Congratulations on the New Year!

On January 1st, 2009 you’re going to wake up in a strange apartment, fully clothed, with just a touch of vomit drying on your shoes. You’ll be on a hardwood floor a few feet away from a sprawled out young woman who seems to be in the grip of some terrible nightmare.

Her body and face will be unfamiliar to you, but her expression is one you know all too well; the dissatisfied reverie of someone who mixed booze and pot last night and moved through the evening in what could be called a series of “rolling blackouts.”

You’ll give her a shake, but she’ll only react by punching at you with an adorable fist. When she punches, though, something on her fist will glint, and your heart will stop.

She’ll be wearing a ring. It will be around the fourth finger of her left hand. It won’t be anything new to you, you’ve been with married women before, especially while blacked out, but there will be a tiny feeling of wrongness in your head when you see it.

After a few puzzled minutes you’ll clasp your hands together and there it will be, on your own hand – a Cracker Jack decoder ring which had clearly served as your wedding ring last night.

Bits and pieces of the evening will come back to you: meeting the girl in a bar along with her sister, stealing her away from her group and taking her on a lengthy adventure through the city to find a hamburger joint, then finally catching up with them to watch the fireworks, hot dogs in hand. You even briefly remember the wedding, where you kissed your new wife and felt inside yourself a swell of love and rightness that has been missing from the last twenty-something years of your life.

This last bit will scare the living shit out of you.

You’ve been living the bachelor lifestyle, narrowly evading STDs and relationships like your name is Neo, and you’ve been pretending to like it a lot more than you actually do. This would trash that for roughly two weeks if it was a mistake, and for your entire life if it wasn’t.

And that feeling of warmth and belonging cut right through your drunken haze. She’s probably the right girl for you, and even if she’s not she makes you really, really happy when you’re both too drunk to stand up. You spend a lot of time in that state, so it’s a good bet you’d get along really well.

So here’s what’s going to happen. In about four minutes, she’s going to start coughing really badly. You have two choices.

You can push your new wife onto her side so she’ll vomit away from her body, then quietly egress from the apartment without waking her sister. It won’t be hard, her sister took home like three people last night and got so much nice nice she couldn’t stand up if she wanted to. Then you’ll call her up (she’s labeled “Mystery Wife” in your cell) and tell her that last night was fun, but you don’t want to structure your life around one drunken marriage, however fun it was, and that you’d like an annulment.

She’ll feel awful, she’ll be partially covered in vomit, and her brain will be shot, but at least you won’t have taken sexual advantage of her and you won’t have made a life changing decision based on really poor information.

Option two, you get up and dig through her kitchen until you find a bowl. Then you’ll hold back her hair as shit vomits into the bowl, helping her to keep her weight off the ground so she doesn’t puke all over herself.

She’ll heave for what seems like an eternity, occasionally groaning, until her body stops twitching and she collapses on to your lap. She’ll look like an angel, with her spit up ringed mouth and slight snarl from physical discomfort, but you’ll hold her there for an hour and a half until she looks up at you.

The moment those eyes open you’ll be captivated by her beauty and the only thing you’ll be able to say will be “I think you’re my new wife.” Then you’ll wrap your hand around hers and she’ll just look confused.

“Where the fuck am I?” she’ll say.

You’ll have time to sort out the details on both of these once you make your decision, and we can’t really see where either of these go, but good luck whatever you choose. And congratulations on the New Year! Its already shaping up to be a doozie.