I'm in a muuuuuch better mood right now, having spent last night at a fancier hotel and drinking beer and trading Notes — don't be dissuaded! It ends so happily — for British women's magazines, which I'll be filling you in on as the day progresses. But before I do:

1. Free shit: An old friend of mine at the Journal who covered the fast food industry once told me the watershed moment in the McDonald's corporate history was the invention of the Happy Meal. The promise of a cheap heavily-advertised ever-revolving toy instantly turned the restaurant into the favored purveyor of crying children and by extension their parents and as a bonus instilled at the most impressionable age a taste for the company's distinctive brand of caloric substance. I mean, duh, but still. Anyway every magazine in the UK seems to come with a free toy. Eve and ELLE came with canvas tote bags that smell vaguely of petrochemicals, COMPANY came with a novel called "Angel" ("But then she meets Mickey, the lead singer of a boy band, who is as irresistible as he is dangerous, and Angel realises that a rising star can just as quickly fall…"), Tatler came with a pair of sunglasses, and some other magazine I didn't buy came with flip-flops. Which brings me to a thought: I don't really want free shit with my women's magazines, but I always thought incorporating more free shit into the shrink wrap section of the Sunday papers — you know, little packs of cereal, large samples of warming pore cleansers, cigarettes or something mildly addictive — could be the business move that saved the newspaper industry. Maybe I should discuss this at tonight's panel…

2. Beer: I like beers wherein the bitterness manages to seep through to my blunted taste buds. IPAs, etc. Not sure what to drink here.

3. I am not saying this because they paid for me to be here but: I highly enjoyed this story.

Methanol is the extra stuff in whiskey and wine and beer, which are, IMHO, the only alcoholic beverages really worth drinking. Breaking it down is the most painful part of the hangover process. If you give your liver other things to work on — eggs, grease — you can assuage the pain. But then there's the matter of assuaging the guilt.

See, Kingsley Amis knows what I'm talking about:

Feeling bad isn't such a bad thing, from Amis's point of view. With its "vast, vague, awful, shimmering metaphysical superstructure" of guilt and shame, the hangover provides a "unique route to self-knowledge and self-realization." In his book "On Drink," Amis recommends a raft of remedies for the Physical Hangover and then gets on to the Metaphysical Hangover, a combination of "anxiety, self-hatred, sense of failure and fear for the future" that may or may not be the result of alcoholic overindulgence. Dealing with the Metaphysical part of the equation entails reading Solzhenitsyn, which "will do you the important service of suggesting that there are plenty of people about who have a bloody sight more to put up with than you (or I) have or ever will have."

The last time I was truly hungover, so many, many beverages ago — which is to say, last Saturday morning — I managed to get to a bookstore before the methanol began breaking down, leaving me unable to stand. So I picked up the first book I noticed — The Idiot, great title, and sat in the corner on the floor. I stood up sometime after coming to a passage wherein the protagonist, a Christ-y figure, passionately inveighs against the notion that the guillotine, rendering decapitation swift and painless, represents the most humane method of executing someone:

If there were torture, for instance, there would be suffering and wounds, bodily agony, and so all that would distract the mind from spiritual suffering, so that one would only be tortured by wounds till one died.

And I read that and I began to feel guilty for needing, like Amis, that physical suffering to stir up and reestablish my own spiritual suffering, the limited faculties that accompany a Morning After to truly hone in on Why Get Up At All, when…

Yeah, we are all just way too fucking Catholic. No wonder my people all evolved into drunks.

I would like to say "And then I hurled," but I can't hurl; that's probably a Catholic thing too.

The Hangover Artist
A Few Too Many? [New Yorker]