Sunday, I was hungover. This is no surprise. Many Sundays have begun that way for me. It was nothing I hadn’t experienced before: waking up and having just a moment or two of no pain, before I started feeling blood pound in my temples, and my head started to throb, and nausea settled in.
Typically, this demands a choice: rolling the dice on Tylenol (I can’t take Advil or any NSAID because of my ceaseless IBD) and seeing if it will make me throw up, or just resigning myself to a headache for most of the day.
The only thing that was different this time was that I hadn’t felt like I had drank much the night before. I played a gig with the usual suspects which, for me, means some combination of beer and whiskey. As my early twenties have decidedly passed in favor of “mid” twenties, I’ve tried to be more responsible—I eat more solidly, I drink water, I don’t get blackout drunk even if I have a ride secured. I determined, after some memory reconstruction, that Saturday night, I drank about 7 drinks over the course of 6 hours. Yes, firmly in the realm of binge drinking and definitely not great for my health, but far from my worst night, and I’ve survived worse without too much punishment the next day.
I attribute the intensity of Sunday’s hangover to getting older. I’ve had a couple of bad ones recently, in circumstances in which I thought I wouldn’t. In circumstances which, in the past, I wouldn’t have been hungover at all. My body seems to be telling me that the party isn’t over, but maybe I need to be more “adult” about it. When you’re 20, you can get away with a lot. When you’re 25 you can get away with a lot too, but, evidently, less than when you were twenty.
After the dry heaves made way for wetter heaves and the Tylenol started to kick in (I rolled the dice and lost), I laid in bed with Maddy and sipped coffee and choked down a banana while we watched this movie Blaze from 2018, about the cult folk singer Blaze Foley. That viral TikTok sound of Michael Cera singing “Clay Pigeons?” Actually written by Blaze Foley. Covered by John Prine, among others. He wrote other classics like “If Only I Could Fly,” “Election Day,” “Sittin’ by the Road,” et cetera, et cetera. He lived hard and died young, broke and unaware of his eventual fame, like so many of those folks did.
Being hungover on a Sunday is the right way to take in that story.
I’m no cult figure, and I don’t have even local fame. And that’s fine. But writing songs is enough to make you feel like part of something bigger—part of a tradition. At the very least, you are a person trying to make the best thing you can make, which gives you something in common with your heroes. And as a result, I end up comparing my life to others’. It’s impossible not to notice how many musicians and writers I look up to were addicts in some way, or at least lived lives that don’t seem appealing at all beyond the shallow glitz of fame.
There are plenty that don’t fit that mold, too. But given my history of drinking, it makes me wonder which path I’m walking, which camp it’ll lead me to, and how long I can maintain my priorities the way they are once I get there, wherever “there” is.
Blaze Foley was shot in the chest over some fight over a disability check. Townes Van Zandt died in his fifties from congestive heart failure after years of beating the brakes off his body. There was Bourdain and what happened in Kayserberg, France. And there was Elliott Smith.
My Mount Rushmore of artistic heroes is full of suicides, overdoses, and premature deaths by bizarre means.
No one needs a thousand words to understand that idol worship is bad to begin with. The Christians might’ve had that one right. But I think that misses the point. We all have heroes, especially as artists. But you could live their lives to the letter and never write “Waitin’ Around to Die,” or Kitchen Confidential, or “Wouldn’t Mama Be Proud,” or anything like it. Contrary to the mythological idea of the drunk poet, I think folks probably do their best work despite the damage they do to themselves. But then you hear stories like the one about “If I Needed You,” which Townes Van Zandt supposedly wrote while completely obliterated on codeine.
But that shit is just legend, and so what if it was true anyway? What are you going to do? Sip Robitussin and await your masterpiece? It doesn’t work that way.
All of this has nothing to do with the fact that I was hungover on Sunday, aside from the fact that it’s important to keep yourself in check. I have the kind of substance habits that can creep, usually ebbing and flowing from nonproblematic phases into vaguely problematic ones. Luckily, touching the hot stove has only left me with minor blisters so far, no serious burns. But I’m tired of blisters. And I know what touching the stove does by now, and have long since fallen out of love with the scars it leaves.
Really, I’m tired of dry heaving on Sunday and not feeling human until 3 pm.
So I guess I’ll go on worshipping my heroes. And you take the good with the bad—their stories are incomplete without their bad habits, without their often-meaningless and/or arbitrary endings, without how shitty they could be to the people they loved because of their tendencies for self-destruction. The same is true of me and you. But the hero worship should really be work worship. I don’t want to be friends with any of these people; I just want to write like them.
And you don’t write like them from the bottom of the bottle. Fuck, you probably don’t write like them at all, ever. If everyone was Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan would be working at Target.
But your only chance at being anything is by being yourself, and by not mistaking your attempts to numb a wound with the art that comes from having the courage to look the wound in the eye in the first place.
matt nilsen 