Sheriff Jim Witt's Hangover From Hell
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Sheriff Jim Witt was supposed to wake up dead on New Year's Day, but he didn't... he only woke up wishing he was dead, which was pretty much exactly the opposite of what he'd been going for. It was like ordering a peaceful eternal rest and receiving a cosmic prank call instead.
The night of December 31st, 2041 had been just another Saturday night for Jim, and he'd celebrated the new year by doing what he always did on a Saturday night... he got stupid drunk on 190-proof double-rectified moonshine and attempted to shuffle off this mortal coil. A weekly suicidal drinking binge had been his tradition ever since he'd been forced to resign his commission from the army - like the world's most depressing hobby that nobody would ever put on a résumé.
Over the past twenty-or-so years, he had actually come close to punching his own cosmic time card on more than one occasion, but invariably he would wind up blacking out before getting down to the brass tacks of it. Oh, and it didn't help that Sheriff Jim Witt of Podunk County, Georgia, was also a hopelessly cheerful drunk, which made for absolutely terrible suicide vibes every single time. It was like trying to perform Hamlet while giggling uncontrollably - the dramatic impact just wasn't there. If it wasn't for the fact that he had a county to sheriff and a moonshine route to drive, Jim would have chosen to stay drunk all the time. At least drunk Jim found the universe amusing instead of personally offensive.
As Jim struggled against consciousness, the inside of his noggin felt like it was being scrubbed vigorously with a Brillo pad dipped in detergent. Simply trying to think was nearly impossible while shouldering a devastating, planet-sized hangover, which was just about exactly the opposite of the peaceful void he'd been expecting that Sunday morning. Nowadays though, simply waking up was a disappointment, and he was always bitterly surprised when it happened, like receiving a participation trophy for babysitting a 900 pound retarded toddler.
On this particular Sunday morning, a ray of sweet sunshine containing the first photons of the gathering dawn gentled softly upon Jim's left eyelid like an angel fart. To that left eyeball, however, the substance of that single spark of hope felt like a NAZI JACKBOOT STOMPING DIRECTLY ONTO THE LEFT HEMISPHERE OF HIS BRAIN! Jim SCROUGHLED awake, choking on the snotty boogers of his own wet, ugly snores. With a mighty HAAGGHCK! a slimy lougie PSCHFLOOP'd across his tongue and somewhere over there, across the kitchen, landing with what could only be described as a disappointed splat. The inside of his mouth remained dry and his lips were spit-welded together like some kind of organic superglue experiment gone wrong. They made a moist 'pop' as they came unstuck, followed by the sound of him trying to build up saliva by smacking his tongue and lips together, which sounded exactly like a dog having an intimate encounter with its own nether regions, complete with what could only be described as enthusiastic sound effects.
"Tastes like a dog's butthole," Jim muttered with the resignation of a food critic who'd hit rock bottom and kept digging. He tried to inhale through his nose and was greeted with the smell of snotty, freshly snored boogers that had apparently been aging like fine wine throughout the night. His eyes were gummed up and crusted over with what felt like organic cement mixed with crushed dreams.
Jim was definitely disappointed. He'd chickened out again, like a suicidal rooster with performance anxiety. *If I'm really serious about blowing my brains out,* he thought with the practical wisdom of someone who'd made this same resolution multiple times, *I'm gonna have to man up and do it sober. This drunk suicide thing clearly isn't working out.*
Jim's head was full of this... this all-encompassing, everywhere kind of nausea that seemed to have colonized every available neuron and set up a small, vindictive civilization. *Ubiquitous,* Jim thought to himself as he heaved and pulsated while trying to catch his breath. *Ubiquitous.* He'd learned that word some twenty years ago from a science fiction novel, and at the time he'd thought it a pretty damn cool word. Now it just seemed like the universe's way of being pretentious about his suffering.
Ubiquitous—meaning ever-present, abundant, all over the place, filling the nooks and crannies, just all over everything like cosmic spam. *The boogers in my nose are ubiquitous,* he mused philosophically as he threw up all over the kitchen floor in a display that could only be described as artistically comprehensive.
