St. Patty's Day Thoughts

Some readers may say it is to my eternal shame that I have no good St. Patty's day drinking story to share with you today, but one element of most great drinking stories is their unpredictability - you don't set out to have one. Call it the zen of drinking - if you want a drinking bout to produce a fond lifelong memory, the worst thing you can do is have that as a goal going in.

Lacking any in depth knowledge of why we celebrate St. Patty's day, it is an uncontroversial assertion to say that the day's ubiquitous popularity stems from it having become a secular celebration of the means of adult celebration - that is, a celebration of alcohol and inebriation. Such a celebration doesn't discriminate between Gentile or Jew, or between Irish and Guinea Wap Degos (Italians). I cannot imagine the reason for hooking the celebration of alcohol to a Saint, but the Irish part makes a lot of sense, at least to the bigoted White Anglo-Saxon Protestant establishment, who view the Irish as consummate drunkards. (There are worse ways to be viewed.) If we ever start celebrating marijuana and getting high, we'll no doubt all dress like Bob Marley for a day, and maybe we'll even seek out a Rastafarian saint to mark the day by.

In any event, I came across the following article concerning a magazine called the Modern Drunkard that most readers of this blog probably already subscribe to: http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/higgins200603170812.asp It is somewhat humorous, especially when it gives a few representative article titles. My favorite among them - How to Ace an Intervention - the title alone is pure comic genius.

Whatever you are doing right now, or at any time during the day, remember this: somewhere Ted Kennedy is three sheets to the wind. The shrewd reader will note that I could write this in a post on any old day, and it would be no less true. But the point is this - drinking is a non-partisan activity. So it is important on certain days of the year to just get yourself to a bar and celebrate drinking, even if you risk have Ted throw up on your shoes. And get there before he drinks all the Chartreuse.