken.”) Intense, teeth-gnashing stuff. I plopped down into my chair with my headphones blasting. I watched Phil Anselmo, drunk as hell, throw his microphone into the audience and make motions for the crowd to throw it back. He gave up immediately and just put his hands up instead of singing. If I didn’t have Metal and Noise music or YouTube, or even Internet, CD’s, and records (going back in time), what would I have done when ‘getting WRECKED?’ What sort of intensity would sate, slake, or quench my thirst?
I can imagine getting drunk in the 1980’s. I can imagine it in the 1970’s. Even all the way back, decade by decade, to the 1920’s. Maybe I can imagine these eras because I’ve experienced them on a second-order level: I’ve seen footage of these times. I can picture people being drunk and belligerent ass holes from reading things by Gorky or the drinking parties from “Mysteries” by Knut Hamsun, but that’s just basically ass holes being ass holes. That’s not any sort of INTENSITY from ‘partying.’
One way to get hammered in an intense, partying kind of way, without Pantera or the Internet might come from Ladislav Klíma’s “My Autobiography.” Klíma loved his drink. And he lived intensely and bizarrely.
“Alcohol saved me,” he writes, “rum and undiluted spirits; to this day I’ve remained faithful to my rescuers. The second half of ’12 and all of ’13 didn’t see me sober even for a minute.”
And: “How did I spend 1920?…Just beautifully, in a state of Self-Embrace, heightened by alcohol and girls, married and unmarried.”
So how would he rage?
“It went so far [the drinking] that I suffered the only injury of my life: a fracturam radius sinistris, when I was drunk, running at midnight along the icy roads from Smíchov to Vysočany…”
Seems like an early-20th-century equivalent of an injury from a stage dive. You might think he was running to maybe get somewhere. Sounds reasonable, but I think it’s reasonable to assume this drunken midnight run on the ice was some sort of paroxysm akin to moshing because of how he describes living his life:
“My whole life has been such a consistent divergence from all that’s human…. Once in a while I would try to make myself ill – doesn’t work – unless a person takes cyanide – spending the whole night in the 20-below cold, in a gale – wearing a summer outfit – nothing…. I would glug down bathwater from people with smallpox – scarf down sausages that were all wormy, drink water that would’ve made a normal person at the very least seriously ill – I’d just have to contend with two days of diarrhea [almost a kind of hangover?]. For some time I’ve eaten only: raw flour (if necessary, wheat or peas soaked in water), raw meat, raw eggs, milk, lemons, and raw vegetables…. Once I stole a bitten-into mouse from a cat and gobbled it down, just like it was, with the fur and bones – as if I were eating a dumpling. – I covered 98 km in the Tyrol in 21 hours, and could’ve kept going for the other 3 hours (of that day) without stopping…Etc.”
So, without these modern outlets of intense life-negating drinking binges, there’d be people like Klima running around naked eating mice.
Imagine his hangovers…
DA-PHNE (chicago) 
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