Someone must close down the bar, but I am through volunteering for the position. This is not to say bourbon has lost its bloom, or that work days do not begin with brief foamy fantasies about the first cold beers to be cracked eight hours later. I can say (with a straight face) that serious carousing is an occupation for swollen wallets and spare time, and claim that, as of late, I have neither. I can rationalize moderation because I wake up very early and tire before last call the following morning. I can insist that going out is harder than staying in, especially when it's raining and there's work to do and Netflix in the mailbox. I can affect a jaded outlook, yawning that the sport of drinking doesn't hold the appeal it had ten years ago. I can label it a secondary activity, something I associate with games to watch, gigs to play, food to eat, and good conversations with friends. Big nights happen, yes, but usually on accident, I can say -- candidly, with no regrets.

Those are all parts of the problem (if embracing moderation can ever be considered one) but the real reason, the one that really has me avoiding bars and heading home early when I can't, is that these days, when I drink too much, my hangovers hit like Mike Tyson circa 1986. After a few too many, I wake up stuffy, morose, disoriented, ugly, and sore. I don't ever get sick, but I forget details about where I went and who I saw. I don't have the energy to do the things that the day ahead demands, and my mood plummets correspondingly. When I was 20, I could shake off boozy sweats, dehydration, and body aches, and spring out of bed after five hours of sleep to bound around the house, read, study, and socialize -- all miraculously on an empty stomach. Now, on those increasingly infrequent occasions where I over-indulge, I am discovering that I desperately require food -- breakfast maybe, or at least a snack of heroic proportions -- to piece myself together again.

Restorative noshing is welcome immediately after the party, or hours later, upon waking. The fact that I've only really realized this in the latter half of my twenties probably says something about my learning curve in general. If hunger pangs strike on the way home from the bar, possibilities are limited. Most restaurants aren't open. Chorizo tacos from El Farolito and Taqueria Vallarta hit the spot. I haven't been, but Nombe, the new-ish izakaya on Mission St., has a late-night take-out window selling ramen to revelers staggering home. Sometimes, an attack on the refrigerator is the best and cheapest recourse. I went out on Saturday night and stayed out -- gasp -- until 1 a.m. When I came home I realized nearly everything in the house that I felt like eating was being saved for a dinner with my dad the following night -- sausage for pizza, bread for croutons, and olives. Instead, I microwaved some leftover white rice and added salt and a few squirts of srirachi sauce. Something with srirachi sauce usually does the trick. Lately, I've also been especially enjoying plain corn tortillas roasted on a cast-iron skillet and then topped with srirachi and a few creamy squiggles of Kewpie mayonnaise. I do two at a time, folded over like miniature fusion-y quesadillas, and eat them fast, usually burning my mouth in the process.

For those disinclined to wallow in gastronomic gutters, there is also, of course, street food -- bacon dogs, tamales, and the ever-growing assortment of heavily Twittered carts that tend to pop up on corners outside the doors of drinking establishments. As good as some of this stuff is (I'm thinking about you, gumbo guy), such trendy offerings come with long lines, and waiting fifteen minutes for a grilled flatbread behind a bunch of ravenous drunk people is rarely an attractive option when you're ravenous and drunk yourself. Fifteen minutes? I could be home by then, putting the final drizzle of srirachi on a corn tortilla, wearing the sweats, watching a little Larry David before passing out with a smile on my face.

Tortilla with srirachi and Kewpie mayonnaise. You won't see this in Saveur.

Alcohol stirs the strangest cravings the morning after. Some people wake up and go for eggs, pancakes, waffles, sausage, and other conventional breakfast-y things. There is scientific logic to this. Eggs contain cysteine, a substance that breaks down the hangover-causing toxin acetaldehyde in the liver. Fruit juice actually hastens the rate at which a body gets ride of toxins like those generated by alcohol metabolism. Bananas, also common at breakfast, replace potassium lost to alcohol's diuretic tendencies. Fried or stupendously unhealthy foods appeal because sufferers suspect that grease will soothe their irritated stomach linings -- nevermind the fact that it's more likely to have the opposite effect. Psychology is powerful, however, especially the morning after losing brain cells, and I think that sometimes people condition themselves to crave the very things that will hurt them more. It's, in the long run, a fairly harmless sort of self-loathing -- sitting down to a plate of battered chicken, savoring the punishment disguised as a cure, letting your over-taxed body pay the tab your inconsiderate brain racked up. Some treat their morning afflictions like illness and self-medicate with more austere feasts -- steamed vegetables, spicy broths, and so on.

