After spending all of yesterday on the couch with a hangover, I began to wonder if I had ever experienced a worse "holiday season" day.

The answer, I think, is yes.

Subject: Miserable Christmas Eve - Place: Paris, France

To say that Kori and I were hungry, broke, and lonely would be to say that Adolf Hitler was a mild irritant for a few people back when he was ruining the universe.

I had been living in Paris for a few months by the time December of 1999 rolled around. Most of my money had been spent on rice, transportation, and internet use (when I was there, you paid by the minute (about 10 cents per (and I spent a whole lot of 10 cents))). I hadn't even paid for the visa I needed in order to be considered a legal temporary occupant of the country. I was counting on the long-practiced (nearly to perfection!) French tradition of bureaucratic inefficiency to save my butt from having to shell out the dough for a stamp that nobody would ever ask to see. I thought it might raise some eyebrows on my way out of the country, having overshot my welcome by several months, but that was something I wouldn't have to deal with until my day of departure.

This day was December 24, 1999, and Kori and I were occupied with finding something to do that didn't involve sitting around and feeling sorry for ourselves or eating rice.

I know it sounds a little stupid - living in Paris and complaining about it, but there was something particularly lonely about being in Paris during Christmas. The building we were living in had emptied a few days prior, nearly everybody else returning home (wherever "home" was) to be with their families. This left Kori and I to walk the halls of La Fondation des Etats-Unis alone. It's difficult to understand what a lame prospect this is until you visit the place, but the popular travel book "Let's Go Europe 1998" did a decent enough job of summing up the student housing I was living in which was sometimes rented out to foolish backpackers during the summer: "Having all the qualities of prison-like squalor."

I'm guessing that the review was pretty accurate. I've never lived in a prison, but I did see "The Shawshank Redemption" and can say that there was a great deal of similarities between prison life as depicted in the film and life as I lived it at La Fondation. Like Tim Robbins' character in the film, I had even been planning my own escape from the building, although I wasn't quite as resourceful as he was and eventually just had to use Delta Airlines to remove myself, but the result was similar. Whether you go out through the front door or the sewers, escaping is escaping.

But, back to the day in question.

Kori was out from the city of Rennes, and we wanted to get into the Christmas swing of things a little. We were both missing our families, but there wasn't much to be done about that. Instead, we headed out into the city to see if there was anything holidayish that we could tangle ourselves up in.

The natural first stop was the famous Notre Dame cathedral. It's known to have quite the Christmas celebration, and we thought it might be just the thing we needed. However, neither one of us is terribly pious (hardly a surprise considering that neither one of us is religious), and we didn't know much about the Christmas Eve celebration at Notre Dame aside from its reputation as being one hell of a party. We hadn't taken into account the possibility that the seats for the bash had been reserved since sometime in the 17th century, and the echoing, laughing rejection of church staff to our request that we be allowed to attend drove the point home quite nicely.

Strike one: Kicked out of Notre Dame on Christmas Eve. Sucky.

Dejected, we descended into the St. Michel metro station. Our plan at this point was to head back to the 'hood where we would try to find an open grocery store at which we could purchase vast quantities of booze. If you can't get into one of the world's most famous churches for Christmas Eve, then you at least ought to be able to get drunk and throw heavy things out of your fourth-storey window. There aren't any laws saying you can't do that - at least there weren't any we knew about.

While waiting for a train, a very homeless, very toothless man approached us.

To be more specific, he approached me. He was mumbling something under his breath (the breath itself was like a wall of wine-infused dead-cat halitosis, knocking over anything decent and good that got in its way, taking no prisoners, and leaving a trail of victims longer than this). I felt bad for him, thinking that his Christmas Eve was somehow managing to suck even more than mine. After he repeated himself a few times, I finally managed to catch what he was saying, and suddenly felt a little less sorry for him. The words crawled out of his mouth as though they were looking for a toilet to die in, but when they came together, their meaning was pretty unmistakable.

The bum, on Christmas Eve, had just asked me if I would be at all interested in doing the "shanky-bank" (as my mother says) with him.

I nudged Kori a few feet down the platform and breathed a sigh of relief when the train finally arrived.

Strike two: No Christmas celebration, but instead propositioned for sex by a leper. Lame.

Kori and I boarded the OCD-nightmare of a train and huddled together as it whipped through Parisian neighborhoods at night, each collection of dilapidated buildings looking like a wet dog with a bad case of mange, but not even enough energy left to spread its rabies. They were all just waiting to die, for rigor mortis to set in, and maybe for the opportunity to infect a passing scrounger with whatever diseases they carried beneath their scaling skin.

That is to say that the neighborhoods were fitting in quite nicely with the rest of the evening.