Jim thought of all the ubiquitous things in his life that he hated. The ubiquitous waking up that happened every day was the worst... then there was the ubiquitous hangover, followed by the ubiquitous passage of time, which contained the ubiquitous dread from which he observed his own ubiquitous habits, every day, ubiquitously.
*Oh, how I hate that word,* he thought. *It's just so... pretentious! And ubiquitous!*
Jim went through a mental checklist of his available senses with the methodical approach of someone conducting a personal inventory after a natural disaster. Smell? Check, and unfortunately functional. Touch? Check, and reporting way too much information. Ubiquitous pain? Double check with a side of bonus suffering. Sight? Huh... something was definitely still wrong there.
*Maybe you're just so catastrophically hungover that you forgot to open your eyes,* he thought with the patient logic of someone talking to themselves like they were a particularly slow child. He scurried backwards on his ass and hands across the kitchen linoleum, reaching for some kind of stable purchase while looking exactly like a panic-stricken crab fleeing from existential dread. He finally backed up forcibly against the refrigerator, which he'd left open the night before after a drunken search for sustenance that had apparently ended in failure and poor decision-making. The impact jolted a jar of pickles that he'd left perched precariously on the rack above, because apparently drunk Jim had the organizational skills of a caffeinated toddler.
The pickle jar fell over, spilling green vinegary liquid all over his head and onto his face, immediately dissolving the dried crusty muck sealing his eyes shut like some kind of briny miracle cure administered by the universe's least sympathetic nurse. His eyes flickered open.
"I CAN SEE!" Jim exulted with the joy of someone who'd just experienced a minor miracle involving condiments and poor refrigerator maintenance. Then the pickle juice was all over his eyeballs.
"I'M BLIND!" he screamed with the dramatic flair of someone discovering that miracles often come with hidden service charges.
He scrambled to his feet, one hand furiously trying to punch the fire out of his eyes while the other groped around blindly for something to extinguish the flames that didn't involve punching his own lights out. Jim abruptly recognized the kitchen sink with his thrusting, outstretched hand, like a blind man finding salvation in familiar plumbing.
"WATER!" he exclaimed breathlessly, and immediately put both hands to the task of making water happen in the sink with the desperate efficiency of someone whose eyeballs were currently hosting their own personal hell convention... but what happened instead of water was just cosmically bad luck administered with surgical precision.
His frantic, jerking hands happened upon the jar of methanol that he'd carefully extracted from the latest batch of hooch the night before—methanol he'd reserved for some future project involving "that gawtdam dog" and had left safely in the sink to await its vengeful purpose. However, being blind, hungover, eyeballs on fire, and desperate for relief, Jim completely failed to remember to put the two and two of the previous night together into anything resembling a coherent memory. Instead, he latched onto that jar of methanol, thinking it was cool, precious, fire-quenching water sent by benevolent plumbing deities. He upended it upon his upturned face and directly into his pickle-juiced, already-on-fire eyes.
The pain was so tremendous that the nerves conducting it from his eyes to his brain actually backed up like a cosmic traffic jam designed by someone with serious sadistic tendencies. Fully five seconds transpired as he stood there, immersed in a kind of un-feeling... much like what happens when you touch something so hot that your brain freaks out and tries to convince you it's actually freezing, because apparently pain has its own twisted sense of humor. Five seconds of rapturous, expectant, kind of hot-cold-numb limbo transpired for Jim as he stood there in his kitchen with an upturned jar of methanol held over his hopefully expectant, pain-wracked face like he was conducting some kind of deranged baptism ceremony.
Then the traffic jam of nerve endings became a pileup that just kept piling up and piling up and piling up, until it was a 7:00 AM rush hour traffic massacre of pain, pointing with pointy, painful, on-fire points that piled up like cosmic construction cones, all pointing right into his eyeballs from every direction... and every direction was ON FIRE!
Jim SHRIEKED with the vocal enthusiasm of someone whose morning had officially crossed the line from "bad" into "cosmically vindictive."
This finally woke up the gawtdam dog, which he'd almost forgotten about in his preoccupation with personal suffering.
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Enter Mighty Whitey: The Alcoholic Rottweiler of Questionable Life Choices
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The dog was an ancient Rottweiler colored a dirty shade of white that suggested either advanced age or a serious laundry mishap. It was blind, and its name was Mighty Whitey—a name that had seemed hilarious when Jim was drunk but now felt like just another example of his questionable decision-making skills.
