St. Patrick's Day Drinking... Or How To Spend Your Whole Paycheque On Things That Go Down The Drain

A few years back I had a fine St. Patrick's that I never want to have happen again.

I started it at Opening Time, which for this special, joyous occasion was 9 AM - I decided to forgo watching the parade and instead spend the whole fucking day drinking at a bar, in this case Madhatter's, at the bigger location on Crescent, the third of four incarnations of the bar I've drank in.

We started out being four, well, there were two of us, but lack of space made another two people sit at our table, but soon enough, the three people sharing my space, being the social blabbermouths they were born to be, got the other tables interested in us.

Madhatter's, with a great sense of profiteering, had no specials on beer on the one day that pretty much celebrates the fucking thing - so it was $15 pitchers and $6 Jack Daniels. Lucky for me, ever thinker-ahead-of-times, I'd brought in a 40-ounce of Mr. Daniels' fine drink to re-fill my glass at my own convenience and save dough...

By 11 AM, there were waitresses coming around selling $1 shots of vodka-fueled drinks - Sex On the Beach and Kamikaze... I acquiesced and took two of each, and for the first time of the day, also paid some to my tablemates - at a buck a pop, it would have been wrong not to.

At noon we had our first meal - I ordered a plate of nachos, fully loaded with olives, black peppers, salsa and topped with a bit of mozzarella cheese; food helps keep the booze down, and keeps the booze hound from getting his noose wound - and spitting some juice, brown.

By 2 PM, our new friends were wasted and left, quickly replaced by new drinking buddies. It was around that time that I got up, for the first time, to evacuate a bit of liquid and take some more money out; I'd had at least 5 pitchers at this point, plus perhaps 20 ounces of JD and a dozen shots of the vodka drinks... so up the stairs I went to the men's room, which was already a walk-in puddle of transparent stickiness, and one stall - one of two, the one on the left, first from the door - seemed to be reserved for vomit-emitters and those afflicted by diarrhea. I finished what needed to be done as fast as I could to not have to spend a second longer than I had to, and promptly made my way back downstairs for more beers.

Soon enough, an army of musicians swarmed the place and got the whole populace festive, standing and cheering and yelling; it was a mini-parade inside the bar, so those of us who had missed the actual one outside were treated to a show anyhow. It was all good.

By 5 or 6 PM, it was time for another meal - a hamburger with fries. I realize in retrospect that I should have had the meal that requires the most careful handling first, before things degenerated, but hey, I didn't; not that anything was wrong with the food, both the burger and fries tasted exactly like they usually do there, but it was about that time that I, personally, started to buy the shot-waitress a shot every time she came by, which was becoming increasingly often; I can only imagine that the same thing happened with the rest of the staff, from the bartenders to the cooks. For most humans, alcohol consumption means motor skills and attention to detail start becoming a priority... but as I said, it tasted fine.

I probably went to the washroom after my meal, say by 7 or 8 PM, and it was probably stickier, smellier and more disgusting than before. At this point, it was only my second time (in about 10 hours of drinking), but I'd be going every hour on the hour from then on, and the situation upstairs just got worse. I was tempted to use the ladies' room, but it wasn't much better there, plus there was a line-up. Between 11 PM and 2 AM, I'd just go outside and urinate in the alley to save time and keep my sanity, but later than that, I feared not being let back in - keep in mind, closing time is 3 AM...

In any event, they only kicked us out past 4 AM; they stopped serving us alcohol at 3:30 (well, the shooter girl handed us drinks, many of them free by then, until 4:15), the bar had been empty except for a half-dozen hangers-on for over an hour, and the staff was wanting to go home.

We each grabbed a cab - our table, and the shooter girl and bartenders - and headed our separate ways, sad to leave each other's company but exhausted (and, for some, dead-drunk). The sun was coming up, way in the distance, and with my going East, it looked like I was headed right for it, looking to meet the sunrise head-on.

When I got home, I called my bank to find out the damage done: $750. My whole paycheque I'd just gotten 3 days prior, and a bit more.

I went to bed at 5:30 AM and had to get up at 8 to go to work. I got there at 9:30, barely a half hour late, with a headache, and proceeded to tell my boss the tale of my previous night; he wasn't surprised, but he had trouble believing it.

It was an amazing day and night, but I wouldn't do it again - I couldn't even afford to, anyhow. It's the last time I ''celebrated'' St. Patrick's Day.

Chasing The Dragon

This one is a weird one; even today, bits of that evening come to me in bizarre flashbacks that barely make any sense until I tack them on to whatever hazy memory I have and somehow the events are reconstructed a little bit more.

