… And night became day. I hate the cold light of morning after a night on the pop. In summer it’s annoyingly early and it’s no shame to be up and about at 4am, but in the dead of winter it lurks in and makes you feel guilty. Nothing makes you feel more exhausted than it getting light either. I must have seen the dawn in several hundred times, but still the feeling is always the same. Especially when you see shops opening up and people walking briskly to work. And what have you done? Had about twenty beers and talked nonsense to strangers. It’s a strange feeling of guilt. Not that there should ever be any guilt and apology attached to boozing of course, unless you’ve pushed someone in front of a train when the jokes got out of hand at 3am, and I fiercely defend the right not to feel any guilt and apology in an increasingly boring and staid world, but there’s a weary guilt to the sleepless morning none the less.
Some people attack it with the “Hell, we’ll go on right through until tonight and then get a proper night’s sleep� attitude. It’s noble but it doesn’t work. It’s not just the hours that begin to take their toll, it’s the fact that the only thing keeping you going is the sugars in the beer, and if you take your foot off the gas you’ll want nothing more than a pillow. If you don’t take your foot off the gas you’ll be chugging on ineffective beers that have no pleasure or flavour to them. Switch to spirits and they’ll kick you in the head.
So we entered the Lion today at about 11.30am having toured a few early venues in the city. The crowd at Lloyd’s at 7am is a disheartening one, I can tell you. These people haven’t been up all night, they’ve just got up early to come and have a beer and to sit and look miserable with the world on their own. Why get up? Why not come into town at, say, 10am for a beer? Like normal people.
Anyway, The Lion. There comes a point where you’re not going to raise your game again and I knew that, I also had an incurable case of hic-ups, and so I made my excuses and came home. There’s no point in trying to stay up in this case either, you have to take your weary bones up to bed, knowing full well that you’ll wake up early in the evening and your sleep pattern, for what it’s worth, will be shot to pieces.
I used to do all this so regularly, and I’m still young, but I can see it receding regardless of whether I want it to or not. I think the big factor is that I’m also starting a company, and you can’t run one when your out of your mind. The Modern Drunkard Magazine, perhaps, but then it’s their job to out of their minds. I also see it as the last few months of my twenties, and whilst hitting thirty next year is really just a day, it will be a marked one, I know that. I will have a change of mindset. And so fun, if pointless, nights like last night are really just a swansong to the glorious Twenties, and I will leave it all behind. It’s depressing, but I really do have to.
Ideally, I’ll be quite sensible in my thirties, make a pile of cash, and then go mental in my forties, fifties and sixties. But I think the 30’s will be a time of concentration. We’ll see, we’ll see…. Doing stand-up for a living is one of the main contributing factors to a hedonistic lifestyle of course. Stand-ups have zero responsibility. Running a company will bring responsibility in spades and I’m not going to duck out of it.
See how just one long night can make you question yourself? It’s a pain in the arse and just another reason not to bother with the binges in the first place. Not that I’m going to smoke a pipe and live in Orkney during my thirties of course, I’ll hopefully be raising a glass in Tokyo with a plane ticket to Miami in my pocket, but things will have to slow down in some respects.
Still, another five months until that sobering day comes so in the mean time… Chin chin.
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