To the Hungover:

Although the words on the following pages may not cure you, they will provide you some comfort in your time of hedonistic ill health. Additionally, here is a list of remedies that will be sure to ease the pain:

Smoking weed and watching dis-1. count DVDs from WalmartFarting (alone)2. Calling your grandparents3. Masturbating (alone)4. Drinking tea5. Stealing from Value Village6. body massage (optional)7. sauna time8. brisk walks in the cold9. facebook quizzes10. sunbaths11.

Well hung,TRowl & AOH420

A Story of Great Cun-ning in the Face of Adversity by Pogo New1

Katzenjammer by Mark Sanford 3

Untitledby Mary Tramdack 6Slow by Slow By Hilary Kitz 11Pizza Magicby Aditi Ohri 13Unbearable Wavesby Roland Pemberton 15Vague by Thomas Rowlinson 16Joe Winer’s Vomit 17

C O N T E N T S

A Story of Great Cunning in the Face of Adversity by Pogo New

Before I was seventeen, I never got hung over. I think that this was God’s way of encouraging me to get really drunk be-fore I hit puberty because I was more forgivable then. I hit puberty on my seventeenth birthday at 10:43 a.m. A few days later, I found out that a friend of mine was having a kegger.

I got very drunk at the party. I can remember a girl using the washroom at the same time as me. I decided I should try to get a half-boner to seem impressive. I actually got a full-boner and couldn’t pee. Then I realized that the girl was a showerhead.

That hilarious anecdote and the fact that I remem-ber it demonstrate my young-person resiliency to the ef-fects of alcohol. This is why old, bad people are so fond of bathing in child’s blood. It is because youth is good. But on the night in question an important threshold of youth-ful innocence was violated, and not in the “it was my cousin and we only did it once” sense like in the Oscar-nominat-ed Mandingo. It was in the sense that I got a hangover.

1

When I woke up that morning I was in more pain than I had ever been before I woke up that morning. I was on my living room couch. My mother was standing over me with questions about whether I had been drinking the night before. I an-swered with lies, but she already had a good deal of evidence. She said that I had been moaning in my sleep (parents are so nosey!) and that my bike was in the front garden without a lock on it and the lock was worth more than the bike because back then people in Toronto were very fond of stealing bikes.

I wanted nothing more than to stand up and saw my skull off my head, but I had to lie down all day to hide the fact that I had peed while sleeping. I used my dehydration-induced fever to evapo-rate all the pee and my mom never found out. That is why I call this story “A Story of Great Cunning in the Face of Adversity.”

2

Katzen-

jammer

by Mark Sandford

I n G e r -

man, they use the word ‘katzenjammer’ to de-

scribe what goes on after a night of drinking. It liter-

ally means ‘cat misery’. You drink your little kitty self into

a little kitty misery. It’s kind of cute really, maybe the only cute

thing Germany has ever done.

I’ve never understood the term ‘the hair of the dog that bit you’.

I realize I’m kind of dense and take things literally, but if a

dog bit me, why would I want its hair?

3

What’s the dif-ference be-tween that and ‘kitty misery’? I’ve never seen a cat drink a beer, but I have seen a

dog drunk. Though at the time no one had the urge

to shave the dog because it was drunk, and conversely

the dog didn’t go on a drunken biting rampage.

Do you think dogs and cats get worse hangovers

than we do? I don’t know, but fuck my head hurts.

Someone find me a dog to lick.

4

5

Untitled by Mary Tramdack

Most hangovers are inevitable enough that it’s useless to pinpoint exactly when they begin. You might argue that the narrative climax of a night occurs when you hear your voice reply, “Yeah, prob-ably not” to the Australian accent telling you that you shouldn’t be passed out in the alley behind Korova, alone, partially covered in your own vomit, and that everything that happens after is sol-idly on the side of “denouement” and “hangover.” But we rarely wonder whether it’s the second joint or third Navigator that makes us feel so terrible the next morning, and the Drinking–Drunk–Hangover progression feels unified and predictable.

It’s only when a night is transcendently fun that a hangover be-comes its own entity. For it to reach its most apocalyptic nadir, you have to feel betrayed. The only way to do this is to get so drunk you forget that getting fucked up will make you hung over.

The last time this happened to me was two summers ago, at an Italo Disco dance party at the Saint-Ambroise brewery.

6

It was the kind of party where five different friend groups collide, and you are reeling from group to group feeling on, you sense your voice getting louder and your words coming out in the wrong order.

Soon you are grabbing both of someone’s hands, yelling “When are we going to hang out??” and sloppily kissing someone else on the cheek and then standing next to the murky, contaminated Lachine Canal with your ex-boyfriend and some guy who claims to work for Google and probably actually does and you are all remov-ing your clothes because you’re about to jump in and go swimming. The water feels suspiciously metallic, but it’s a warm summer night and you’ve never done this before and you get out feeling awesome.

As you start unsuccessfully looking for the shoplifted silver jewelry you’ve been wearing since age fourteen you see, to the extent that you are still “seeing” anything, more and more people heading to the canal. There are at least thirty people jumping into the Lachine Canal, the entire party is swim-ming, your crew started it, and who can think about hangovers ‘cause this is fucking rad. My last hazy memory is of Los-ing Myself To The Music and thinking, “Fuck my future.”

7

I have attained such a sincere level of Fun that I literally can-not understand the shock and despair of the next morn-ing. I wake up in a pair of iridescent blue/red SurfStyle shorts that I only wear while working out. I keep them on for three hours so that I can debate whether wearing them all day would be moving in the opposite direction of where I want to go, fashion-wise, and also because I am basically paralyzed.

