Hungover or hung under?

What goes up must come down. It's the law of gravity. As it is with physics, so it is with human emotions. So now that the "legal high" has worn off and cruel reality bites back, it's back to trying desperately to find credible reasons not to self-harm. A treaty that seemed within our grasp just 36 hours ago now seems like a distant pipe dream, having seemingly foundered on American inflexibility and Russian intransigence.

© Jesper Waldersten

So do we approach the end game with the menace of a P5 text being slapped upon us like a wet fish, as we always feared? The answers to bridging delegations that are often light years, even sometimes galaxies apart, are certainly not being found in the UN's Indonesia Lounge. But maybe this is all part of a macabre master plan, an elaborate costume drama in which we have been unwitting actors? We shall know soon enough.

For the penultimate day of the conference beckons. Delegations need a new text to seek instructions on, and they really need it today. But informal consultations have barely touched on a third of the President's previous draft, so from which font of consensual wisdom comes the input to the many necessary changes?

And what of our watchwords, transparency and inclusivity, the guiding principles that the Conference President solemnly announced at the outset of our deliberations? Well, like a smoker promising to quit tomorrow, they are words devoid of substance -- empty rhetoric that demands a supreme effort on the part of the orator just to keep a straight face.

So enough of the childish innocence already. Eat your heart out Holden Caulfield, I'm all Buddy Glass tonight.

"You can’t imagine what big, hand-rubbing plans I had for this immediate space. They appear to have been designed, though, to look exquisite on the bottom of my wastebasket."

Hung under. Definitely hung under.