Mighty Whitey was an alcoholic dog that had gone blind after it slurped down a large container full of methanol that Jim had left on the counter, thinking it would be out of the dog's reach. Not so, as it turned out, because an alcoholic dog will track down its own "hair of the dog" with the dedication of a bloodhound working for the DEA.
So it had happened that Mighty Whitey leaped onto the kitchen counter with the athletic prowess of a canine Olympic champion and slurped down enough methanol to kill an elephant. To Mighty Whitey, however, it was barely enough to catch a decent-sized doggy buzz, though it did blind him permanently.
But that hardly even slowed the dog down when it came to sniffing out its own hair of the dog, because apparently addiction transcends the limitations of functional eyesight.
"THAT GAWTDAM DOG!" Jim suddenly hollered out loud, as murky details of the night before came flooding back to him like a tsunami of bad memories and poor planning.
The sound of his own voice was like an inside-out kick to the head delivered by someone wearing boots made of concentrated suffering. His hands jerked up reflexively to his face, and he could feel the skin of his eyelids pulsing against his palms as his eyeballs tried to make a run for it.
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The Great Kitchen Chase Sequence (Or: How to Turn a Hangover into an Olympic Event)
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What happened next could only be described as the kind of slapstick comedy routine that would make the Three Stooges weep with professional jealousy.
Mighty Whitey, awakened from his alcoholic slumber by Jim's shriek of methanol-induced agony, immediately went into what could only be described as "Breakfast Mode"—which, for an alcoholic dog, meant tracking down the nearest source of fermented beverages with the single-minded determination of a heat-seeking missile programmed by someone with serious drinking problems.
The dog launched himself off his sleeping spot (a pile of empty moonshine jugs arranged like a canine throne) and began careening around the kitchen like a furry white cannonball fired by someone who'd never learned proper trajectory calculations.
Being blind, Mighty Whitey navigated entirely by smell and sound, which meant he ricocheted off every surface in the kitchen while following the scent trail of Jim's morning disaster like some kind of alcoholic bloodhound having an enthusiastic seizure.
Jim, still blind from the methanol incident and screaming like someone whose eyeballs were hosting a convention for vindictive fire demons, began running around the kitchen in what could generously be called "evasive maneuvers" but was actually more like "panic-stricken flailing with directional ambitions."
The result was a complex dance routine choreographed by chaos itself.
Jim would stumble in one direction, crash into something (usually furniture or kitchen appliances), ricochet in another direction while screaming something that sounded like "MAKE IT STOP MAKE IT STOP," only to be intercepted by Mighty Whitey, who had apparently decided that Jim's screaming was some kind of dinner bell announcing the arrival of breakfast booze.
Around and around they went: Jim stumbling blind and on fire, Mighty Whitey careening after him like a furry white missile with alcohol-detection capabilities, both of them creating a symphony of crashes, bangs, yelps, and what could only be described as "creative profanity in multiple octaves."
Jim ricocheted off the refrigerator (causing another pickle jar to fall, this one landing on Mighty Whitey's head with a satisfying BONK), careened into the stove (where he grabbed a dish towel to dab at his eyes, which helped exactly not at all), stumbled toward the back door while Mighty Whitey took a shortcut through what used to be a chair, and finally burst through the screen door like someone fleeing the hounds of hell.
Except in this case, it was more like fleeing the single hound of bad life choices.
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The Great Outdoor Adventure (Or: How to Turn Your Yard into a Disaster Movie)
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The chase continued onto the porch, where Jim—still blind and convinced his eyeballs were melting—began running in what he hoped was the direction of "away from the alcoholic dog" but was actually more like "toward the well in a pattern that would make geometry teachers weep."
Mighty Whitey, emboldened by the fresh air and the exciting prospect of outdoor alcohol hunting, began running circles around Jim with the enthusiasm of someone who'd just discovered that exercise and substance abuse could be combined into a single recreational activity.
Round and round the well they went, Jim stumbling and cursing while trying to splash well water on his face, Mighty Whitey barking with joy because apparently this was the most fun he'd had since the methanol incident.
