(“That girl certainly talks a lot about her various vices”/”They’ll never put THIS into the club newsletter” Edition)
There is very little moto-content here, but it’s all part of the trip. Trigger warning: There is a lot of talk about nausea and related activities. Medical stuff. Drugs and Alcohol. Airplanes. Be advised.
When last we saw our intrepid ADVMotoGirl, she had said goodbye (as far as she knew) to her stouter-of-liver friends at the barcade, all of whom were upright and (as best she could tell) generally coherent. All were still capable of playing games, so they had that going for them, which was nice.
She had just managed to successfully navigate the mile or so back to her hotel on foot after a brief, blurry stop at a nearby bodega. A bodega that was… haunted?… mostly by dead-eyed, listless persons wandering the aisles in search of… what? Redemption? Aisle 3, I believe. Hope? Aisle 5, below the canned peas. Opportunity? Sorry, fresh out.
My id was evidently in full control, because I departed with only two things: A pint of strawberry Haagen-Daaz ice cream, and, inexplicably, a box of strawberry milkshake Pop-Tarts. Strawberry Milkshake? What the hell, eDar? [Brief aside: Back home and bits of elsewhere, people call me by a shortened version of my email/Slack name from a company where we all worked. Mine was three entire syllables long, which, I am told, was too many syllables. Hence, eDar, pronounced EE-dar, like email.]
Pop-Tarts are made out of basically everything I don’t want much of in my life, but chiefly, the main ingredient: RAMPANT AMERICAN OVERINDULGENCE. The very flavor screams it – “Strawberry?” Oh no, not enough!
“We must make it MORE! MMMMMOOOOOOAAAAAAARRRRRR!!!! How can we justify jam-packing even more sugar into these little slices of hell? I KNOW! We’ll pretend it’s a milkshake! IT’S NOT EVEN COLD OR CREAMY BUT THEY’LL BUY IT!!!!! Because EVeryone loves milkshakes!!! MMMMOOOOOOOORRRREEE!”
Okay, calm down, Dave; the board approved your idea. Genius – sugar’s cheap.
Sigh.
Carrying my parcel of shame, I wobbled onward.
It was, if you’ll recall from just above, Mardi Gras, but Congress Street in Tucson at 2330 was remarkably absent of party-goers and bead-flingers. We were likely in an unhip part of town, and the cool kids were elsewhere. Utterly fine by me!
I am not accustomed to Being Drunk in Publick [sic, because that’s how it sounds when Ron White says it,] and it was a small miracle to arrive at my home base when everything looked basically like this the whole way back:
All I wanted to do was consume the entire pint of ice cream (mission accomplished) and a Pop-Tart (mission aborted after a few bites – that box will likely be in my cupboard for years,) and sponge off (for the Hotel Congress loves to play water temperature ping-pong, and the cold water faucet in the shower requires using vernier calipers to determine the 0.25mm required to obtain enough cold water not to be scalded, but not to hit the 0.28mm mark, which utterly f reezes one’s bits off. God forbid anyone nearby flush, rinse, or even think about using any water, because that caused a cascading effect felt throughout the building – at least judging by the shrieks and thumps (my own included.))
This isn’t to say the hotel wasn’t nice – it totally, absolutely was. Lovely. Historic. Well-staffed. Well-appointed with modern conveniences, such as this fully functional … Victrola? Mimeograph machine? Telegraph? Whatever it is, sounds come out, but they are neither speech nor music. More of an electric gurgle.
With those things done, I took my nighttime meds and crawled into the comfy bed with its fluffy pillows and adorable art-deco bedside lamp that I apparently fell in love with so much that I took about 87 photos of it, some with my glasses, some without, all with a fair bit of dust.
The room was not precisely stable, per se, but I just felt what I presume to be a normal level of drunk and nothing more at this point.
I have mentioned previously that I am an unashamed pothead, and there are several reasons for this. I have this awful (but silly-sounding) neurological condition called “Restless Leg Syndrome,” which has been my own personal hell since age 20. “How bad can it be,” people wonder; “so your leg is ‘restless,’ whatever.” Oh no, no, no, my friends. It is beyond “restless.” One of the infuriating things about this disorder is that it is impossible to describe.
