The Sunday Hangover with Warren Ellis

THE SUNDAY HANGOVER
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WARREN ELLIS

So in preparation for today I bought a bottle of something called Head Start, which calls itself “thirst aid for hangovers.” A hypotonic energy drink, it seems to be the current iteration of “smart nutrients,” which we all crammed into our bodies in the late Eighties/early Nineties in the hope that we could be both drunks-and-druggies and immortal geniuses. This thing is stuffed with easy-burn carbs, electrolytes, vitamins and detoxing amino acids. It sounds great, and probably a lot less hellacious on the system than some of the gunk we necked in the cyberdelic days to try and light up our punished synapses after nights of cheap beer, worse whisky and licking the yellowed bottoms of bathtubs that the local E was mixed in last week.

I can’t get the bottle open. The lid seems to be fused shut somehow.

Head Start is the most horrific joke on drunks I have ever seen perpetrated in the field of retail. I can’t cut this fucking thing open.

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Back from the States, where I found myself once again quite horrified by the news provision over there. The newsgathering widget on my handheld computer blew up, and the hotel TV system didn’t pipe in BBC News 24, so, given the time constraints of my working schedule, I found myself reliant on the likes of CNN to find out what was going on in the world. And, my God. Apparently nothing happened that entire week outside of Lindsay Lohan – who I’m told is an actress, though I’ve never seen anything she’s been in – evidently necking a crate of Thunderbird and leaping into a truck filled with cocaine and dead babies in an attempt to run down and/or deliver vigilante justice to her ex-assistant and her mother. Or something. The rolling half-hour “specials” that replaced anything that appeared to be actual news dissected this thing so many ways that, really, I have no idea what happened the fateful night that Ms Lohan cracked the crust of stale, blood-flecked coke off her crotch and said to her soon-to-be-ex-assistant while snorting cough medicine up into her forebrain, “shove your arm up there, girl. I want to come on your elbow.” Because the very rich are not like you and me.

Actually, that might not have happened. The awesome newsgathering power of the mighty CNN tried so many scenarios on the simple fact that some sandwich-dodging crazy actress (newsflash; all actressses are crazy. Also, the sky is blue) who likes a bit of chas went apeshit at her assistant that the actual facts were totally lost.

Which makes it, in its way, the perfect object lesson of American news. Given the time, CNN and their kin can present the news in such a way that it makes no sense to anyone, and increases no-one’s understanding of current events and the times they live in. I spent nine days in America this time, and it felt like I was in a bottle lost on the tide. I’m still catching up on what happened in the world over those nine days. All I know about that time is that Lindsay Lohan is the Road Warrior and the Space Shuttle can be flown while shitfaced. And the only reaction I can muster to nine days of American news is: I hope to God they didn’t pack Head Start on those Shuttle flights.

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The only other thing you should be doing on Sundays is finding out What Zo’s Wearing. See to it.