It is brutally hot and my skin feels papery from Lachine toxins. Maybe you should go eat something? Maybe you should go look for your jewelry in the daylight? Who am I. Why do I do this to myself. What is the point of “feelings.” It’s with the vague goal of “jewelry” that I start riding my bike in circles across the Plateau, sweating, furtively drinking Gatorade, convinced that Everyone Knows I’m Hung Over. I make no prog-ress until I find that I’m downtown and there is no shade and I am unable to deal with anything. I go inside an American Apparel and immediately wonder, “WHY??” Nobody ever points out that you’re even less responsible for your actions while hung over than you are while drunk; you’re subject to the incomprehensible, what-ever-gets-you-through-this-minute logic of the hangover itself.

8

It’s in this spirit that I go into Chapters and walk to the Chick Lit section for the first time in about a decade and read “Four Blondes” by Candace Bushnell, in its entirety.

I do not purchase “Four Blondes,” and in fact have no idea what I am doing or what it really means to be alive. I stumble across the street to Multimags and spend twenty minutes buying the latest is-sue of GQ. Who is responsible for my thoughts? What thoughts?

It’s dusk now, and I make my incremental, hilariously slow way home. I sit in my sweltering room and it’s only after I read all of GQ in one sitting and have started to feel margin-ally human that I wonder, am I going to remember last night or this hangover as the defining moment of my summer?

9

10

Slow by Slowby Hilary kitz

Guilt over my brain sitting at the bottom of my skull. Sit up awake really hard and fast like G.G. Allin ordead girls in movies.Cannot close eyes because eyeballs are too swollen. Stomach kind of like being pregnant with a cranky cat made of what nuclear waste looks like on The Simpsons.Someone is in bed: their face is way too close. Yell in shock kind of up their nose and in their eyes. They offer to go for breakfast. Reject offer, wander around blindly pretending to help find their stuff til they’re out the door.Fumble around dawn trying to figure out how the bathroom door works and how much of my roommate’s juice can be chugged from the boxwithout them noticing. Worry whether or not this will give them my easily traceable cold. (It will).

11

Probably chugged too much juice and now feel worse. Make cereal and coffee even though coffee will make me feel worse. Eat too much then feel dumb because I’ll probably go out for breakfast in 3 hours when normal people wake up, and feel even worse. Smoke a cigarette even though I know it will make me feel worse. Feel more guilty. Spend the rest of the day on laptop and accidentally high-bid a pair of bronze lion heads for $60 that could be used to open beers, but if not, can’t do anything. Wonder how I will pay for these - - remember job.Realize work shirt is dirty and try to wash it in the bathtub.Get stressed and smoke the roach somebody left. Worry about what would happen if plants and digital technology hybridized and took over The world.

12

pizza magicby aditi ohri

I was 16 and working at a pizza place in Toronto, The Magic Oven. All of the pizzas had names as silly as the sequins on a stage magician: Cheese Magic, White Magic, Yogi Magic, Eupho-ria Magic – everything on the menu was magical and nothing in the restaurant was safe from this word. It was in the password for the cash register and embedded in the security code to be punched in before locking up. I used the word so many times it would lose all meaning by the time I finished a shift. Because ev-erything was magical, nothing was magical. It was a strange time.

My friend Regan was turning 20 and I decided to com-memorate this occasion with one of my favourite pizzas, the Harmony Magic. I arranged the slices of sausage in the shape of the number 20, nestled a few candles in beds of arugala, and we proceeded to get wasted in the back room.

I left the restaurant in a hurry, frantically punching ‘magic’ wherever necessary. I stumbled through sidewalks and alley-ways, peeing occasionally, screaming at random, and strolling in and out of bars and clubs as vehicles for my drunkenness.

13

Sometime around 2AM at the corner of Queen and Te-cumseth a gaggle of gays stuck their heads out of a third story window: “HEY! PARTY GIRLS! DO YOU WANT SOME ABSINTHE?” We were in no state to say no.

The next 4-6 hours of my life remain a mystical and dream-like blur. I was commanding inanimate objects to do impos-sible tasks, attempting the splits, and dancing with decora-tive mannequins in a friendly stranger’s apartment. I vaguely recall dialing random numbers in my cell phone until someone finally screamed at me to “GET IN A CAB AND SHUT UP.”

When I got back to my mother’s tiny waterfront condo, the sun was up and my eyes were in the back of my head. As my legs struggled to carry my weight and throw my body into bed, I puked green and gorgonzola all over the sheets. It smelled like magic.

14

Unbearable Wavesby Roland Pemberton

How much is enough?

The tertiary tingles, the auspice is pricked,Like erstwhile jingles from the hospice kidsThe path to sepulchre is lined with indulgenceAnd Heavenly Idol’s occipital pulses

Hyperthymestic, the present is the giftAgainst all odds, my nights just siftA graft is a grift, killing me when killing it,The bloodletter baby gets to work the night shift

The limbo is a lathe so incandescent,It shapes an arrow of the 22nd secondAnd rattles floating beds where you bandy out your endsSlicing up your bread for the butter on the lens

15

vagueby Thomas rowlinson

I’m rarely hungover I think. When I am it’s like being underwater and the rest of the world is the bars of shaky light from above. I usually remember to drink a few litres of water before sleeping off a drunk. There are times when I don’t. Then I feel like I’m gonna sneeze my brains out.

I like to kill hangover mornings with weed, coffee and a copy of the Gazetteand just trying to be real(for a moment).

16

17

No complaints, just hangover.

hangover.mag@gmail.com