The closest thing I can think of in terms of intensity of the sensation is something like this: Imagine you are completely bound, head to toe, in unbreakable bonds. You cannot so much as wiggle. Now, imagine the most intense nose itch you have ever experienced in your life – and you are helpless to scratch it. The itch doesn’t attenuate – it just keeps going, unscratched, until you’re about ready to lose your mind. With RLS, the urge to stretch, contort, and move is exactly that powerful – it cannot be ignored, which is very inconvenient when trying to go to sleep. Or sit in a car. Or a movie. Or an airplane.
The sensation itself is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced outside RLS. Something between an irresistible itch crawling up and down the bones of my left leg (mostly around the femoral head, but running downward along the sciatic nerve) and my leg needing to sneeze.
Yeah, it’s weird.
I would rather be in abject pain than deal with RLS. If I have a nasty attack, it literally reduces me to a whimpering fetal-position… until I have to get up and walk whilst whimpering. It’s crazy, it’s horrible, and no one really fully understands why the hell it happens, but there’s a general understanding that it involves dopamine and that it has a genetic component. Women will sometimes get it while pregnant, and sometimes it doesn’t go away after delivery. Mine is genetic from my dad’s side. Fortunately, just about everything else about my dad is awesome, so I can’t hold a grudge. He cured his with massive doses of quinine before it was outlawed here.
I have tried almost literally every possible treatment out there, from anti-Parkinsonians to opioids to anti-depressants to naturopathics. Nothing works 100%, and most treatments do almost nothing. Some make it worse. Others have intolerable side-effects (blurred vision, dysphasia, worse.) The best combination thus far is Bupriopion combined with Ropinirole, which work chiefly on serotonin and dopamine.
The trouble is, Ropinirole at my 3mg dose (it goes up slowly over time) causes nausea. A lot of nausea. On any given night, if I don’t have the marijuanas, I have about a 60% chance of vomiting 30-60 minutes after taking it. Fun!
Thus, Reason Number One: Nausea. Weed keeps the nausea almost entirely at bay, which allows me to keep the meds down and actually sleep.
Reason Two: Actual medicinal effects. I’ve been a chronic insomniac since middle school (thanks, Mom!) and indica does a specTACular job of getting me to sleep. Sure, it may disrupt the sleep cycle to a degree, but at least I do sleep. It surely beats the hell out of the cyclobenzaprine I took for 20 years, and the clonazepam I took for more than a decade before that. It also does help the RLS symptoms themselves – not enough to stop the other treatments, though, sadly.
Reason Three: Honestly? It’s nice. Pot provides a very enjoyable, relaxing, meditative, “everything is amazing” experience. Not a bad side effect for a drug that actually does have outstanding medicinal effects. I’ll take “high” over “drunk” any day of the week.
But it was not any day of the week, no; it was Company Retreat in Another State Day (also, Mardi Gras, of course,) and I generally do not carry federally prohibited substances across state lines when those states tend to have varying definitions of “legal,” as well as border patrol and agricultural checkpoints. Thus, I was sans weed.
I was also, you will recall – utterly hammered at this point. I have a low booze tolerance, so it doesn’t take much to move me from Stone-Cold Sober to Tipsy and Beyond. Typically, I’m very good at stopping at just the right point, or, if I have slightly overindulged, I eat something and hydrate really well before bed. As a result, I have only had two hangovers in my entire life. The first was in 2004 at the Reno Air Races, where I was crewing with a T-6 team called “Red Knight.” This is their gorgeous girl:
Some of you are (or hang out with) pilots, so you likely understand the truth of this statement: Pilots can DRINK. Airshow pilots? Even worse. Canadian airshow pilots? Normal, merely mortal humans are advised to bring a barf bag. But there I was, with some of my childhood airshow heroes, having ridden my mighty K1100RS from Olympia, WA to Reno, NV which absolutely blew their minds. Lol; adorable.
Wait, no! Lies! It was the Abbotsford air show, not Reno, and Dave, one of the airshow pilots, had flown me up in his Navion – SUPER cool. As much as I hate commercial flight, I will leap at the opportunity for private flights ANYtime <cough-Josh-cough>.
That really doesn’t matter here, the point is, my various ostensible “friends” plied me with beverages and dancing until 4am in the morning, at which point I staggered back to my tent, which had taken for some reason to spinning in wildly gyroscopic fashion in my absence. I slept for two entire hours before the 6am wake-up call came to prep the planes for the show.
