The Daily Procrastinator

Hello, procrastinators. Big Red Poet, here. I’m alive and well. In fact, I wasn’t even hung over this morning. Years of practice have finally paid off, it seems. Yesterday, FlashCap, who edited my St. Patrick’s Day: Part I post, assumed that I passed out at 7:53 p.m., just because my blog entries ended. Actually, nothing could have been farther from the truth, as FlashCap himself was about to discover. (Please note that my laptop didn’t accompany on the second half of my voyage, so the timestamps for my individual thoughts are absent from this half of my notes on the day.)

At 7:53, I discovered that WrongFoot and I were the only two members of our original group who were still at the bar, and he was talking about getting something to eat and heading for home. Frankly, I was pretty disappointed in the whole crew. I guess I just assumed we were in it for the long haul, but others didn’t make the same assumption. In hindsight, I guess they went out on St. Patrick’s Day, got drunk, and went home to crash. That’s what people do. I can’t hold it against them.

Late in the afternoon, FlashCap had texted me and asked me if we’d be out all night, since it seemed he’d get the chance to come out around 9:30 or so. When WrongFoot bailed out, I remembered both FlashCap’s text and the performance schedule of a local singer-songwriter named J. Putting two and two together, I called FlashCap and asked if he’d like to finish off his St. Patrick’s Day by going to J’s show and having some drinks. He seemed amenable, as did Pre, who texted me just moments later.

A few calls and text messages later, at a little after 10:00 p.m., FlashCap, Pre, and I sat in a funky little joint that’s a coffee house by day and a bar by night. J was just starting his second or third song when we arrived, and we settled in with a round of double-whiskey-sours. As J stormed his way through a mixture of original songs and cover tunes, we quickly killed the first round of drinks and sent FlashCap to the bar for another.

All over the cafe, the owners allow local artists to display and sell their work. While much of it didn’t catch my eye at all, one image appealed to me. Behind the stage, at the top of the rightmost column of displayed paintings, hung a black and white likeness of Zack de la Rocha, vocalist for Rage Against The Machine which was clearly based on this photograph. Although I know J quite well, I didn’t want to interrupt his set, so I didn’t get up to examine the painting closely. Zack stared intensely down at us throughout J’s show, though. Somewhere in there, we had a third round of double-whiskey-sours. Also, FlashCap, who attended a major university and proudly wears the associated ring, offered me a few choice words about my notes at 2:38 in Part I of this post.

After about an hour and a half of fantastic singing and playing, J stepped off the stage to take a break. We decide to wander down the street a few blocks to the area’s other Irish pub. I’d already spent 12 hours in the first one, so it seemed only sensible to at least pass through the second. Each of us had a drink in hand that we didn’t want to abandon, so I told Mohawk Dave, a bar employee and friend of mine, that we were going to stash them behind the flower pot near the front gate and pick them up when we returned. Our drinks thus spared, we headed for the Irish pub. As we expected, the place was pretty packed. Upon seeing the sea of humanity at the downstairs bar, we decided to make our way upstairs in the hopes that it wouldn’t be quite as full. This was not to be, but we stayed upstairs anyway. Within a few moments of reaching the second story, we bumped into Pre’s friend, the guy with whom I’d played Super Mario Brothers 3 for a couple hours earlier in the day. While conversation started up, I headed for the men’s room.

As I navigated the crowd, I abruptly came face to face with a woman who had obviously had drunk about twice her responsible limit of beers for the day. After leering drunkenly at me for a moment and wobbling as she attempted to commence locomotion, she staggered off in the direction of FlashCap and Pre. When I returned from the men’s room, Pre’s friend and his group were gone, and the drunken lady was sitting at their table with a pained expression on her face. The chuckling and smirking between Pre and FlashCap told me I’d missed something good.

