Last night is a blur. I know I told Cade and Kari I’d be taking things easy but it didn’t quite end up that way. At the point I ended up in a karaoke room full of military guys being told to please help chug their Saki (which I did, straight from the bottle) it was clear that the evening would not end well.

There is getting wasted in the fun sense of the word, where you act silly, do some shit you otherwise wouldn’t, and have a more or less harmless evening that you laugh about later with friends. And then there’s getting wasted to the point you’re sprawled out on the floor with the room spinning so fast you’re not sure it’ll ever be still again and begging your friends to make it stop. The nights you clutch the toilet bowl and think to yourself “There can’t possibly be anything left to vomit can there?” The nights that make you wonder how far gone you’ve let things go.

Last night was one of those nights, likely the most messed up I’ve been in my entire life. It was easily the most I’ve ever vomited. I haven’t had anything like it in nearly four years. Most of the time you wake up after one of those nights with a ripping headache, a pain in your stomach, and the mantra of “Ill never drink again.” Thanks to chugging a ton of water and vitamins I woke up at 4:30pm without any real trace of a hangover. I woke up knowing I’d one day drink again, but I can’t say I have any desire to do it again soon.

What I didn’t expect to wake up with was such an enormous sense of clarity. I can’t quite explain it, but somehow while going through the process of purging all the physical misery from my system; I seem to have purged my mental demons as well. I woke up feeling calm, settled, yet somehow motivated. I got a considerable amount of writing done today, including adding another entry to the ‘Things it took me a while to learn’ canon. The entry will appear on Pocketfives first and then be on the blog a couple of days after that. I even played quite a few poker tournaments today, and played patient and well.

I even somehow woke up with a greater sense of confidence (which seems as corny as it is nonsensical.) I used to be a guy so overwhelmingly sure of himself that it felt like I was on a perch I could never be knocked from. As Tucker Max once put it “Having confidence bordering on delusional hubris.” Not the most modest term, but you get the point. The last few weeks I haven’t been anything close to that, and I suppose what last night made clear for me is that pumping myself full of liquid courage isn’t the correct band aid for the mental bruise. Nothing about me has really changed the last few weeks, yet I’ve somehow felt the need to try to prop myself up with a constant stream of the sauce.

Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t the end of my drunken misadventures. Not by a long shot. But I’ve lost my sense of urgency and necessity about them. I feel ready to get back to work, not only in poker but in life. I just proof read this entry, and fuck does it sound pretentious. But whatever, I’m going back to work.

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