It was not the best of circumstances to be sitting there in the Summit County Justice Center in Breckenridge hung over for several reasons, not the least of which being that my lawyer had been adamant: “Whatever you do, DO NOT show up for your alcohol evaluation either drunk or hung over. They will know. That knowledge will negatively affect their evaluation. A negative evaluation might result in even more jail time.” (Live and learn.) (Or not.) The reason I was sitting in the Justice Center was that, a few weeks prior, I had suffered through the inevitable indignity of going through what many consider a High Country right-of-passage: I had earned myself a DUI. (Guilty as charged.) Part I of the DUI process in Colorado is to have your drinking/ lifestyle/drinking patterns evaluated by what ended up being a remarkable desultory mental-health professional, who, I learned later, was no stranger to Xtreme Tippling.

In the first part of that evaluation, you are required to fill out a long questionnaire that covers a lot of ground, from the hyperliteral, “How many alcoholic beverages do you consume per week?” (2,054) to the more conceptual, “Do you have negative feelings towards law enforcement?” (Only when they arrest me.) (Well, not only, but mostly.) One of the questions dealt with the subject of hangovers. It was worded in such a way that, despite the hideous bottle flu that was at that exact moment defining my entire corporeal existence, I managed to chuckle. “Have you ever felt fuzzy in the morning after drinking the night before?” That was, as far as I can remember, the only one of the questions I answered honestly: “No!” I said, emphatically. Though there was no room for annotation, what I wanted to write was, “I — like almost every single person I have ever known in Mountain Country — have awakened after drinking the night before with a heartfelt desire to immediately cut my feces-tasting tongue clean out of my mouth and throw it in the ditch. I have awakened wondering what horrible person it was who decided to pummel my poor, poor aching noggin with a large piece of firewood. But “fuzzy?” No, not ever. “Fuzzy” would be a friggin’ godsend. That night, I related my questionnaire experience to my amigos down at the Sluice Box Drinking Emporium, not realizing till it was too late that, if there was ever an example of preaching to the choir, this was it, if you catch my drift. Anyhow, the subject of hangovers came as a result to dominate the conversational thread for the rest of the evening.

Mountain Country is the only place I have ever lived where hangovers play such a large role in the local fabric-of-life that there is almost zero in the way of social stigma attached to them. Of course, that’s because heavy drinking is such a huge part of the local fabric-of-life at altitude. And it’s not just obvious reprobates such as me and my drinking buddies. This reality bleeds into the demographic realm of those who shower more than once a week as well. I remember covering a council meeting for the local paper in a town that I will only describe as “being above 9,000 feet.” On the agenda were several fairly substantial development applications that were due to be presented by well-coifed men wearing coats and ties who had driven many hours to attend this humble exercise in local corruption/ insanity/government. The mayor was 15 minutes late and, when he finally did arrive, he took the gavel in his hand, tried to hit the little round wooden gavel target (whatever it’s called), missed by a good six inches, sighed, placed his head in his hands, tried to compose himself, failed, looked up with unfocused orbs the color of sapphire and moaned, “I’m just too hung over to conduct this meeting. Meeting adjourned,” which — as a point of parliamentary procedure — was impossible, since the mayor didn’t have his act together enough to have called the meeting to order in the first place. In any other region in America, the next day’s front-page story, under a 90-point banner headline, would have read, “Mayor too hung over to conduct meeting!” There would have been hell to pay for months. In this particular case, everyone there gathered agreed that you can’t very well have a town council meeting with a hung-over mayor, so we all just retired over to the Sluice to ponder the vicissitudes of democracy.

One time a couple decades back, we had one of those chirpy chamber-of-commerce directors who last about 14 minutes in a wild anarchistic mountain town before they decide that maybe it’s a good idea to go back to grad school somewhere more civilized. This chirpy chamber director, who was a nice enough lady, had heard some comments from those few chamber members who clearly did not have a real firm grasp on High Country ways that their employees often arrived at work feeling somewhat unwell. The chirpy chamber director consequently decided to organize a seminar for local employees focusing on the downsides of showing up to work so hung over you smelled like a distillery. Stuff to do with safety and efficiency and for God’s sake basic human decency and dignity. Enough employers made their employees go to that seminar that people in the local bars had a bone to pick with the chirpy chamber director, who made the almost-Freudian mistake of walking into the Sluice at the exact moment a couple of disgruntled regulars were lamenting the fact that, at 9 a.m., they were expected to show their smiling faces in the banquet room of the local Holiday Inn, where they would learn all about why they ought not arrive at work in the exact condition that every single one of them planned to arrive at the hangover seminar, which was actually titled something like, “Showing Your Best Side.”

Needless to say, 14 shots later, the poor chirpy chamber lady was carried out of the Sluice, and, from what I heard from several of my chums, who were all particularly chirpy as they related the story, the chamber lady did not fare so well at the hangover seminar. At one point, she even had to hurriedly egress the banquet room to blow grits in the hall, much to everyone’s amusement.

There are lessons to be learned from all this: When in Rome, do as the Romanians. It is a wonderful thing to dwell in a place where the mayor can call a town council meeting mulligan because he attended a bachelor party the night before. Indiscretion is the better part of valor. Go with the flow. Have a beer on the back deck. Ogle the view. Thank your lucky stars you’re not in a place that would go apoplectic if the perky chamber director ran a hangover seminar while hung over. Nothing wrong with a little institutionalized debauchery. Matter of fact, the world could use a lot more of it.