I staggered out of the tent in almost exactly the same condition in which I had staggered in. Ugh. While I was still probably technically a little drunk, I was distinctly feeling other things: Headache. Nausea. Trembling. Grogginess. An overwhelming desire to curl back up in my sleeping bag until Kingdom Come. Ugh. Why do people drink that much more than once?! I moaned to myself in abject misery.
Through sheer force of will, I managed to clean and smoke-oil the Yak for which I had minor responsibilities. As a volunteer for the Olympic Flight Museum, I had earned some small privileges, and some of the pilots had for one inexplicable reason or another taken a shine to me and included me in their midst. Bud and Ross Granley, two of the most talented pilots ever to grace the skies, were the owners of the two Yaks. Bud had taken me up numerous times in the Skyraider and other truly amazing aircraft, but I had never flown with his son, Ross.
Hey, look! Another slightly related aside, because this is a jaunt down Memory Lane, after all. For Father’s Day earlier that year, I had asked one of the airshow pilots, the renowned Bill Shepherd with his Yak 11, if he would take my dad up for a ride. He agreed. I was pretty chuffed at winning the Best Daughter Ever award that year – until my step-mom said he couldn’t fly, she was too afraid something bad would happen. WHAT!?? Noooooo! Thankfully, we changed her mind, and he got to ride in the Yak and a Chipmunk.
We now return to Abbotsford.
After getting the prep things done, there was still time before the show began. I slowly, carefully maneuvered to a folding chair and sat down, eyes closed in the blazing summer sun as my innards tried unsuccessfully to become my outards. WHY DO PEOPLE DO THIS MORE THAN ONCE??!To this day, I remain convinced that the main reason Ross approached me that morning was due precisely to this unstable, easily abused condition. “Hey, Airyn,” he began cheerfully, looming over me. Ross is not an especially tall man, but everything seemed larger than life at that point. “I’ve never taken you up, have I?” Swallowing a <hork>, I said, “gosh, no.” “Wanna go?” a wide grin accompanied the invitation. “ONLY OF COURSE!!” I nearly yelled in excitement, only to sit quickly back in the chair and readjust my volume. “Meet me at the plane in 10.” “Roger that, thank you!”
This is Ross flying his pristine Yak 18T:
This is Ross flying his 18T with his dad in the little Yak 55:
https://youtu.be/065YJ_mVBCs?t=105
Astute viewers will notice there is very little time spent in level flight because #airshow. I was at an airshow. In a plane with an airshow pilot. A very skilled, very evil, airshow pilot.
I and two other passengers climbed aboard the freshly and completely redone leather interior. It was spotless. Flawless. Ross was so proud of it, because it is perfect and wonderful.
Remember this: Flawless interior, hung-over eDar. The math is not looking good.
After taking off and obtaining sufficient altitude, Ross began to perform some of his routine. There were positive G’s – YAY, FUN! – and negative G’s – OH SHIT RED-OUT HORK can’t puke can’t puke can’t puke please oh please do not let me puke in this gorgeous aircraft. I was convinced the negative G’s were most definitely in excess of at least -2. Ross later informed me that they were only about -0.25 and gave me a look that had an implicit, “wow, you are totally a wuss” about it. I was hungover, man!
I struggled to maintain open eyes and conscious brain during those negative-G events, and I did NOT puke, thank you very much. It was not for lack of Ross’ trying, however: From time to time, I he would turn his head around to look at me (for I was in the back seat) and ask, gleefully, “how ya doin’ back there, Airyn? All good?” with the kindest yet most mischievous glint in his eyes.
“Hork,” I replied, horking back a hork.
Ross continued to make the Yak do things nature never intended it to do… all the while not taking his eyes off me for what seemed like 5 minutes but was probably more like thirty seconds. How is he doing this without sending us to our fiery, crashy death? Oh, right: Because #granley.
The closest I came to losing it was at the peak of the hammerhead stall, the first move in the video linked above. Pretty sure everything I had was lined up and ready to exit, but as God as my witness, I was not going to barf in this plane. Not only did I not wish to forever sully the interior, but now? I didn’t want to give Ross the satisfaction. The former was important, but the latter was the real impetus.
