Drunkenness: The silent embarrasser. It comes for you when you least expect it … like when you’re still drunk the next morning after a long night out — a night in which you’ve made questionable decisions and perhaps urinated in places other than a bathroom.  Not that this ever happens to me. Just an example.

It can befall anyone. John Daly knows this. Which is why, following his infamous drunken session at a Hooters, I can safely feel bad for the man:

“Nothing is going right in my life right now,” Daly said in a telephone interview Sunday. “I’m going through a hell of a divorce. I haven’t seen my son. It was an unfortunate incident, but it’s a joke what people are saying. I take full responsibility for what happened, but it wasn’t that big of a deal.”

Ouch. Daly says the arrest itself was actually a misunderstanding; he went back to his tour bus to sleep when the driver found him passed out with his eyes open and thought he was dead:

But he said he was not arrested, nor was he thrown out of Hooters. The restaurant closed more than an hour before police arrived.

“The thing I want people to know is when I called my girlfriend at 11:30 p.m., I was going back to the bus to go sleep,” Daly said. “I’m not going to say I wasn’t drunk. I did have a few drinks. I said to them, ‘I’m tired, I’m drunk and I’m going to bed.”’

As a destructive drunk myself, I find this story eminently believable, and I have but one recommendation for Daly: Find better drinking buddies. If your friends don’t know you pass out with your eyes open from time to time — and every good alcoholic has at least one friend like this — then they might not be best suited to Daly’s considerable needs.