Fractionals

There is a kind of translucence (or fear of translucence) that comes with the morning after, a superstitious reluctance to look at yourself; as if raising your arm in front of your face would show something beyond or below its normal comforting solidity and persistance and subjection to your will (the valid fear that one day your body will stop obeying you is always present in hangover). A tenativeness to existence, a shying away from light and noise and movement, especially in the stomach, in equal and opposite reaction to the certainty of the sour burn of gin in your throat the evening before (like all sensations, it can either be enjoyed or endured, although I suppose one could always stop drinking gin).

Last night I ran into a friend who wasn't quite on a bender, but rather was on ten nights of successive drinking (a bender would be ten days and nights of drinking). I couldn't do that; even with the break for "normal" life (wake up, have breakfast, go to work, have lunch, work, go home, eat supper) things start seeming tenuous after two or three nights out. The converse of William James' contention that "Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites and says yes" is that if you do it too often (and I have a very low tolerance for this), you begin to have difficulty discriminating yourself from the rest of existence.

There's a reason Nietzsche said the Apollonian was a necessary illusion (one of individuality, separateness, order); too many nights engaged in even mildly Dionysian pursuits and you start to blur around the edges and fade away.