Ten years ago:
One night after work, I stopped over to play trivia with Allie at the restaurant in the mall. There was some kind of automated system, and teams registered answers on a little remote control. I answered history and sports while Allie covered pop culture topics, and we mopped up the place in short order.
This restaurant was one of the few places in Holland where I could get cider on a regular basis. I pounded cider all night, celebrating our victories over the poor trivia losers, as well as the day off I was looking forward to the next day. I was much too drunk in pretty short order, and Allie had to pour me into her car and drag my ass home.
"Do you need me to help you up the stairs?"
"No, no, no, I'll be alright."
"Good, because I couldn't really do it anyway."
It took me about ten minutes to navigate up the now-even-steeper stairs and through my front door. I managed to throw myself onto the bed and fall asleep pretty quickly, but it was the kind of drunken sleep where hours pass during a blink of an eye. The next thing I knew, it was six in the morning and I really needed to pee. I managed to convince my body to get off of the bed, and headed toward the bathroom.
The next thing I knew, my alarm clock went off. This was unexpected.
I discovered that I was laying with my face pressed into the linoleum tile of my kitchen floor. I had also developed a really intense headache, which was making the bout of disorientation even harder to work through. I was afraid that I had given up halfway to the bathroom, and curled up on my kitchen floor for some reason or another. I didn't completely understand until I reached up and touched the enormous lump on the top of my head.
In my attempt to reach the bathroom, I had neglected to duck when I went from the bedroom to the kitchen. I had hit my head on the top of the door casing, and knocked myself out cold. I was lucky that the lump was above my hairline, out of sight unless I was intentionally looking to find it. Since I wasn't dizzy or nauseous, I figured that I was probably going to be okay in the end.
I hope to never need to rub a linoleum patten off of my cheek ever again.
Notes on a life in exile: A retrospective
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