Bonnie and Clyde were shot to death on May 23, 1934. A friend throws a party on the anniversary of the shooting every year, with 46 shots of alcohol served for the 46 shots that killed them. It’s a good party. There’s no rule, but people usually look sorta old-fashioned. And there’s lots to drink. I only remember doing one shot of whiskey this year—you mark where you’ve killed them on a big drawing—but that’s not counting all the vodka.

Now, I may look like a person who’s been drunk a lot in his lifetime, but beneath this exterior beats the heart of a truly uptight guy. I had my first sip of alcohol at 19. Until two weekends ago, I’d never been so drunk I threw up.

So it’s the morning after the Bonnie and Clyde party and there’s a strange smell in the kitchen. The kitchen sink is piled with dishes that I’ve been putting off—piled higher than the sink. And now the dishes and the walls of the sink are coated in crusty, stinking orange stuff. I have no recollection of throwing up in the kitchen sink in the middle of the night, but there it is. Vomit. Hardened to all the dishes. Bits of raw cauliflower. Bits of basil. Salsa chunks. Some unidentifiables.

I fill the sink with water to let everything soak—right? And then after it’s soaked? Well, the problem is I don’t have a garbage disposal, or a dishwasher, and there are huge hunks of stuff in this water, which I can’t let go down the drain, or it’ll get all backed up and I’ll have problems only a plumber can solve. I put all the dishes on the counter and pull up the stopper thing at the bottom of the sink and empty it into the trash, while plugging the drain with a dish, but when I put the stopper thing back in place it fills up immediately, and—well, at this rate, I’ll be cleaning this up into next year. I need something bigger than this stopper thing, so I grab a big plastic noodle strainer.

The noodle strainer works much better than the stopper thing, because it’s big and catches more, but after a while—a lot longer than it should take—it occurs to me that, like, I’m not going to be able to purify this water with a noodle strainer, no matter how many times I drag it through. Have I mentioned the identifiable food? And the smell? I am essentially playing with my own vomit. Through my kitchen window I can see people out on the street, in the sun, enjoying their lives.

Only then—insights come hard when you’re hungover—does it occur to me that, um, I should get a big bowl, something that doesn’t have holes in it, and just carry all this chunky water to the toilet and flush it down. Whoa! Brilliant! I don’t spill a drop. Then I wash all the dishes with a vomit-encrusted sponge, to get off all the big stuff, and then again with a clean sponge, to actually clean them, and then clean the sink and the counter where I had to put the dishes while playing with my vomit, and then throw away the sponges.

Why couldn’t I have just thrown up on the floor? That would have been so much easier to clean.