The hangover

Well I woke up after last night's five gins feeling like absolute fucking poo.  I haven't felt so atrocious since Halloween, and that was as horrific as the holiday suggests.  The alarm came blaring on at 6am and the first thing I felt was a headache the size of a steak lying flat across my brain.  The second thing was Regret.  The whole room span.

I'm not entirely sure how I made it to work alive, but I did and then forced down half a cup of coffee that did not sit at all well on my sensitive innards.  It almost escaped back out of my mouth during the lesson, but I managed to retain it and then reconsume it, all the while keeping an impressively expressionless face.  By some stroke of incredible luck, that was the only lesson today as for one reason or another the rest didn't require my frankly unnecessary presence.  So I gleefully, albeit slowly and quite hunched, returned to the train station, where I came across the most unfortunate sight.

I think it was chicken.  It could've been that some poor soul had been recently disemboweled, but I think it was chicken.  It was lying on the grass in a pink heap, glistening and raw, flies buzzing about it and an especially swift slug already slithering into the mix.  Thin white strings hung over a few of the chunks, and it was without a doubt one of the most rancid things I have ever had the misfortune to lay my eyes on.

In my weakened state I was unable to cope with it, and I gagged three times in quick succession.  Nothing, blessedly, came up, but my stomach was in a sorry state and I forced my gaze away, fixing it on a gentleman walking ahead of me lest it be dragged back to the chunks.  For a few seconds I was successful.  But then suddenly, the image came hurtling back into my mind in high-resolution, pink and wet and devastating and I was unable to contain myself.  I gagged and I could already sense I was doomed this time.  It was on its way.  I gagged again, and the man ahead turned just in time to catch the main event.  With a terrible retching sound, I vomited into my hand and it began seeping through the gaps between my fingers and dripping onto the floor.  I was so mortified that I couldn't stop walking.  He did, and stared at me with a look torn between concern and disgust, but I just carried on, and walked straight past him at speed with a handful of sick as though I was merely taking it home as a souvenir.

I put it on the floor as I rounded a corner and wiped my hand on the wall, which I know is unpleasant but it was either that or my trousers.  I was eager to return home and collapse onto the floor, but then fate conspired against me once again.  Due to some inconsiderate shit wandering across the tracks, I was forced off the train at Wokingham and left stranded.  To make matters worse, a man was then arrested and a woman hit by a lorry, so the police closed the roads and I couldn't find a bus and I didn't even have any fucking change for the bus and it was just the Worst Thing in the World, or at least a close second to that woman under the lorry.  When I did finally return home after the most inordinately expensive bus journey I have ever been on, I was soaked through with rain and sweat and was beginning to become aware of the faintest hint of sick upon my person.

Then I retrieved a bottle of wine and secreted it in a gap between my bookshelf and my bed.  Bearing in mind I am on my own, this seems a disturbing action to take.  I seem to have attempted to hide it from myself.  No doubt in shame.

And of course the skin cancer has also chosen this day to be particularly malicious.  I'm getting the occasional stabbing pain and the nerves there don't seem to be working so well.  I doubt I have more than a week to live.

It looked a bit like this but far less appetising and with more white strings.  And on the floor outside.