Every year, usually when New Year's Eve approaches, publications feel it necessary to run stories about hangovers and how to avoid them. Typically, these pieces involve interviews with bartenders, operating under the assumption that these callous dispensers of liquid poison know something about recovery too. On Christmas Eve, Grub Street consulted some mixologists on the subject, and the responses were fairly telegraphed, with most suggesting hair of the dog remedies. Likewise, a Dec. 31 Examiner article expanded the sample group and saw similar results, with respondents largely sticking to the guns articulated by their respective professions. The bartender recommended more booze. The personal trainer advocated drinking plenty of water and working out. The doctor condemned drinking too much in the first place. The acupuncturist suggested acupuncture. I'm not sure if I have a profession to stick to, but I have done both drinking and thinking in my day, and for that reason, I hesitate to press any so-called "cures" on others. Hangovers are, after all, very personal things. I will however share a few meals that I have managed to enjoy under the bleariest of circumstances:

Indian buffet. This goes back to a summer home from college. The morning after a long night, some friends and I went to an Indian restaurant attached to a worn motel. After three plates of chicken korma, saag paneer, and samosas, I felt well enough to spend the rest of the day at the zoo. I'm not sure if there's a San Francisco equivalent, but once I woke up in San Jose, went to New Indian Cuisine, and came away again convinced that naan is merely Advil slicked with ghee.

A breaded chicken torta with chipotles from La Torta Gorda. I'm always momentarily tempted to get a junior, but the full is the way to go. Go home, eat half, and put the remainder in the fridge. Get some covers and stretch out on the couch. Watch basketball or half a season of a television show you've already seen. Look up at the clock. It's nearly dinner-time. Good thing you have a brick-sized piece of torta to eat.

A pickle, dill.

Soup. I'm a soup person -- that could be a post in and of itself -- but it doesn't help my hangovers unless it's French onion from Ti Couz, with some seafood salad and maybe a mushroom crepe on the side.

Chicken fingers and waffle fries with ranch dressing from Phat Philly. This is actually my girlfriend's thing. She's yelling at me from the other room to include it.

John Campbell's Irish Bakery. Once, a few years ago, I was staying out at my dad's in the Richmond District -- dog-sitting, house sitting, and cable-watching -- and I woke up after a night out with a painkiller-resistant headache, a sour hollow stomach, and my dad's whippet dashing around the bed in frantic circles. I had hopped off the 38 at 1:30 a.m. and decided to grab one more at the Blarney Stone. Pulling on a coat, leashing the dog, and stepping out into the stabbing mist, I walked back to the scene of the crime and had a piece of pizza (it might have been called "focaccia") from John Campbell's, the fantastic bakery next door to the 'Stone. This was like nothing you'd see at A16, Flour + Water, or even Pizza Hut. There was turkey or ham in cubes, peppers and onions, maybe. A white sauce and cheese, I want to say. The dog was whimpering, begging for a taste. I can't recall the details, but the slice (a slab, really) was like a combination of stew and scone, or an upside-down pot pie even -- bread-y, bland, and bad, at least as far as pizza goes. Yet held to a different standard -- alcohol absorption -- it delivered -- nearly as well as a corn tortilla with hot sauce and mayo.

Are you as tired of hearing about the End-of-Times as I am? If one is to believe all the hullabaloo, we humans have slightly more than 3 years to live until catastrophe strikes.

The ancient Egyptians predicted a great disaster would come in the year 2012, crazy present-day Belgians, Canadians, and Americans are forming survival groups to prepare for total global meltdown in the same year. Even the folks at N.A.S.A. are all predicting a sharp increase in the number of sun flares and sunspots in 2012. Nostradamus, unsurprisingly, got in on the act, too. Of course, if one writes several hundred vague quatrains promising future doom and gloom, some of them are bound to hit on something gruesome.

Perhaps the biggest fuss of all is being made by the Chicken Littles (or Chickens Little, if Little is a family name) who point to the ancient Mayan calendar and claim that the sky is falling. Alarmists of several nations are pointing to the fact that the Mayan long count cycle will come to it's 5,125-year end on or about the 21st of December, 2012.

I am no expert on the Mayan calendar but, having studied their art and pulled out most of my hair spending several months trying to remember Mayan names and the meaning of lord-knows-how-many Mayan glyphs in college, I came to learn that there was no culture more dean-on in their observation of the stars and the passage of time. Their calendar was long the most accurate that anyone had devised, pre-dating our Gregorian calendar by several centuries. It's even believed they came up with the concept of the zero about 400 years before the mathematicians of India (though one must give the Sumerians their due for coming up with the zero first and blame others for promptly losing that knowledge.). In short, apart from the occasional thorn-spiked rope-through-the-tongue bloodletting business, the Mayans knew what the hell they were doing.

