I went to a party last night, a highfalootin literary party at which I had no other recourse than to become very drunk. Rose Kernochan, an editrix at Word mag, apparently throws a party every year, after she's met enough people who don't know each other. Ostensibly, parties like these facilitate scene interaction and "mingling" but really, people mostly just talk to their friends. We showed up fashionably late, admired the various Kernochan family portraits and the admirably high ceilings of her apartment, and then I made a beeline for the kitchen and started mixing my own gin and tonics. Sequestered into a corner with Tomas, Elise and Sabin, the conversation somehow changed into a fairly heated discussion about whether all human eyes are exactly the same size. I mostly drank and stayed out of it.This guy complimented me on my tie and launched into a rant about how everybody at this party was "fake," how these publishing people all thought they were artists, but really they just leeched off real artists, and he wouldn't have anything to do with them.

"You're not in publishing, are you?" he asked.

I was giving out business cards indiscriminately, an action that will no doubt have unpleasant repercussions in the near future. I gave the guy a card.

At one point I remember making the observation that a lot of writers look like Bill Murray.

I was wearing a ridiculous, ineptly painted maroon Korean girlie tie, which drew numerous compliments.I was "smoking" candy cigarettes and trying to look cool, but according to impartial reports, I was a loud, belligerent fuckwit. I talked, in toto, to four people I had not met before and I will assume that I will never see them again. I made no useful business contacts, there was no free food, and when it was time to leave, it got very, very bad.

I was fine until we got on the subway. I'm used to walking off a drunk; when I lived in Seattle, most parties I attended were within ten blocks of my house, and I could stagger home in the chill night air, sober up a bit, and collapse in bed.However, now I was 110 blocks from my house. We got on the 1 train to the Upper West Side, and I started degenerating rapidly. Motion sickness and four G&T's worked their magic on my brain and my guts, and I felt my gorge rising in my throat. I've never thrown up from drinking before, and I've drank an awful lot. This was an inauspicious beginning; throwing up my guts on the floor of a subway car. With my girlie tie and my "The Mighty Thor" stocking cap, I'm sure I looked like the most degenerate street lunatic the other people on the subway had ever seen. Luckily, half of them were passed out drunk too.

"I'm sorry," I started mumbling, incoherent. "This sucks."

"That's OK, Thor," Tomas, cool in the face of disaster; "that's what the floor of the subway is for."