After a too-short-yet-also-too-long 20 or so minutes of being thrown around the sky in various ways, we returned to base and disembarked. I wobbled slowly… OH ever so slowly… back to my chair. I carefully sat down. I gently lowered my head to my cool, cool hands and pressed them into my hot, hot skull to try to get the marching band running roughshod over my brain to calm down. There were no sunglasses dark enough.
It may have been 30 minutes, it could’ve been five days, but eventually, everything calmed itself and I was able to ambulate in a mostly human fashion. All’s well that ends well, and we all went on to have more fun times together, in the sky and on the ground. Bud’s Reno team was “Lucky Strike – A Party Team with a Racing Problem,” so I should have been sufficiently forewarned.
They look so innocent, don’t they? I have no idea who that young, skinny lady is, it’s been too long since I’ve seen her. 😀
These trips down memory lane, though; the nostalgia is palpable. I’m having a great time, hope I’m not boring you to tears out there.
The second hangover (Hah! You forgot there was another digression already lined up, didn’t you?) requires far, far less copy. The Cowboy fed me two mint juleps and, I believe, one or two neat bourbons, while we were shooting pool a few months back. For those who do not know what a “mint julep” is, it is essentially a bourbon snow-cone. I am not kidding. Look it up. Delicious. Adult. Snow. Cone. That night, there was indeed a little barfing, but fortunately not all over the interior of a classic aircraft. However, just as Ross was amused, I’m pretty sure the Cowboy was, too.
However, I answered my own “why do people do this more than once” question handily: They probably don’t realize it’s even happening. I sure as stinkin’ heck did not. Not until it was far, far too late. (See? That one was painlessly short.)
And now, at long last, here we are back at Mardi Gras in Tucson, with a hopelessly intoxicated ADVMotoGirl in her hotel room. She has taken her meds – the meds that nauseate her under the best of circumstances, and the GI situation already not in good shape. She has no weed to mitigate that nausea. Let’s watch.
About twenty minutes after ingesting the Ropinirole, everything went sideways and upside-down. Badly. I managed to make it to the (lovely) bathroom before all of the things I hadn’t barfed up in Abbotsford 15 years ago got their revenge.
The RLS meds had not yet done their trick, either; nope! They came up with the rest, leaving me without any defense against those horrible symptoms. Attempts at even a tiny swallow of water were not successful, there would be no more ingestion of meds for me, not that night. Nor could I hydrate or eat to stave off the dreaded hangover. Fuck.
Cue the whimpering and the thrashing and the pacing and the contorting for a solid hour or so. I was so miserable, I barely even noticed the insanely loud music blaring from the downstairs radio station’s speaker, which is inexplicably loud for an establishment where people are supposed to be sleeping. A quick graphic: My room is the green circle, and the implausibly loud speakers are in the red circle. Confound my luck.
Once that hour was up, either alcohol poisoning (unlikely) or the hangover began, because so did the unceasing vomiting. If I moved a hair’s breadth off-center, barf. If I opened or closed my eyes too quickly, barf. If I, Heaven forfend, stood up, mega-puke.
The hotel could have come crashing down around me, and I would have been oblivious to it all. 2am rolled around, much like I rolled around on the cool, cool, solid tile bathroom floor from time to time, in between bouts of dry heaves.
3am. 4am. 5am. Little to no change. I felt horrible and my body was not being shy about showing it. Laying my head on a plush towel laid over the side of the bathtub, I managed to slip into something resembling sleep for about a half hour from 530 to 6 before my alarm went off. Time to work. Unlike all of my co-workers save the one guy who works for me, I had to work on this retreat. Support never sleeps. The Support department doesn’t get “days off:” One of us must always work on any given day, 365 days a year.
I read the overnight tickets through bleary eyes while random dark, semi-translucent blobs oozed their way across my field of vision. I hope I made any sense to anyone. “Hello! Your server seems to be undergoing a florblewoop ping truffle, which mean you’ll need to vacuum the begonias.” #fired
The barfing had gone down a notch to once every 20 minutes to a half hour – provided I ingested nothing whatsoever. As soon as anything went down the hatch, the hatch opened right back up again to express its displeasure.