It's just that they never said the end of this 5,125-ish-year cycle meant the end of the world. I think they just meant it will be the end of a cycle and the beginning of the next. That's it. One would think desperate Republicans would be latching on to this as they start gearing up for the 2012 presidential race. It wouldn't be any more crazy then what the Doomsday survivalists are doing.

Where am I headed with this, you might ask? Well, all this End-of-Times crazy is driving me to drink, not that I need to be driven far. If I decide to buy into the brewing hysteria, I am liable to drown my sorrows in appropriately-themed Mexican cocktails.

If these kooks are correct and the end of the world is, in fact, nigh, I say drink up. Why worry about liver damage if the world is coming to an end? If they are wrong and the end isn't so nigh and I wake up to a clear sky and the sweet warbling of Franklin Street traffic on the 22nd of December, 2012, I am going to have one hell of a bad hangover. I'm going to need something to soak up three years-worth of margaritas.

I'm going to need chilaquiles-- the sure-fire, Mexican breakfast of hung-over champions. And I'm going to need a lot of it. I will be prepared. I will stock up like the survivalists on corn tortillas and red chili sauce. I will hoard cojita cheese.

If, for some reason, the Mayans were off by a day and the 22nd of December winds up being even more of a hell-on-earth than the Holiday season has already made that particular time of year, as long as I've had a heaping plate of chilaquiles, some fried eggs, and a few bites of beans, I'll feel fine. Really, I will.

And then, if my pen has not yet vaporized or been covered in volcanic ash, I will write a rather contrite letter of apology to those not-so-crazy Doomsdayers.

Chilaquiles

According to Chow.com, the word "chilaquiles" refers to a "broken-up old sombrero." This is, in my opinion, a direct and charming way of telling the reader that this dish is--though quite delicious in a functional, comforting sort of way-- not going to be very pretty. According to Urban Dictionary, "chilaquile" can be used as a substitute for nearly any noun, verb, or adjective. An extreme example of usage would be "Those chilaquiles were so chilaquilin' good that I nearly chilaquiled myself right there in the chilequile-ing restaurant." In other words, a less direct and even less charming way of telling the reader that something is-- though quite delicious in a functional, comforting sort of way-- not going to be very pretty.

This dish is very easy to make and very difficult to screw up. In other words, it's the perfect thing to make when one is hung over. Combined with eggs (scramble or, better yet, fried), and a dollop of Mexican crema, this dish will soothe and soak up anything the past 5,125 years or so has thrown at you.

Serves 2 to 4, depending upon the size of the hangover.

Ingredients:

For the Chilaquiles:

12 corn tortillas. Stale ones are ideal, but if there is no such thing as a stale corn tortilla in your household or you would never admit to it, buy some fresh and leave them to sit out overnight.

Vegetable oil (preferably corn oil, which you can call maize oil, if that helps you in any way)

About 2 cups of some sort of Mexican cuisine-derived sauce. Elise Bauer over at Simply Recipes offers an excellent and, of course, simple salsa verde recipe for this particular dish; The Food Network, if you are into them at all, can provide you with a great red chili sauce. There is no one, correct sauce to use here. Experiment to find your favorite version*.

Toppings:

Popular toppings include:

Cojita cheese, or queso fresco

Crema Mexicana, or crème fraîche, if you want to re-visit the short-lived, ill-fated, French-backed Mexican Empire.

Finely diced red onion

A squeeze of lime

torn up bits of roasted chicken

Avocado

Cilantro

Tiny Mexican flags

Unpopular toppings include:

Spanish, Austrian, French, or U.S. flags of any size

Preparation:

1. Cover the bottom a good-sized (read: large, preferably cast iron) skillet with about 1/8 inch of oil. When the oil is hot and a test piece of tortilla sizzles, add its brother and sister pieces to the pan-- making sure to coat all of them-- and fry until golden brown. Remove tortillas from the pan and drain on paper towels. Salt them generously. Wipe pan to remove any stray, brown pieces of tortilla.

2. Add about 2 tablespoons of oil to the same pan and heat through. Pour in salsa and cook for a few minutes to thicken slightly, then add tortilla pieces. Make certain all the pieces are well-coated by turning them gently in the sauce. If you break a few, I dare say it shouldn't matter much, given the dish's likening to a broken-up old sombrero. Let the mixture cook until most of the sauce has been absorbed, which is not more than five minutes, but not less than two. Remove from heat.

4. Heap the now-ready chilaquiles onto a platter and garnish with any of the above garnishes you wish. Serve warm.

*In the true spirit of hangover food, I think it's perfectly acceptable to purchase pre-made sauce. There are several good, reputable brands. Seriously. Call me Sandra Lee if you want to, but unless you are the type (A) kind of personality who plans ahead for his/her hangovers, the fewer steps to breakfast, the better.