DISCLAIMER

People often ask me what it's like being an expat in Dubai. Actually they don't but like the rest of this blog, let's just blindly assume people care what I think and go on from there. Dubai is beautiful, it's a sun-drenched tax-free paradise, with a wise and benevolent ruler. There is no real winter to speak of and the roads are beset with outrageous supercars. If your eyes ever tire of street level gawking, there are thousands of kilometres of sky scrapers to develop neck trauma to. Yes, in many ways it is paradise, but what is paradise without a little trouble? In the Wachowski (formerly) brothers movie trilogy: The Matrix, a sentient program called 'Agent Smith' describes the failure of our robot overlords to captivate and pacify human minds in a sensory-fed utopia: "Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world where none suffered, where everyone would be happy? It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed that we lacked the programming language to describe your "perfect world". But I believe that, as a species human beings define their reality through misery and suffering. So the perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from". And that's where we are with this blog: a long whimsical stare in to the bathroom mirror wondering what would have happened if you took the blue pill, intended as nothing more than a (sincerely respectful) bit of probing in to the more bizarre side of living in the UAE.

Tuesday, 14 July 2015

The Wheel Of Disproportionate Hangovers

I'm a strict atheist, and as such never drink. But when I do drink, which is all the time, I'm drunk now in fact, I get drunk on good old booze, moonshine, grandpa's old whooping cough syrup, not on life. What do people think they are saying by being ''drunk on life''? That they're giddy with delirium from the same continuum that they've been part of since birth. No, what they're saying is - 'void my driving license immediately, it would be irresponsible to leave children in my care, have you seen my other shoe? Whose shoe is this? fetch me a kebab'. It's largely irrelevant because life is condition of existence and not a hopsy beverage - which means these people are either lying, or suffering from a mental illness where they dissociate and absentmindedly sniff marker pens every 5 minutes.




Anyway, I digress, as usual. So, after a drinking session - we're left in varying degrees of fragility which should be relative to the quantity, type and mixing (enhanced or mitigated by other negligible contributory factors) of alcohol drunk. In Dubai however, it doesn't seem to follow any such observable pattern. Sometimes I have literally a few small glasses of wine and wake up with a hangover worthy of 4th movie in the film franchise of the same name - where a band of irresponsible man-children act out deeply suppressed sociopathic tendencies in either Bangkok or Vegas. 

Other times, I drink several people's skin's full - the type of drunk where you walk in gait born of a hybrid between Fagin and Captain Jack Sparrow, and wake up either still pleasantly drunk or lacking the expected all-engulfing black hole of hang. The variable that seems to have the most influence is how much you have planned for the next day, which is then amplified by physically saying out loud that you can only have a couple - because of the amount of things you have planned for the next day. 

Maybe it's the heat, maybe it's indiscriminate roofie fairies, maybe it''s solar flares or refracted sunlight through swamp gas or the illuminati, whatever the cause - it can be neatly analogised by spinning the big wheel of disproportionate hangovers.



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