WOOOO! ST. PATRICK'S DAY! DID YOU GUYS RAGE?

With all due respect to the filthy Irish, fuck St. Patrick's Day (which the church had moved back to Saturday anyway, but nobody paid attention). It's Amateur Night, and I won't have any part of it, not even at the Bar That Shall Not Be Named; they even went and put Bushmill's shots on special for five bucks a go the whole night, and you know how many they sold? None.

No, instead they were overrun with yowling fucknecks and simpering harridans-in-waiting ordering shit like the repellent "Everybody's Irish:"

2 ounces Irish whiskey
1/4 ounce green Chartreuse
1/4 ounce green creme de menthe
Cocktail olive for garnish

Are you fucking kidding me? Would you spend time with anyone willing to put this in his mouth? (People have been saying this about Elliot Spitzer, too. HEY-O!) This is like a drink created by Gallagher specifically to be drunk only by Kobayashi.

Or how about this gem, the "Triclops," which was apparently dreamed up by Anton LaVey:

3 ounces vodka
1 ounce Sprite
Cocktail olive for garnish

This just makes me seethe. Hey, why not knock out all your teeth too! Then with a bloody grin, you can dribble your broken teeth into your drink and when you're done with your drink, you can spit your Sprite-y teeth at the other bar patrons who already hate you anyway? Then you can have a loud, toothless, unenunciated cellphone conversation about what a fucking St. Patrick's Day booze warrior you are with some horrible drunk chick in a green microskirt who is unaware of all the vaguely date-rapey guys leering at her as she adjusts her socks. Also, it's seven PM.

Fuck trying to go out on St. Patrick's Day. The wife and I stayed in and invited our friends J. and E. over for corned beef and potatoes, because I guess nobody's entirely immune to the cultural stereotype thing. Which is why we also whipped up some green milkshakes and hassled some garter snakes that were hanging around our patio.

(I know about the falsity of the snake thing. You know what I didn't know about? The Oilliphéist, the Caoránach, and the Copóg Phádraig! And I still don't, because I got bored reading the Wikipedia page. But you have to admit, those things sound hilarious.)

Dinner was set for 8:00, and was only slightly complicated by J. and E. not showing up remotely close to 8:00. It turned out that J. was kept late at work because--I'm not making this up--one of J.'s servers caught on fire. (I have since seen and can attest to the validity of his nerd papers.) Because I didn't know, I'll go ahead and ask you all: do you know what happens when a server catches on fire? J. told me what happens: a little red light blinks at you.

This is why nerds have been on the short end of the evolutionary stick for so many generations: meekness. When buildings or forests or normal humans catch on fire, they tend to ring, crackle or scream quite loudly. Then they get help, and possibly get to continue to exist! When geek-controlled things burst into flames, they just quietly wave their electronic hands around. When nerds themselves catch fire, they probably just blink frantically. It reminds me of my old sixth-grade diabetic friend Marty, who once, in the midst of experiencing a reaction in class during a particularly contentious discussion, quietly sat with his hand raised until called upon, whereupon he finally said, "I'm having a reaction."

Also, his girlfriend recently had surgery to put some metal in her hand, and now she's going to get one of those medical "get out of airport screening free" cards that says "Weird Chick Totally Has Metal In Her Hand; Don't Fuck With Her; Is Possibly A Terminator." So you know she has issues too. Why did we invite these damaged souls into our home? Nobody else will talk to us. Even so, they didn't make it over until a little before 9:00 thanks to fiery, truculent technology, but fortunately, corned beef appears to be unruinable, which you can probably say about all of your favorite boiled meats.

In all, it was a good evening, and happily unspoiled by yarking greenboys or stumbling bikini skanks. But there was, of course, one hitch. It has a minor and stupid backstory.

Some months ago, Budweiser had the astonishingly shitty idea of teaming up with Clamato to release this . . . beverage that they called "Chelada," a perversion of a perfectly fine Southwest/Mexican drink tradition of leavening shitty lager with tomato juice, lime and salt in order to create a refreshing summer drink (I swear this is true). And when it came out, J. managed to sneak a can of it into my fridge as a joke; when I discovered the offending thing, I swore to him that I would make him drink it.

This was the night. I pulled out the giant can--24 deathless ounces--and squinted apprehensively at the label, which, yes, was still trumpeting the good sense of this collison of Budweiser and Clamato. With a coroner's clinical eye, I examined the "nutritional information" boxlet, and encountered this terrifying fragment: "Contains shellfish/clams." I clouted J. about the head and torso and wept at our fate.

I poured the stuff into a couple of glasses; pinkish and wan, it looked like poorly oxygenated blood, or perhaps a pleural effusion. It bore virtually no head whatsoever, the carbonation presumably overcome by the angry, imprisoned shellfish/clam zombies. Even pouring it was dispiriting, like watching suicides falling from tall buildings. We smelled our samples and were not encouraged: it was a hellishly chemical lime nose that seemed to grouchily throw punches at the only other olfactory note, which was a sickly tomatoesque sweetness. Finally, we took a sip.

This was possibly as close to the American tradition of St. Patrick's Day that we got that evening. For one brief horrifying moment, J. and I drank an alcoholic beverage that was, for all intents and purposes, like drinking pure, unadulterated malignity. For a mere moment, we were as one with all of those douchebags out there in all of those Stygian Irish bars, drinking the undrinkable.

Then we poured the noxious horror out and poured ourselves some white wine.