Giving the Devil Head

When I was a child, that grizzled drill sergeant we call God tried to teach me about hangovers.

Occasionally mum would allow us a chocolate Mighty Milk – they later changed the name to the odd-sounding Steri Stumpy, which for some reason always made me think of a guy with his legs cut off at the knees.

Dad would punch a hole in the top of it with his keys so we could drink it, and I would without fail down the lot in a series of frantic gulps.

I knew it was a bad idea, and that not long after I would suffer a painful belly-wrench. But I didn’t care; I loved that Mighty Milk so much I just couldn’t stop myself.

I got so used to the hurt that by the age of eight I could take a punch in the gut from Mike Tyson and carry on building a model airplane without skipping a beat.

So you see it’s not so much the headache part of a hangover that bothers me. The hangovers that I dread are the ones when I wake up feeling like Linda Blair.

I’m talking about that floating, hazy feeling; that heavy lump of shame; when you can’t remember what you did or who you offended, but you know it was along the lines of a 360 degree head rotation and projectile pukage onto a priest.

Losing mates this way is a bit more dramatic than finding you’ve been unfriended a few months after the fact, and it’s usually just as public and embarrassing as a series of angry wall posts ping-ponged across t’interweb.

Naturally, this hasn’t stopped me from drinking as much, but rather just to identify the types of poison that turn me from a jolly Jekyll to a heinous Hyde.

And much study has brought me to the conclusion that if Satan gave golden showers, you’d smell like you’d been in a Mexican barfight – tequila is the Devil’s discharge.

Seriously, they should just package Jose Cuervo in veiny, red penis-shaped bottles – maybe with two great testes so it won’t fall over as easily… and horns on its bell-end.

It looks like piss. It tastes like piss. No, no, it’s from the blue agave plant in Mexico. It’s just a coincidence that it resembles a liquid by-product excreted through the urethra. Don’t worry about the taste, lick some salt and suck a lemon afterwards.

You’d have to be shitfaced to fall for that!

All the teenage Satanists from the Eighties grew up to be Brandhouse reps pushing what they tell you is cactus juice.

With God telling you one thing and the Devil winking and suggesting another, it’s tough.

If, as Eric Draven in The Crow tells a junkie, Mother is the name for God in the hearts and minds of children, then Satan is the tattooed slag you wouldn’t take home to meet her.

I stopped drinking once, until a good friend told me I was much more fun drunk. And according to Chuck Palahniuk all God does is watch you and then kill you when you get boring, so...

I guess life’s just more exciting when you’re confused.