“Criminy, it was the worst drunk I ever suffered. Fourteen pints in, I’d forgotten me own name, and I was as legless as a soul treading an ice sheet with jello boots. My brain felt like the devil himself was peeing upon it, shorting all circuits and synapses except for the few that could fire off my one sacred thought: More ale, please. Two glasses later, I could but wriggle myself slowly across the floor, moaning aloud my joy at the perihelion of alcoholic orbit. Opening and closing my eyelids had no discernable effect whatsoever. I couldn’t count to Two if you gave me the One. The loo was far too demanding a journey, as my underwear could attest. At this point, my stomach had only become a brief stopping point in the ale’s course through the body, whereupon the good brew did discharge its promised effects. The whacks on my back were friends reminding me to breathe. I remember profane outbursts and the ankles of women I managed to grab when they trod close enough to my lair on the floor. It was like all of royal history weighing on my back, saying “Never more shall you rise, now cry for more poison” to which I could only reply with the loudest and vilest curses. I slept it off the next day, and I was glad to hear that the rest of my niece’s baptism went as planned.”

“Arrr, there were another occasion. ‘Twas amazing the effect that nine lagers and a flask of whiskey had on my mental and motor functions, like breaking into a vomitous sweat as my vision went snowy and Thor smacked me legless with his mighty ball peen. O sweet concoction, whiskey and cola, sickly sweet and with such punch! I felt like I was grasping a high voltage fence with both hands. Funny thing is, you don’t feel the floor when you crumple upon it, wheezing and braying like a blue-balled ox. Yet I begged for more! “Just one more glass, one for the road that leads to the devil’s own chambers!” Naked lay I, to the last mole and scar, holding lecherous court behind a moat of my own sick. A thousand tiny furies tugged at the folds of my brain and urged me on to ever louder and viler curses. I heard the siren songs of sweet ladies who passed by and offered them services that my gelatinous body had no ability to deliver. My bowels evicted all transients, accompanied by the bellowing of horrifying profanities, and the room spun like a carnival ride, or a death ship on turbulent waters, with me as the doomed captain. The gods heeded my begging and let me pass out. When I came to, the papers were being signed, and the bank officers had indeed granted us our loan. Natch!”


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