The American Jerk

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.

—————————————-

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.

Continue reading →

My television is making a shrieking sound; as if, were it a human being,  someone were applying live electrodes to its testicles. Which is unfortunate, because hearing that sounds makes me want to apply live electrodes to its testicles.

Back in the heady days of 2004, when high definition television was in it’s infancy and many people had things that history will refer to as “jobs”, I, in fact, had two jobs: one at an insurance company that paid the day-to-day bills, and one at a radio station that allowed me invade upon unsuspecting people, erroneously feeling safe in their own cars, with vile, thinly-veiled dick jokes. This job didn’t pay the bills, but it did make me feel slightly less suicidal ideation over spending forty hours a week in a cubicle at a fucking insurance company.

As such, I had money, as the old wealthy refer to it, pouring out of my asshole. What I didn’t have was time. On Fridays, after forty hours plus ten hours commuting, I would arrive home at 5 p.m. with a single mission: pour enough beer quickly enough down my throat to be asleep by 9 at the latest, because I had to get up at 2 a.m. to be at the radio station by 3 to prep to go on the air for five hours at 6…

…And having reread that paragraph, it occurs to me that I’m complaining that I had to drink… for my job. But trust me: drinking is like any other form of recreation: it’s only fun if you don’t have to do it. It’s like sex: awesome… right up until someone jams a gun barrel against your brain stem and tells you it’s time to get it up. A fistful of Cialis and a shoehorn might keep you alive, but the neighbors aren’t exactly gonna be pounding on the walls to make you keep the noise down.

Anyway. By the time I would get off the air at 11 a.m., I would be exhausted with a severely confused internal body clock. My normal routine would be to somehow point the car towards home, whereupon I would begin drinking again to put me to sleep for three or four hours in the afternoon in order to recalibrate my brain into understanding Eastern Standard Time again, so I would be able to finally actually enjoy drinking on Saturday night. Back then, if Nicholas Cage had hung out with me to prep for Leaving Las Vegas, he not only would have won the Oscar, he’d have won the fucking Nobel Peace Prize. Probably posthumously.

That was my normal post-airshift Saturday morning. However, one Saturday morning, I decided that I was in the perfect condition to choose and purchase an expensive hi-def TV.

Continue reading →