April 1946

AHANGOVERFOREVERYTYPE

dragging a stick along a picket fence. (Any similarity between the following descriptions The Yoga Type This is the one which gives rise to the and your own experience is purely coincidental. The author, a Scripps-Howard staff writer, is a nonstories about wrens stomping around in alcoholic, and apparently had no thought of A.A. in There is the more common, or yoga type. the bushes, and kittens clomping up and mind in writing this piece, which is reprinted by Your stomach is in good shape, and your down the hall. permission from the Jan. 2, 1946, issue of the New head is all right. You have had breakfast, One kind is actually pleasant. It’s Yo& World-Telegram.) and the hands are steady. No music on the cheerful Sunday hangover. It comes the radio. No telephones. And no when you have drunk considerably the By Robert C. Ruark conversation. All you want is to be left night before, but have had 10 hours alone with your thoughts and perhaps a sleep and a good breakfast. A hangover is the unpaid balance book with big print and lots of pictures. You feel relaxed, pleasantly on easy credit ecstasy. A third type comes only to the melancholy, and content to stay home There are many kinds of more highly integrated people. This with the funnies, some soft music on the hangovers, according to the quality and carries a sensation of floating in space, radio, and a short beer every now and quantity of the booze, the state of the then. At the end of the afternoon, maybe soul and the stomach, and whether or while you look at yourself sitting down below. Generally, you don’t think much of a stroll in the zoo or a neighborhood not the victim went to bed at all. Or, so the boys have been telling me. yourself. movie. You will fall asleep in your chair The least common type is the This disembodied feeling lasts all after dinner, and eventually struggle off inexplicable hangover. This is the one day, and is sometimes accompanied by to bed. you get twice a year. You never get it the sound of softly chiming glass prisms. oftener. they say, or you would quit While it grips you, conversation is undes- The Guilty Kind drinking. It strikes you suddenly, irable, and the hands have a habit of ,, generally after a night when you thought dropping everything they touch. One of the worst is the kind which you were taking it easy. wouldn’t be so bad if you could stay This hangover is standardly The Claustrophobic Type home, but is awful when you have to equcpped with headache, nausea, and work. You cure the hammering head with delusions of mice in bed. Only time or a We deal now with the aspirin, and you brush your teeth. But pistol will cure it. Cold water makes you claustrophobic hangover. That is the one when you get to work, you still feel that sicker. Aspirin makes you sicker. Cold when you don’t want people to get too you must smell like a brewery, so you cloths on the head merely dampen the close to you, and riding in a small, turn your face away from the boss. pillow. Food is repulsive, drink more so. crowded elevator is exquisite torture. This is the one which makes you say Your nerves are wetted to a fine-point, “never again,” and you believe it. and the rustle of a newspaper is like

The hands which shook not at all when you were home, suddenly begin to dance violently when you hand the man a letter, and your tongue, so sure and witty last night, stumbles and stutters over routine words. This is called the guilty conscience hangover. These are the commonest types, and the most easily classifiable. Some people have copyrighted heads, and imagine that they hear flutes playing or cicadas chirping. But this is getting out of the realm of hangover and into whooping jitters.