Saturday night, I fell asleep with one of Spengler's later works, Jahre der Entscheidung, splayed open on my chest. In the morning I was woken by a message from Rachel. She'd been drinking the previous evening and had woken up with the hangover horn...Would I come over? Why do I let women treat me like this..? Yet, for all my experience, I had never heard that phrase before. Nevertheless, approximately twelve minutes later I was standing at her door. Hangover horn...I suppose this is the language of normal people. And Rachel is so...normal. The use of that word could imply, of course, the projection of my own weakness. So when I say Rachel is normal what I mean, probably, is that she is so practical. And she is practical. But what I mean by normal is, actually, a contraindication of a different order. By which I mean, unlike everyone else I meet, Rachel is...well balanced. Anyhow, I am happy to succumb to whatever it brings...Or am I..? Hangover horn...it suggests a rather detached yet infantile need that could be satisfied by a pill, or a decent bagel, as much as by sex. Of course, I don't regret a second of it but I was reminded of client T. She is a married woman in her forties. Her affair with a man ten years younger was troubling her and she came to therapy to resolve the situation. Before long, she was referring to her lover as the boy, finding in the maternal erotic a category not without issues, but less troubling. Last week she burst into tears. After a silence of several weeks, her boy lover had sent her a text, R U Happy..? It took me twenty minutes to pick this unhappy creature from the floor. But after she had left I wondered what vain, craven feeling that boy, that child, would've felt if he had seen the effect of his lazy, stupid text. R U Happy...? This is the zonked out language of a dying species. Later that sunday, however, I received another text from Rachel. Her hangover was history. That was nice, she wrote, x. And yes, for a minute, it warmed my heart.