Watch as my life spirals into control
My little run in with that recent non-alcohol induced hangover reminded me of a challenge I took back in 1999. I was on a trip to Wilmington visiting friends at the annual W.E. Fest. It’s a week of music and partying and on this particular year I decided not to drink. Seven days, how hard can that be?
Wilmington used to have this blue law that stated if you had live music after 2:00 AM, you could not sell beer. Ah, there’s the rub … you could not SELL beer. So … we gave it away for free. It was hard enough to be in the bars from 7:00 PM to 2:00 AM. Especially when they’d have buck-fifty Pabst Blue Ribbon and other assorted cheap drinks. To then be at an after-hours party until 6:00 AM with a rowdy crowd, great music, the heat of North Carolina around Memorial Day and free beer makes ‘7 days sober’ it a difficult goal to reach indeed.
The most peculiar bit of this particular trip was how one of my roomies could seem to transfer his hangovers to my head. When I arrived in Wilmington, I had no place to stay. I befriended two girls from Idaho and two guys from Ohio. The girls had just moved to town and invited me to crash on their floor.
One of the guys (called Grog … no, not Greg) used to somehow always wake up before me. As I’d open my eyes and peer up from under the kitchen table (yes I was sober), he’d glare down to me with a big ass smile and a syrupy jolly ‘good morning’, my head would immediately begin pounding. It was eerie! Seriously.
