EDITOR’S NOTE: Nothing I write about St. Patrick’s Day is likely to be funnier than what we published on March 1, 2000. It is by far our most popular piece, having been reprinted hundreds of times on Web sites and emails across the Internet. So if you’ve seen that piece before, or maybe forwarded it via email to your friends, please leave me a comment and let me know… you owe me some fucking money.
In the meantime, here’s this other thing.
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It is St. Patrick’s Day, and thanks to 2008’s unforgiving leap year and an uncaring God, it falls on a Tuesday. It is therefore useless to everyone but college students, people with vacation time to burn at employers with liberal substance abuse policies, and Boston city employees, who have the day as a holiday to celebrate the Revolutionary War withdrawal of British Regular troops from the city limits… probably because of the stench.
I used to observe St. Patrick’s Day religiously (Assuming you’re willing to accept a liberal enough Bible translation to believe that when Jesus told his buddies, “This is my blood,” he might have been swirling a glass of whiskey), but it gets harder every year. Particularly in this economy; good luck telling your employer that you want to trade a day of work productivity for a day of producing green bile and liver necrosis.
I have had employers who have seemed to have a pathological hatred of St. Patrick’s Day; one time when the holiday fell on a Saturday for proper observation, they scheduled a mandatory day of product testing. After watching ten hours of drinking time trickle away while in front of someone else’s computer, my nerves were so shot that, on my way home to finally tie one on, I dropped a $60 quart of 12-year-old Jamesons and shattered it on the ground. It took masterful and quick telephone soothing from my girl to prevent me from spending the remainder of an already horrible St. Patrick’s Day in the emergency room getting lacerations in my tongue stitched up.
But every March 17th, I never fail to get nostalgic for my first epic St. Patrick’s Day. It was my senior year in college, and I arrived home at my townhouse with a quart of Bushmills and a six pack of Killian’s Red, because nothing’s more Irish than a thin red lager from County Colorado.
Ken MacDonald and I started the morning with a pot of proper Irish Coffee: a half pot of Folgers, with the remainder topped off with whiskey. By noon we had settled into an off-campus bar and were nipping off to the men’s room over ten minutes to pee green… not from drinking green beer, but because of gall bladder failure.
By 3 p.m., after trying and failing to hook up college girls with witty pickup lines like, “Hey, honey! I’m drooling because of lust! For you! Not because liquor has robbed me of the fine motor control I would need to make sleeping with me anything more than a horrible story to tell your therapist!” and “Guhhhh… sucky?” I decided to attend my Senior Journalism Seminar class, since the bar was getting messy, and since not attending would mean an automatic F and a repeat of my senior year. In retrospect, I chose poorly.
When I arrived at the classroom, my professor approached me and said, “I thought you said that you weren’t going to be able to attend today.” After I turned to face her and cleverly respond, “Wha? Huh?”, she grimaced, waved my breath away from her face and said, “Jesus! You smell like a dead squirrel trapped in a distillery outflow pipe! You sit in the back!” Note to self: when you are told that you are embarrassingly drunk… by a professional journalist… you should go home or to the hospital, whichever is closer.
The guest speaker in that day’s class was the producer of the epic Tommy Chong vehicle Far Out Man, who, after I told him that I intended to pursue a career in stand-up comedy after graduation, advised me: “Don’t quit your day job.” And trust me when I tell you that, when the most prescient and sage career advice you gets comes from a guy dumb enough to put his own money into a Tommy Chong solo project? You have made terrible decisions in your life.
But the point is, that was my most epic St. Patrick’s Day, and I can remember it all like it was yesterday, from the scratches in the Pepsi Comeback Mug I used to smuggle Irish Whiskey into the classroom, to the Camel Turkish Gold cigarettes I was smoking rather than my usual Marlboro Mediums due to a three-for-two sale. And now that I’m older, I realize the fact that I can remember all of those details after all this time means that I am predisposed to have a certain feeling about St. Patrick’s Day…
…and that feeling is shame. Because if I can remember all that shit? It means that I did it wrong.
[tags]St. Patrick’s Day, dark humor, satire[/tags]