The well, being a circular structure, created what physicists would call "orbital mechanics" and what everyone else would call "the world's stupidest merry-go-round operated by desperation and poor planning."
Jim would stumble around one side of the well, splash water in the general direction of his face (most of it missing and hitting either the ground or Mighty Whitey), while the dog continued his enthusiastic circumnavigation like a furry white satellite with questionable navigational skills.
This continued for several minutes, creating a scene that looked like some kind of folk dance performed by people who'd never learned the steps and were making it up as they went along while having a nervous breakdown.
Finally, in a moment of desperate inspiration, Jim spotted his accident-prone Ford electric pickup truck parked nearby. The truck bed was already loaded with several kegs of double-rectified moonshine (apparently drunk Jim had been preparing for today's deliveries), and Jim realized he could use the truck as both an escape vehicle and a strategic high ground.
He stumbled toward the truck, climbed onto the bed with the grace of someone whose inner ear had declared independence, and stood among the moonshine kegs like a general surveying a battlefield made entirely of poor decisions.
Mighty Whitey, realizing that Jim had achieved elevation advantage, began running circles around the truck while barking what could only be interpreted as tactical suggestions, most of which seemed to involve "throw down some of that moonshine, you coward!"
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The Great Trapping (Or: How to Outsmart a Drunk Dog While Being Blind and Hungover)
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Jim realized that he needed to end this standoff before the neighbors started gathering to watch what was rapidly becoming the most entertaining nervous breakdown in Podunk County history.
He climbed down from the truck bed, grabbed one of the moonshine kegs, and stumbled toward the old storm shelter behind the house—a concrete bunker that had been built during the Cold War by someone who'd apparently been very concerned about nuclear attacks but hadn't considered the possibility of alcoholic dog-related emergencies.
"Here, Mighty Whitey!" Jim called out, unscrewing the cap on the keg and pouring a generous amount of moonshine onto the ground near the shelter entrance. "Come get your breakfast!"
Mighty Whitey, who possessed the supernatural ability to detect alcohol from vast distances despite being blind, immediately zeroed in on the scent like a cruise missile programmed by someone with serious addiction issues.
The dog charged toward the moonshine puddle with the enthusiasm of someone who'd just discovered that Christmas had been moved to Sunday morning, dove face-first into the liquid breakfast, and began lapping it up with the professional efficiency of someone who'd made this their life's work.
While Mighty Whitey was distracted by what was clearly the highlight of his day, Jim stumbled around to the other side of the shelter and slammed the heavy concrete door shut, trapping the dog inside with his breakfast and what sounded suspiciously like grateful barking echoing from within.
"There!" Jim announced to the universe, which had apparently been watching this entire performance with the kind of attention usually reserved for car accidents and reality TV shows. "Problem solved! Temporarily!"
He stumbled back to the truck, loaded the remaining kegs into the bed (because apparently even cosmic hangovers weren't going to stop him from fulfilling his professional obligations), and climbed into the driver's seat like someone who'd just survived a war against logic itself.
Before leaving, he grabbed Mighty Whitey's water dish, filled it with a generous portion of moonshine (because apparently the dog had earned hazard pay), and slid it through the storm shelter's mail slot.
"Breakfast is served, you gawtdam alcoholic!" he called through the door, which was answered by what sounded like enthusiastic slurping and possibly a canine version of "thank you."
Jim started up the Ford electric pickup—which made the kind of quietly efficient humming sound that seemed inappropriate for someone who'd just survived what could only be described as "Sunday Morning: The Action Movie"—and began driving toward Maybelle's Reputable House and Public School, where he had moonshine to deliver and possibly some kind of cosmic explanation to figure out.
As he drove away, he could hear Mighty Whitey's muffled barking from the storm shelter, which sounded less like distress and more like someone singing along to their favorite drinking song while locked in the world's most secure liquor cabinet.
"Well," Jim muttered to himself as his vision slowly began to return and the fire in his eyeballs settled down to a manageable campfire, "at least somebody's having a good morning."
And with that philosophical observation, Sheriff Jim Witt drove off to begin another day of professional moonshine distribution and amateur existence management, leaving behind a yard that looked like a small tornado had gotten drunk and decided to redecorate using chaos theory and spite.