Apparently, while I was relieving myself of about four pints of Guinness, the drunken woman did a total faceplant right in front of Pre, FlashCap, and Pre’s friends. According to firsthand accounts, “she somehow managed to fall right on her ass and also hit her head on the floor.” I can scarcely imagine the drunken calisthenics involved in such a feat, but I’m bummed that I missed it. When she sat down at their table, Pre’s friends decided their night was over and headed for home. They were gone when I returned. A few moments later, the woman got up and actually walked down the stairs. I was sure we were going to hear some thumps and shouts from the staircase, but she apparently made it to the bottom without incident.

Nodding toward the table where first Pre’s friends and then the drunken woman had sat, Pre said, “They left a couple beers that the didn’t even sip yet. They said to drink up.” The best beer is somebody else’s beer, and I know it. I immediately snatched up a pint of room-temperature green Miller Light and commenced to teach it a lesson. FlashCap was more hesitant. It seemed he didn’t want to be seen poaching a “used” beer off a recently vacated table, so I grabbed it and thrust it into his hand. Before long, we each had an empty pint glass in hand. Pre didn’t seem thirsty.

While walking from the Irish bar back to our original location, we were accosted by a guy who seemed to need money. It was hard to tell exactly what was on his mind because his spoken English left much to be desired. From what I could gather, he needed three dollars because his “old lady” was “trippin’” on him. I took this to mean that either his wife was angry with him or his mother was hopped up on LSD. Either way, I didn’t have any cash on me. FlashCap and Pre didn’t either, but that didn’t stop this guy from following us back to the bar and asking the other patrons for three dollars.

Returning to J’s show and rescuing our drinks from behind the flower pot, we settled in for the second set. Within a few moments, Mohawk Dave showed the panhandler to the door and offered him a few words of encouragement which I can only assume mean the guy won’t be back for a while. I also saw one of the local artists who displays his work at the bar wander in. It took only a few moments of conversation to establish that he had painted the Zack de la Rocha and he would sell it to me for $40. Needless to say, that painting is now in the back seat of my car.

Believe it or not, at one point in the second set, J covered the Tool song Aenema on his acoustic guitar, and when he finished that, he transitioned seamlessly into the Foo Fighters’ Everlong. It was really impressive, and I could see FlashCap’s attitude toward J shifting from casual appreciation to genuine respect. About this time, my friend MovieGirl, who had apparently read Part I of this post shortly after it was posted, texted me to tell me that she, too, did not appreciate my comments at 2:38. I think she was mostly feigning offense. I hope so. Apparently, I need to be more careful in my commentary about college rings, especially in this town.

The remainder of the show passed without incident, and once J finished up his killer set, FlashCap, Pre, and I headed to the nearby Taco Bell to get some solid nutrition before heading to bed. Since when does Taco Bell close at 2 a.m.? This seems totally pointless to me. The only reason we have Taco Bell is so we can eat there after going to the bar. They need to realize their primary customer base and adjust their hours accordingly. With tears in our eyes, we headed to the nearby Whataburger and grabbed some greasy fast food to eat while we drove back to our respective homes. Thus ended our St. Patrick’s Day 2009.

So…What did we learn today?

• I am apparently incapable of catching a buzz from drinking alcoholic beverages. It’s a serious annoyance. Reading both parts of this post, one will count six beers, an Irish Coffee, a mimosa, four (or five?) Irish car bombs, and four double-whiskey-sours. That’s a pretty earnest effort to get drunk. Yet, when we left J’s show, I was stone sober. You can ask FlashCap. He was there.
• NES and SNES games are every bit as much fun now as they were when we were kids. Sure, xBox 360 and PS3 are amazing, but there’s just something about a badly-animated Italian plumber chasing a mushroom that no other video game can replace.
• My definition of “drink all day” differs significantly from others’ definitions. Clarify your plans with your friends, procrastinators.
• $120 is a pretty reasonable price to pay for a day of drinking and a sweet painting of Zack de la Rocha.
• The Taco Bell people need to pull their heads out and make me some tacos at 2:15 a.m.
• Even people who are so drunk they can’t walk across a level floor without busting their asses are capable of navigating staircases.
• People who attend major universities, the kinds of universities that issue their students rings, are kinda sensitive to comments that involve phrases like “completely insane with devotion to their university.”

Until next year, my work is done here.