There was a particular night this summer, I must have played a show and then we'd gone to party at the bar near my house afterwards, it's pretty much the only way I can account for my friend, The Big E, to have been there.

The details of what went on before things started fucking up are still hazy today; it could have been a night where the Lady Of The House and My Dad had been there where an old woman came on to me a bit hard, grinding against my leg while I was just sitting calmly and talking with the folks at my table, then proceeding to give me a full-on ''I Touch Myself''-style show on a chair she'd pulled next to me and acting like a stripper (but keeping her clothes on, at least). Eventually, though, she was tossed out of the place, and chances are she ended up fucking some panhandler in an alleyway somewhere.

Then again, it may have been a totally different night. Oddly enough, I mostly remember the details of what happened after we'd all had, perhaps, a little too much to drink. There was this drunk nerdy girl, the type you see in movies - kind of cute but that you're pretty sure that is she took her glasses off she'd perhaps be hot, or maybe she'd be the type to get gang-banged by a boatload of sailors, you never know - anyhow, she was playing pool, for all we knew, but at some point when that ended, she came to sit at our table. By then, The Big E and I were the only ones left.

Beers followed glasses of Jack Daniel's, then beer made a comeback. The girl was visibly way too fucking drunk - and so was E. E doesn't require much - usually a single shot of vodka will help derail his whole night - and, even though he stayed on beer all evening (he dislikes JD), he was way past his point of tolerance. Myself, I was in my comfort zone. Closing time - 3 AM - was rearing its ugly head, and I was just getting started.

Last call came and I ordered us a massive round - two beers each, and a quad-JD (four ounces) more for me. They let us finish our drinks before closing the place down, but apparently my partying mood was contagious. Many of the other customers decided it'd be wise to continue ingesting booze in the alley behind the bar; I went home (not even a block away) to grab a 40-ouncer of JD, that I planned to share with Big E.

When I got back, E and the girl were standing outside the bar's locked door, in full view of any and every passer-by, facing each other, forehead-against-forehead. I wouldn't have a problem with it, despite the girl saying she had a boyfriend for most of the time we were inside - he's no concern of mine - except E's Lady is possibly the closest friend I've had this past year, and I won't let him fuck their relationship up for a drunken tart in a shit-hole local bar - at least have it be something meaningful, for fuck's sake. So, when I'm near enough for them to hear me, I say ''am I interrupting anything?''

- No, E answers, you got here just in time.
- Good, I reply, now let's move out back.

They both get out from in front of the door and start walking ahead of me when I notice she's got the worst Plumber's Crack in the history of mankind - pretty much her whole ass is showing. All I could think was to use my best Denis Leary impression and say ''Pull up your fucking pants!'' while pulling them up; I didn't expect her to be so light, so I lifted her two feet in the air in the process. I can still make 'em fly, I guess.

When we got to the alley, sitting relatively comfortably, the girl doing her best to stick to E like glue, everybody there kept telling him to throw her away. We were all drinking, having a good time, when weed started making the rounds; that killed E and pretty much got him to fall asleep right then and there. I had to convince two girls to escort him home - one who had fake teeth, and her friend. I'll get back to the fake-toothed girl in a later post, she's so worth her own chapter, but we got E the hell out of there while his magnetized date-for-the-evening went to throw up. We got her in a cab before she realized what was happening.

Eventually, as more people left, the more obscure - or at least less public - habits and consumptions came to arrive. A girl we've come to nickname Duncan, coming off giving birth to her first child, and her boyfriend, Scary Bald Punk Dude, started doing lines of coke; that's not my scene at all, though, so I politely refused and kept drinking my Jack.

It wasn't long before more weed made the rounds, and for Duncan to offer me a ''special blend'' she'd just bought, in a pipe (I hate fucking pipes). I didn't take much, because it didn't seem right: no smell, no taste, no real buzz. It didn't feel like anything at all, yet I recognized the feeling - I just couldn't put my finger on it.

Suddenly I felt warm inside, like a fever taking over, but putting my hand to my forehead, I didn't feel a change in temperature; I just went back to my bottle, and to the conversation. By then the sun was coming up, and we all went our separate ways. I got home and was relaxed - but I couldn't sleep. And as my brain was trying to figure out why, my heart was pumping because I couldn't come up with an answer; I can usually control my main body functions to an extent that scares people, and when I lose that control, everything fucks up and a feeling of unease, of extreme nausea takes over. It took me a half-hour to get back to normal, and enough energy to do so that I was extenuated and went to sleep. Finally.

The next day was even more bizarre. I wasn't really hung over - that, in itself, wasn't entirely out of the ordinary, because I can take alcohol, but I had ingested copious amounts and was at least expecting a migraine - but I couldn't find the energy to move, either. Lying on my couch, watching TV, when a position had become uncomfortable, I had trouble mustering the strength to just shift over a little. And - another rare occurrence in my case - there were blanks in my recollections.

