For instance: Physically, a single fritzing nerve might be causing my left eyelid to flutter uncontrollably, and my skull feels as if it has been pitted with a large-­gauge melon baller. Metaphysically, though, I am pretty certain that my soul has been shucked. There’s a weightlessness about my hung-over person, this sense that whatever normally holds me in place, moors me to myself, has been untethered. In this state, I feel as if I can lean away from my eyeballs, treat my body like a deer blind.

Haven’t you ever longed to see your life through fresh eyes? Appraise it from a different vantage? Wouldn’t it be nice if, for one day, you could squint at the world as if through a peephole, asking each and every unannounced caller, ‘‘Excuse me, what?’’ Because you can do that with a hangover. Though you may feel physically incapable of doing anything with a hangover, you can actually do anything with a hangover. You need to meet a random dude at the Memphis airport, sleep on his sectional? You need to be ‘‘in conversation’’ with an audience of eight, three of whom are employees of the venue, the rest of whom are snoring, heads canted back, possibly indigent, because it’s warm in here? Get hung over.

Hung over, you cannot fixate on the nauseating future, because the present is nauseating enough. The day doesn’t overinflate with deferred possibility. You’re freed from those fears of missing out. You’re literally out of sync. What’s more, you find yourself relieved of your cringing niceness, your longing to be liked. When you’re wrung out, you are sprung — momentarily — from the ­prison of postindustrial etiquette.

Your body is in pain, yes; relatively minor pain. But pain now is such a rare part of our lives that reintroducing even the most manageable dosage of it basi­cally neutralizes self-­consciousness. For, you see, self-­consciousness is lily-­livered, and it flees from the mildest pain’s approach. Your problems don’t sound like ‘‘your’’ problems on this day. They sound like the problems of someone else, someone you don’t particularly care for or even want to listen to right now.

Meaning, I think, that the hangover is a little reminiscent of the old idea of genius. Not our contemporary one; not genius as someone who arrives pre­loaded with knowledge or skill. I’m talking about genius as animating spirit. Genius as something that enters you, moves through you — but only after you’ve cleared out enough of yourself to make room. It’s a state in which all these unbidden thoughts and perceptions and associations are allowed to wander in and out and linger, because the manic doorman that is your discretion clocked out early last night and took today off.