I Would Have Liked to Wire a Car Bomb

While this does not concern drinking before noon per se, this post will show the ramifications of a few spirits in the wee hours of the morning.

Volunteering in a church band has its perks. For one, when you play venues other than your church sanctuary, you get to be a rock star. Another perk is that since we are big fans of food, the church takes us out to dinner at Outback around once a year.

Barring the steaks I’ve cooked in an amazing scotch marinade, Outback makes the best New York strip I’ve ever eaten (they also happened to have an excellent clam chowder on the menu). This is still just exposition, so suffice to say things went as usual with band outings. Somehow all 6 unmarried men wound up at one booth and those who did not fit that description were at the one directly behind us (being much louder, I should add). With a belly full of steak, Brian who owes Lilo money and I made a phone call and headed to my favorite bar: Blue Ridge.

We met up with Mark, whom we met at a Presbyterian barn dance about a month ago. Mark the Presbyterian is a respectable fellow who can brew a killer high gravity ale. This would be the reason Brian and I decided to adopt him as a drinking buddy (I think we pretty much had to after we spent just as much time with him at the dance as we did with our dates). Blue Ridge was running not only their usual $2.50 Wednesday pint special, but they also had $4 Irish car bombs. Though I’m not the biggest car bomb fan, when they’re $4, you pretty much have to go for it. I think you break some law somewhere if you don’t. We had a few drinks (while listening to Jurassic 5) and since I don’t live in the woods anymore, I was in bed by 11:15 PM feeling quite full.

Some time after putting my head on the pillow, I wound up in a strange, nice-looking suburban neighborhood. The lawns were neatly kept and the hedges trimmed just right. I went into the house that I assume belonged to me and it did not reflect the outer appearance of said neighborhood. It had the deep brown shag carpet of the laundry room of the house where I spent my childhood. The whole place smelled like smoke. Two old ladies lived in the house. I spoke to them and they started cackling and chasing me with knives. One was in a wheelchair, but apparently not bound by the usual stair limitations a person in a wheelchair usually faces. I ran upstairs, across a balcony, down another set of stairs, and outside into the street.

I then leapt out of bed, sweating. I looked at my phone: it read 2:16 AM. I shook my head and flopped back down onto the bed.

After I fell asleep again, I was right back where I had been before I woke up. I was running down the street with the two old ladies screaming at me from their front porch like they were Mrs. Henry Lafayette Dubose out of To Kill A Mockingbird. I made it up the street to another house with an open garage. For some reason it seemed like a good idea to walk in there. I promptly ran out because a girl about 4 feet tall with blue skin was throwing things at me.

I awoke a second time. Out loud, I said, “Seriously?” I saw that it was after 4 AM, so I rolled over and went back to sleep.

The dream continued. Now a whole host of strange people in this town were chasing me. I ducked into what should have been my saving grace: a sporting goods store. In most zombie movies, there is a sporting goods store. Why? Because that’s where you get the weapons that the protagonists use to fend off the zombie horde until the helicopter shows up after all but one person is dead. When you’ve got a sporting goods store you don’t have to explain why the movie is 2 hours long instead of 90 minutes and you also don’t have to come up with a hokey reason why the protagonists wound up with enough weapons to overthrow New Zealand. Sporting goods stores are wonderful plot devices unless I’m making up the plot as it goes along. There were no guns and no large hunting knives; I couldn’t even find a baseball bat. Just as I was about to start throwing baseballs at these people I woke up for the third time. Now it was after 7:30 AM.

I thought about getting up and starting my day, but it’s my day off. I don’t get up early on my day off unless there’s fishing to be done or a waterfall that needs to be jumped. So I did what good bachelors everywhere do: I got up just in time to take a nap on the couch. No murderous townsfolk (or old ladies with 24^th century wheelchairs), it was the best sleep I got all morning.

While New York may be full of Irish folk, New York and the Irish do not mix well in one’s gastrointestinal tract.