I didn’t have to be at the meeting and mostly human until 10. The office was a mile away, too short a distance to trolley or Lyft, and HORK at the thought of a trolley or car ride. No, I would have to hoof it. I managed to sink into a dead-to-the-world sleep for all of an hour before my 830 alarm went off. I regarded it through slitted eyes and gritted teeth. Fuck.
I carefully stood and eased my way into the bathroom. One small dry-heave barely worth mentioning, but boy howdy, there was a whole passel of them lined up if I weren’t careful.
Staring at the shower faucets, remembering the ping-pong and the calipers, I decided a washcloth and running my hair under the sink would have to do. I absently wondered if I could somehow rig a hose carrying cold water to a backpack that would constantly pour cool water over my head.
Managing to finagle clothes onto my wretched self, I packed up my bag, Googled the nearest coffee shop, and set out on my next mission: Operation Get to Work Without Vomiting in the Street Like a Peasant.
That almost-mile of sidewalk went on forever, naturally. A precarious moment walking past a Tucson PD unit when I was fairly certain it was all over but the crying, and of course I’d have to do it right then and there in front of the two officers, right? Thankfully, no.
At the coffee shop, I realized I still likely could not ingest a damn thing. I ordered a fresh, homemade donut. A chamomile tea. A peppermint tea. A Perrier. Grease, sugar, herbal teas, fizzy water. Those seemed to be the most sensible choices. Of course I wanted coffee, but even I knew better than to try.
I twisted off a piece of donut that was, I kid you not, less than a quarter-inch per side. Placed it carefully into my mouth hole.
NOPE. Mega-nope!
Close call. I went back to the towering office building and was faced with… elevators. Oh, God, why. Up we heaved to the 12th floor, leaving most of my innards in the lobby for a good 15 seconds.
As I stepped precariously out, as if stepping over a thousand-foot drop, I was greeted by The World’s Most Helpful and Perky Receptionist in the history of ever. I inexplicably greeted her with, “Hi, thanks, could you please show me where the bathroom is I am incredibly hung-over and I don’t know how to be hung-over, so…” like a complete spaz.
Taking it in stride, she clucked her tongue, showed me the bathroom, the kitchen, and offered to bring me basically anything under the sun I could possibly want. A chair. I wanted a chair.
I was the first to arrive, and waited for my compatriots. Upon seeing me, their eyes widened. Ah – yes, apparently it was noticeable. Shit.
“I am insanely hung-over, I haven’t slept, and I can’t eat anything. Please forgive me for being utterly useless today, I am so sorry. I don’t know how to be hung-over.” They suggested, salt, sugar, Gatorade, water. The CEO had helpfully brought two boxen of the biggest donuts I have ever seen in my life:
The bottom-left corner pastry is a normal-sized donut. The rest are monstrosities that would feed a family of eight. Each. My mouth watered before realizing that was problematic unto itself. No donuts for me. <sob>
Meeting, meeting, meeting. I began to be able to sip the peppermint tea after about an hour. Yay!
Meeting, meeting, meeting. Lunch! I opted to stay behind to work and to, y’know, not walk, eat, or be in the sun. The bossman asked if I wanted him to bring anything back. I pondered. “Salt? I mean, fries?” “You got it!”
20 minutes later, he bounded into the room (he is endlessly energetic,) having run from just across the street from the hotel all the way here just to give me 3 pounds of fries, 17 different condiments, and a quart of Gatorade. Then, he turned around and ran back. Bless his compassionate heart.
The fries smelled amazing. I took a nibble. Waited. Swallowed. It stayed! Another nibble, another success. I cracked open the Gatorade, took a small sip. Unsteady, but it stayed down. A little mustard, a bunch of fries, and half the Gatorade later, I felt far, far more human. I was actually able to participate in the second half of the meeting, no less.
A nap, then a BBQ at the co-founders house, hotel to pack everything up for a 7am departure, then TO BED AND EARLY!
But the radio station.
All. Night. Long.
I got maybe 3 or 4 hours in total, in bite-sized chunks, before giving up at 0430 to get on the road. I have ridden farther on less sleep. And, frankly, once I got on the road and exploring the area, I forgot how tired I was and enjoyed the day immensely.
That’s part three, the finale. 🙂
Attachments areaPreview YouTube video Yak-O-Batics — Granley Family Airshows – Chino 2016Yak-O-Batics — Granley Family Airshows – Chino 2016