Have you hugged a toilet bowl lately?

(Here’s a little something for those suffering from Pikoli exhaustion. Did it ever occur to anyone that one day our national obsession would be a fired chubby guy who may or may not be missing a tooth, to quote a soon-to-be-Schabir’s-best-mate editor, when we risked skin cancer en masse on April 27 1994?)

It is an open secret that I do not have too much faith in the phenomenon called human intelligence — including my own. I have chugged many a spear in the direction of other human idiots, which has prompted many an irate reader to accuse me of believing that I’m exempt from human idiocy. Today, I dispel that misguided notion.

I spent this past weekend in my hometown of Durban. By sheer coincidence, the weekend shaped itself into some kind of boys’ reunion, without any female supervision. If you just exclaimed, “Oh-oh”, you have advanced pattern recognition. Being the World Cup semis (and one fat, fanatical rugby-supporting coconut in our midst), the weekend degenerated into a beer-guzzling, rugby-watching orgy.

Drinking alcohol has to rank in the top two most idiotic ideas we have come up with so far as a human collective. Pink shirts for men top the polls. This is a practice whose sole objective is to induce a mental disorder that prompts the Einstein who is drinking the alcohol to lose sense of all reality and hallucinate that he is smart or sexually appealing to the opposite gender. Other recreational drugs and music have the same effect on people, of course. Yes, I said music. I think we can all agree that music can alter one’s state of mind just like da herb.

But this is not about other idiots; it’s about me. Before last weekend, I had not engaged in a proper alcoholic binge in a while. Women, the party poopers, always stand in the way of fun. When I’m asked why it is that I love beer so, I have a standard response. It is in the interest of pursuing that elusive happiness, the ultimate Holy Grail of all humankind. In the absence of happiness, the illusion of happiness can only be brought about by the right amount of beer at just the optimal rate.

The next best thing to happiness on tap is beer on tap. The immature riff-raff of savages I call my friends refer to me by the acronym the BGM — the Beer-Guzzling Machine. I always brag that my body is an efficient beer-processing contraption that has an uncanny ability to sift through the golden nectar, spit out the BS and go right to the heart of the beer.

Lest I be accused of glorifying alcohol, allow me to take you quickly through the stages of an alcoholic binge. I hope that it acts as a deterrent to any other moron who decides to have 17 beers and eight tequila-flaming-sambuca combos:

1. The super state of semi-intoxication
This state of drunkenness is the reason most people drink booze. There is clarity of mind attained by any beer drinker after a genetically predetermined number of pints during which he is under the illusion of reaching great intellectual heights. This is when I personally discover that no problem is too complicated for my super brain. I find that pearls of wisdom roll off my tongue. Why, just this past weekend I solved the Middle East problem. I don’t remember the details clearly, but the solution involved having our home affairs officials manning all Israel’s borders and then it gets a bit fuzzy. I know; I should have written it down, but I was a bit busy.

2. “The funny thing is, I’m still sober” state
I have christened this state after my friend with a girly name. It’s Linda’s favourite thing to say when he’s in this state. When he is in the throes of this state of drunkenness, this becomes his rallying cry. Or, the slight variation, “My god! I haven’t been this sober in ages!” This is the intermediary state between SSS and total inebriation.

This is when the booze is starting to use you as a source of entertainment. This it does by creating a hallucination in your mind that makes you incapable of realising its effect. While during the SSS you are vaguely aware of a certain buzz … a certain glow, during this state you feel extremely sober for some unfathomable reason. Of course this prompts you to go down the suicidal path of screaming at the waitron in a squeaky, girly voice: “Waitress! Are you diluting our booze or something?! OK, tell you what; a round of tequilas for my friends and I! Wait, what am I saying? A round of tequilas and a round of blue flaming sambucas. Of course, at the same time! What’s wrong with you?!”

If you think that one of the other barely-primates around the table would object to this on the grounds that the tequila-sambuca combo is criminally insane, you would be a girl. No. Loud cheering, hand slapping all around, and the idiot making this statement gets closer to canonisation by the Church of Stupid.

If you want to get an answer to the question whether there is life after death, point out to an individual in this state that he may have had enough, and could he please pass you his car keys? I promise you that you will get much closer to your Maker (or, to randomness in the case of Jarred Cinman) than at any other point in your life.

3. Total inebriation. The wasted state
This state creeps up on a fellow. I’m ordinarily having way too much fun marvelling at my “Mantorised liver of steel” (I came up with this gem at 3am on Sunday morning) to notice the signs that I’m sliding down the slippery slope of sloshedness.

Roundabout this time you discover that you have lost complete control of the set of muscles in and around your jaw, lips and tongue. All of a sudden “sit over there” comes out as “shit over zhere” and you cannot, for the life of you, pronounce any consonants without simultaneously showering your companions with 5mm of drizzle, half the annual rainfall of Tripoli.

Because beer, your lord, is not without any sense of humour and irony; he now convinces you that, in order to salvage some of the ground you are losing in a debate about the presidential succession race, this is the proper time to pepper your conversation with important-sounding words such as “proliferation”, “elucidate” or, the omnipresent phrase in all pubs across the land, “statistically speaking”. The sum total of all your efforts is that the pub manager now comes over to invoke the no-politics-in-the-bar rule despite the fact that he’s been listening to it all night. You’re now embarrassing your entire family, dead, alive or yet-to-be-born, with your antics.

Now your limbs discover their trade-union credentials and decide to show solidarity with the public-service workers and embark on an ill-fated industrial action. You somehow lift your body up, steady yourself and make a comedic attempt at walking in a straight line towards the gentlemen’s. You do everything but walk straight. In fact, you take the longest possible route — one that would make the Children of Israel’s exodus out of Egypt look like an efficient, GPS-aided navigation through the desert. And then you proceed to piss everywhere else but in the urinal — half of it all over your shoes. At this point the hiccups begin …

Oh, every beer/whisky drinker has overshot his mark up to this point. You walk into the house, switch on the lights and wonder if you’ve walked into the source of Eskom’s erratic power supply. Your eyes are flooded with light of such intensity your upper body is physically thrown back by the force. After all your bitching and moaning about the power cuts, Koeberg has finally come to you.

As soon as your head touches the pillow you think the Hindu Festival of Lights is taking place inside your head. You have never seen such colourful fireworks before. Next, you discover that while you were gone someone has installed a merry-go-round motor under your bed and now it is spinning at 300rpm. And finally, you discover that the viscosity of your saliva has decreased so drastically it quickly fills up in your mouth, which can only mean … crap!

There is something both hilarious and alarming about the violent convulsions one’s upper torso is subjected to when hurling George after an alcoholic binge. And it comes in waves too; waves that have a tendency to catch you by surprise just when you think you’re done. And every experienced hurler knows which wave is truly the last one.

It’s the one that grips you and won’t let go for a good 20 seconds. When you’re completely empty and spent. When every piece of partially digested nachos and jalapenos has rolled off your tongue, but you’re still retching. During those last wretched 20 seconds I always imagine the devil in Hell looking down on me cruelly, going: “That one is just for good measure.”

And at last, the humiliation has come to its final conclusion in a heap of heaving, hiccupping mass hugging of a toilet bowl with a long, thick, slimy string of saliva attached to both the bottom lip and the inside of the bowl. You don’t even have the energy to blow it off, not that you could even if you tried. That’s how stubborn it is. Your humiliation is now complete.

Have you hugged a porcelain bowl lately?

[email protected]