I suspect that one cannot writedrunkenly simply because one has had alcohol. 

I wake up in the morning and make a few notes, maybe adding up to a page, before pouring the last of the coffee and sitting down to read in earnest until I either have to go to work or am impelled again to make another note and therefore open up a new expanse of paper. This is all done as soberly as you can imagine. Later at night, however, if I have had a few glasses of wine before dinner, I will sometimes open up another page, even if I am already buzzing from the single glass poured into my empty stomach. (The last regiment of vaporous booze pushes itself across the front line of the blood–brain barrier.) But never have my words or sentences come out “drunk,” to the extent that I almost think that written language, and maybe just the fingertips which type or operate the pen, is impervious against this lowly, base form of intoxication. The mouth, on the other hand, does become drunk, and one often says more than one would have otherwise meant (sometimes the truth), or the wrong thing altogether; speech slurs and the hands that so often facilitate talk knock over glasses, bump into people, hit walls and so on, and everything coming out of our mouths goes awry as we drink. And why shouldn’t it.

But it doesn’t matter whether you write while sober or drunk: things will appear mostly the same. What I think can make a difference, however, and I mean a difference for the better, is writing during a hangover.

When I wake up into that beating, pulsating world of a headache after a night of drinking, the most important things, terribly urgent, are: water, coffee, and (tentatively) food, in that order. Taking care of these doesn’t get rid of the headache, doesn’t settle the stomach and doesn’t clear up your foggy vision. Nor does it make you look any better. But meeting these three requirements staves off the worst of a hangover, and you’ll be able to avoid crawling back into bed, or throwing up, or both.

Writing in this state, at first, is extremely unpleasant. Each word that materializes in front of you is a nausea test. Words and sentences are rarely vetted so rigorously as in the harsh, heightened sensitivity of a hangover.

Discomfort, if not actual pain, seems to be the ideal state for writing. Anecdotally, I think of Apollinaire, who would write very uncomfortably hunched over a tiny kitchen table (surely hungover at times!). This image is actually dear enough to me that, in the past, I have superimposed (mistakenly) my favorite writers onto it in an over-determined frenzy of under-imaginative fancy. After reading about the original Apollinaire anecdote, it became Balzac who sat uncomfortably hunched over the tiny kitchen table, writing as though to break the sound barrier with the nice view of the courtyard outside to keep him company. For years, this is how I remembered the image (almost talismanic). Then, I read Zweig’s biography of Balzac and realized that I had superimposed Balzac into this kitchen (he wrote at a real desk). But Apollinaire did not come rushing back through the door to take up his rightful place at the small chair. Instead, Blaise Cendrars came in and made himself comfortable—and that, I eventually thought, is how I know he doesn’t belong here, in this kitchen: he kicks his feet up as if he were sitting at a vast coffee table with more room than could possibly be useful to him at one time, lights a cigarette with his left hand while his empty right sleeve hangs down (he lost his right arm in World War I), waving in the breeze that sucks through the window. No, he is too comfortable, and who would come in through the door but Chaïm Soutine, the painter. He comes in and pours Cendrars a drink without a word, without asking, he knows how to act, and they chink glasses, Soutine reaches out his right arm, Cendrars his left, the two connecting in a straight line. Was it Soutine who worked, cramped and fruitfully, at this awful table? But it’s not him either, he had just come over from the other side of the courtyard (Was he living here? Or the Villa Seurat, and so where was here—) to fetch Cendrars, who gets up after draining his glass to follow the painter out the door just in time for a wily, wiry cast of less than minor characters to push their way in through over the threshold, ignorant of the table and the chair in the corner—they are here to rummage the fridge for cheese, bread, olives, fish, vegetable ends (for what, soup?)—their faces freakish, their bodies indistinct, their clothes shiny with age, and now they too are crowding out of the door, through the hallway, down the stairs and out into the night, and the table is sitting here empty and I cannot picture that Apollinaire (with his head wrapped tightly from his war wound) would write his little calligrammes here, like this, his big strongman’s body hunched and concentrated downward into a square of paper. Ferdinand the Bull sitting at a tiny table in his stuffy kitchen. . .

Everyone seems to agree that morning is the best time to think: one has just taken the first sip of the discomfort of living, and the image is still undisturbed, like a cool glass not yet dirtied by fingerprints.

There are people whose thoughts are insomniac and night-like. (I have often imagined that these are the kinds of thoughts that predominate when life becomes materially comfortable and unworried.)

To be able to stay awake until sunrise every night just in order to say a very few words to oneself, and then collapse, and to do this every day of the week as though the year were just a chain of differently shaded Sundays, life vanishing continuously like phase-shifted colors into the horizon—.

What is interesting about drinking, I suppose like every drug, is that the first few sips, the first moments when it is still just knocking on the phenomenological door, always seem new, as if they might lead to something as yet untouched and unknown. In the space of the first glass—especially if it is hot outside, and quiet—it is as if the activity of the alcohol occurred not in your body, your eyes, your skin, your stomach, but in everything except what you consider to be yourself; the alcohol is in the leaves in the blueberry bush just beside you, it is in the warmth of the wooden planks of the porch touching your bare feet, in the sound of ice and glass in the neighbor’s yard, just out of view, the cloud darkening the horizon and giving depth to the evening, which would otherwise be in danger of a certain two-dimensionality—it is in everything but you, and at its nearest, it feels like it is inside an active, sentient dew collecting over the surface of your iris, only the colorful part of the eye, while the pupil dilates and contracts, opening and closing with the erratic light, which in a few moments will be absorbed, and then it will be inside you and everything else will lose the porous quality that you felt you could almost see, becoming again a surface, and the sun is getting low, the cloud larger, the sky cooler, and now someone is talking and you are onto the second glass, very soon to approach the early zenith of intoxication from which you will smoothly plummet as the night goes on, drunker and drunker, and then into the nadir of dizzy sleep and at last the next day, hungover, truncated, disconnected from yourself more or less unpleasantly, ready to risk making yourself sick with a few words.

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