Well over 100 million people watched the Super Bowl on Sunday night, which means that, at the very least, tens of millions of people (tens of millions!) woke up Monday morning with an affliction that this writer would attempt to describe were he not suffering from it himself. Kingsley Amis expertly captured this self-induced malaise in his comic novel Lucky Jim:
Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he'd somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad. [Lucky Jim]
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