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Tuesday, March 20, 2012

HAPPY ST. PADDY’S DAY TO YA

St. Paddy’s Day, short for Saint Padrick, is, let’s face it, pretty awful. The music is awful, the food is awful, and the only way to get through it is to drink to excess. What is corned beef for instance? I like regular beef- I don’t want people going around corning it. I also like corn, and if you should get the urge to corn that, it’s okay with me. Also all the food is dyed green, making it, a.) resemble vegetables, and b.) gross-looking. On the other hand, at least when you go out for a drink there are plenty of people there, and I can watch drunk people all day long- they are SO CUTE!

My wife made me promise to DRIVE CAREFULLY on the way home- drunk people are like little kids on a ski slope- they have no sense of danger, and it's inevitable that one will slam into you at some point. The whole way home I fantasized that instead my car would be hit by a deer, only the deer would also be drunk, on some frigging fermented berries or some crap, just my luck.

We WERE in a car accident on St. Paddy’s Day many years ago, hit by a drunk driver. We sustained some serious injuries, and of course some humorous ones. We settled a lawsuit with the other driver; this was in the days before lawyers came on TV telling me how they were looking out for MY rights. One TV lawyer wears a huge hat- have you seen this guy? It’s not raining or snowing, but this guy has a ginormous hat as though he might ride a horse into court, dismount and then brand the defendant after tying three of his legs together. Another TV lawyer looks like an undertaker, wearing a big handlebar mustache. Basically every lawyer is rooting for your bad luck.

But I went out anyway. On St. Patrick's Day your feet stick to the floor of the bar. Most of it is beer, but anywhere you turn could be spit, vomit, urine... I think I saw some amniotic fluid at one point, and some stuff that might have come out of someone's duodenum. Everything is dyed green so who the hell knows. I realize now where the Earth's crust comes from. God forbid there is a murder on St. Patrick's Day, because there is so much DNA on the floor you'd be testing it for months. Luckily there is my big fat footprint sitting in it so the cops could finger me that way, the least fun of all the ways they could finger me.

I tried to walk from one end of the bar to the other so I could go to the bathroom, but the bar was so crowded I ended up being extruded at the other end like from a tube of toothpaste. I was man-handled. I think I was also woman-handled, and possibly leprechaun-handled. I checked to see if my wallet was still there. Not only was it there, but I actually had picked up another one, too. I was touched in an inappropriate place, namely the coat-check room. I felt cheap, especially after looking in the wallet. Drunk girls were getting caught in an eddy of green, going around in concentric circles for about 20 minutes before the tide shifted.

There were a lot of firemen, I guess left over from the parade. I think it's good to have a day for the firemen to feel appreciated, because they could be in danger at any given time if somebody did something stupid like leave French fries cooking on an oven burner on high and walk away for about half an hour and start a nice fire in the kitchen cabinets. I'm not mentioning any names, but I don’t think I ever got full credit for sending my little sister through graduate school on the insurance money my father got. I thought I noticed some other weasels trying to ride in on the wave of good tidings for people in uniform. People were wearing bell-hop uniforms, gas station-attendant uniforms, I thought I saw a McDonald's uniform.... It's going too far if you actually have a medal on one of those. Or a rank- sometimes I see a doorman with three stripes on the uniform, and I wonder if he got a promotion from door-corporal.

It seems a shame to celebrate the heroism of firefighters on a day when everybody is too drunk to realize it. I scoured the calendar to find a different day that we could use. By the way, since when did Secretary’s Day become Administrative Assistant’s Day? Remember when you had to stop calling people stewardesses and start calling them aerial wait-staff? This seems like a rare case where all the male secretaries got together and wanted to seem a little less girly, and got them to change the name. Hillary Clinton is Secretary of State and she doesn’t seem girly, does she? You don’t hear her complaining that she wants to be called Administrative Assistant of State, do you?

I had a friend Dave in high school who was a volunteer fireman. He had to pay for his own scanner and emergency lights. When a call came over the radio he had to jump in his car and get moving- his emergency lights were a strobe and a UV light- I think they were from a discotheque. To this day every time I see those lights on the dance floor I pull over.

Anyway, I finally made it to the bar. There was a barmaid there who looked just like Sean Young- right down to those cute nostrils of hers. Am I the only one that noticed that Sean Young has cute nostrils? That's probably why she smells so good. However, Sean Young had that aura about her where she might be bipolar or even tripolar, like you might wake up and she would be hovering above you on the bed with a little-used garden tool, your whole life flashing in front of you and all you can think of is that if you had used that damned bulb pruner ONCE and left it out there to rust like all the others you wouldn’t be in this predicament. Plus the garden would look a little better than it does….

Incidentally, Saint Patrick’s Day is a celebration of the “Patron of Ireland.” Saints sometimes become “patrons” of the city or place where they were born, and unlike regular patrons, can get service even though they are not wearing a shirt or shoes. Often Spanish or Portuguese explorers named a newly discovered town after the saint who was born on the day they first visited the place. Saint Patrick’s Day is sometimes seen as the end of Lent, when you can resume doing whatever disgusting thing you gave up 40 days ago. Legend has it that Saint Patrick used a shamrock to explain to the Irish pagans what the Holy Trinity was. Knuckleheads STILL didn't get it. Finding a three-leaf clover is still considered lucky, as long as you don’t have to sit through the whole Holy Trinity story.

2 comments:

  1. Thank you for grad school! - Diane

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  2. You're welcome! I feel a little better now...

    ReplyDelete