We eventually came to our stop and immediately set out to check on all of our local shops. We knew that most of them would be closed, but one of the things about living in a big city is that diversity isn't hard to come by, and there would have to be at least one shop in our neighborhood that wasn't run by someone who celebrated Christmas.

We did finally find a spot, and we bought alcohol in a fashion that fitted our budget. It didn't wind up being the copious quantity of drink that we had originally wanted, but the quality was quite right. We purchased four bottles of Leffe Blonde, a beer brewed by some mysterious order of monks living in the hills of some country in some part of the world somewhere. We didn't know much about the source of the booze, but we had partaken in the Leffe before, and it's one of the world's magical experiences - something you have to do before you die, right up there with seeing Tom Jones perform live. You just don't want to go to the grave without it.

Pleased with ourselves for managing to have thrown our drowning holiday a line, we headed back to La Fondation to chill our beer on the window sill. We were much too poor to own a refrigerator, and the freezing Parisian night would do a perfectly good job of cooling down the booze to a temperature appropriate for numbing the brain.

The wind was beginning to pick up by the time we got back to my room. The beer was on the sill, I had my laptop out, and I was coding happily away while we waited for Mother Nature to do her thing.

Turns out she was feeling a little irritable.

Tree branches began whipping at the window, and we could see the tree tops outside swaying in the telltale signs of a storm that was winding up to unleash a little bit of hell on the world.

But, I was coding. When you're coding, you don't really pay much attention to these things. You're off in your own little world, and things like raging storms that threaten to prove their physical dominance over you and the rest of your kind don't bother you. You're focused on cranking out a few more lines, and could really care less about the slight atmospheric disturbance outside that's breaking the trees and flipping small cars.

What you do care about is the distant "tinkle-tinkle-tinkle" sound that pops in from nowhere, totally uninvited and welcome as a toothless leper in your bed.

What came to be known as "La Tempete du Siecle" (The Storm of the Century) in Paris had just claimed its first victim. I donned my shoes and went outside to clean up what I could of the mess that had certainly resulted from my beer being pushed off a ledge by the wind and falling to its death approximately fifty feet below.

Strike three: The universe had joined in the conspiracy to make me miserable. Double sucky.

The crash had sounded awful, but all was not lost.

In fact, only one bottle had been broken in the fall.

Minor miracle: The universe patted me on the back, apologized for the inconvenience, and said "Just kidding about the beer."

Three of the bottles had fallen in mud and were in perfect working order - nary a scratch on them. I rejoiced in the one "win" of the night, gathered the soiled bottles in my arms, and ran upstairs to tell Kori the good news.

We celebrated by cracking a couple of the bottles open, and I sat down on the bed with a copy of Richard Dawkins' "Unweaving the Rainbow." Life was suddenly very good, and we had every reason to be happy.

And we were happy. For the next thirty minutes or so, anyway.

I had finished my beer, and was plowing through Dawkins' book. There was a warm feeling in my tum-tum. I had forgotten about the church, the bum, and the fall. I didn't feel lonely anymore, and was feeling somewhat relieved that Christmas Eve was nearly over. The sooner it stopped being Christmas Eve, the sooner I could go back to not feeling as sorry for myself.

Then it happened.

I saw some of the letters in the book "disappear." I looked away, thinking that it was just a momentary aberration in my brain's ability to properly process visual stimuli, but I was wrong. Returning my peepers to the page, I saw that the letters were still "missing."

It was something I had encountered many times before, and could only be indicative of one thing: Scintillating scotoma.

Scintillating scotoma is a condition I have that causes me to go blind every few months. To say the least, it's unpleasant. On this particular Christmas Eve, however, it was disaster material.

Strike four: Even my brain was beating up on itself. Going blind while drinking your beer is a stupid way to pass the time.

I pretty much lost it at this point. I can usually keep my cool in crappy circumstances, but temporary blindness isn't one of them. My scintillating scotoma is often accompanied by other symptoms such as numbness of the extremities, minor hallucinations, and a difficulty understanding what people are saying (a condition called "aphasia"). It's a bit of a trial under the best conditions, and real pisser on life in the worst.

I went downstairs to visit a girl I knew whose mother was a doctor. She had a bag of medical supplies, and I figured that she'd have something I could take that would do something to help me out.

She did. I went to bed that night after taking .25mg of Halcion and slept like a baby through the night and most of Christmas day.

I think it's safe to say that December 24, 1999, wasn't quite as cool as spending 14 hours on the couch yesterday, moaning and wishing for death.

At least when I finally stopped puking last night, I was able to treat myself to a burrito. I didn't have that luxury when living in Paris, spending all of my money on rice, transportation, and internet use...