I remembered E wanting to keep our whereabouts secret, but I recalled having even better arguments in demonstrating that it'd just be easier to ready to disclose most of the night and, perhaps, just leave certain elements out of the retrospection - say, a certain lady whose forehead was glued to his and whose ass was taking in the Montréal air when I got there.

It took me hours to remember I'd smoked up, and a while longer to remember the ''special blend''. I was pissed off at myself for having forgotten, and at having agreed to it in the first place. Then I started wondering just what the hell it was; it couldn't have been pot, that's a given. Pot and coke - or pot and crack? It seemed unlikely, there was no ''uplifting'' effect to it, no heightened senses, no added strength, if anything, it was the opposite. And knowing how I have an ''addictive'' personality (weak self-control when it comes to consuming, whether it be simple stuff like goods or food, or others), I do my best to steer clear of hard drugs because I know I'm the type who wouldn't keep it recreational.

It took a few months during which I'd have occasional flashbacks of second-long moments from that night (yet another unusual occurrence) before I'd remember what that familiar feeling had been; it came to me in the most awkward way, too, reading Slash's autobiography... I'll have a complete post about it later, but when I was a teen, I was prescribed Oxycontin to re-balance my system after having been sick all Winter (something like 6 or 7 tonsillitis's in a row combined with a lack of sleep when Spring came)... and Oxycontin is nothing other than a semi-synthetic form of heroin.

Suddenly, it all made sense: the ''lack'' of effect, of smell, of taste... they weren't what I expected, so I didn't see it coming. The feeling from the next day was explained too: I couldn't get myself to do anything, but my brain was feeling fine, it's just my body that couldn't follow.

I still get flashbacks at times that help make the general picture of that evening clearer, pieces of the puzzle that help piece it back together. And, each time, I'm reminded to not take just anything from people I barely know, and, considering the way I am, to stay the fuck away from that substance because the next time could be the last time I enter a situation with my mind intact.

The Passing Of Time Through Winter

The future is inherently a good thing. And we move into it one winter at a time.

Things get better one winter at a time. So if you're going to celebrate, have a drink on this: the world is, generally and on balance, a better place to live this year than it was last year.

Those are the words of Spider Jerusalem, writer Warren Ellis' take on a Hunter S. Thompson-like journalist in the future; they are taken from the very last page of the fourth volume in the Transmetropolitan series, called The New Scum, in which a new President is elected to the U.S. Ironically, they were written and published in the year 2000.

Transmetropolitan currently sits atop my line of favourite books, along with other comics Preacher and The Walking Dead.

It's funny that I happened to read this volume again, for perhaps the tenth time, today, if only because tonight marked the final in a five-night series that I was outside putting up posters for a show happening on the 18th at La Sala Rossa, for supergroup Magic Christian, comprised of members of Flamin' Groovies and Blondie, among others.

Five nights during which I froze my balls in minus-30 weather, with a windchill I hadn't felt in years. And last night was the worst. I actually witnessed the temperature go down at least 5 degrees in mere seconds, with the swoop of one short blow of wind, at precisely 2:10AM. It was decently cold, with the wind providing extra chill to the fingertips, but without exaggeration, when out of the blue a tiny whirlwind of a weirdly milder wind came and took over Parc Avenue for a few seconds, just enough to make you realize something wasn't quite right, and as soon as it died off, it became colder than death in an instant.

It was yet another proof that Nature is a much stronger beast than we bipeds, but I know for one I didn't need any. It was also a reminder that February is coming at full speed and we Montrealers should just lock ourselves inside and hide/hibernate for 28 days and just order out, fuck, and play Playstation and let the whole world go right by past us for a month.

And if Jerusalem's/Ellis' words are to be true, it's so fucking cold out there right now that this particular winter should signify the death of the past decade completely - what with its 80s-revivals, shitty music, brand new and brand old wars, political tragedies and all-out fucking up of our way of Life - and bring about some actual, consistent, lasting change. For The Better (not sure why I need to add this in particular, but I've been unlucky with my wishes the past few years, in case you can't tell).

It's not in my genes, in my upbringing, in my habits. Perhaps it can be, although I'm quite happy being skeptical and realistic - but I'm actually hoping for Hope. It feels juvenile and stupid, but set against a backdrop of 100 km/h winds outside my window pushing a growing cemetary of white snow in minus-40 degree weather merely 5 inches from my face, a bottle of Jack Daniel's in my right hand, it's all I can muster up that feels right.

That, and putting this text to rest so I can go meet the Lady Of The House in bed.

Good night.