In the not-so distant yesteryear, when I wasn’t so much a wee lad as an underdeveloped adult, I’d find a random St. Paddy’s Day falling on a weekend and would drive home to meet mom and Dad at Coleman’s Irish Pub in Syracuse, NY. Syracuse wasn’t a town known for being Irish, at least in my mind; everyone I knew seemed to be Italian, and the people who weren’t (like me) wanted to be Italian (like me!).

But to hell with any other tradition on March 17^th. Friends of all stripes were keen to pack the bars and throw up all over each other. Slight exaggeration. Still, it was a pretty tipsy scene, and there was often an earnest singer crooning “Danny Boy” on a cheap PA system, enjoying his once-a-year day in the sun. And outside Coleman's, the traffic light had the green on top and red on the bottom, blowing people's minds. 

At home, someone (not me) would put “The Irish Rovers” on the record player and we’d sing along to songs like “No, Nay, Never,” which the Dropkick Murphy’s reprised a few decades later. Later my Dad would fall asleep with a toothpick in his mouth (substituting for a cigarette) to John Gary crooning the very sad “Molly Malone” on our console record player.

Years later, when we kids were out of the house, my parents would throw wild parties where everyone would strip naked and drink Irish coffee, because that was life in the 1970s and 1980s. OK, no one ever stripped naked thankfully, but the Irish coffees flowed like coffee. Thankfully, most everyone was walking home (although, I’ve recently read it’s better not to be tipsy when walking).

All these years later, I find the old John Gary “A little bit of heaven” album still intact in my basement, deeply scratched, bearing my long deceased parents’ fingerprints, and coaxing me to YouTube to relisten to the old songs. Hard not to miss mom and dad on this St. Patrick’s Day. 

I don’t tweet very often, but that’s going to change. Soon I’m going to tweet the bejesus out of you and everyone else, and when I do it’s going to be tremendously interesting and also good for America. My friends are going to love it, even as I humiliate them. I’ve already got a few tweets cued up.

• Hilarious that “Scrambly” Bob is keeps tweeting out the false claim that I like scrambled eggs. I’m not the scrambled one, he is! Do you see the way his handlers refuse to allow him to talk about scrambled eggs? Probably afraid that he’s going to scramble his way through the conversation. Really sick.
• I mention that I’m golfing and now old More Salt Than Pepper Steve starts blabbing about his golf game. “Shot an 82.” What, nine holes on a par 3 course? Play one of my courses and see if you can break 100, Old Salty. (And then have a meal at one of my fine restaurants.)
• “Veggie” Tim goes on the record as saying that I eat too much meat. Even though my meat eating is partially fueling the cattle industry’s economic recovery. IT’S BEEFY ECONOMIC PATRIOTISM TIM! Meanwhile Tim doesn’t eat his allotted portion of meat, causing a drop in demand and a drop in prices. And there are stories out there – some good people claim they have first-hand knowledge – that he’s hunting exotic animals with a chef hiding in the shadows to butcher and serve the delicacies he shoots up. Vile!
• Dirty Howard’s going nuts! He calls me dirty because I dig holes in my yard, while he spends his days up at the cabins riding jet skis, and by night he sits in the shadows and stares into the fire. Like baiting hooks with LEECHES and hauling in crappies is “clean”! Get a life, you dirty loser!
• Failures like Mark keep promoting TOTAL HOAX BS STORIES claiming that I disparage military veterans. We all know that he’s disgruntled because he wanted a job and I wouldn’t endorse him. TOTAL SUCKER!

I think this will be really good for our relationship.

Isn’t it good just to press the reset button sometimes? Maybe work is stressful, or you’re having trouble with that old jalopy of a vehicle that’s been held together with rope and duct tape for years. Or maybe there is suddenly a pandemic and the globe is awash in disease, except in places where it’s not an actual disease but a concept made-up to wreck the economy and many people’s lives (wait – who does that?!).

Perhaps people are having massive eating and drinking orgies during the economy-wrecking hoax, and that unnerves you. “Why aren’t you guys wearing masks while eating and drinking?” you call out to a crowd of people you encounter at a pop-up restaurant, and then realize how stupid you have made your cause sound.

This is when it’s time to pick up your beer grain scale in such a way as to be holding the “units” and “on/off” button at the same time, inadvertently causing the device to enter “calibration mode," from which there is no return. No “exit” button. No “back.” From here until you can find an “accurate 10 Kg weight” to properly calibrate the device, you cannot use it.

OK, no problem. A guy like me who has paddled the Allagash Wilderness Waterway can figure out how to obtain a 10 Kg weight. Those must be everywhere!

What about at the university gym you belong to? Never mind!

Maybe a neighbor has purchased used barbell weights via a Craigslist posting in a country that once hosted the Olympics, and you could borrow a couple.

Heck! You might as well buy a new scale. It costs twice as much to purchase a 10 kg. weight and have it delivered to your home.

Now what are you supposed to do when your wife asks you to weigh the zucchini? You’ve had too many defeats already this week to find yourself unable to determine if the little piglet sized vegetables she has pulled from the garden weigh 1 pound or 10.

Another option is to visit Tim’s kitchen, where there is a mini scale, and where Lily the cat can watch you weigh beer grains into a plastic food storage container until Tim’s mini scale reads 451 grams, which, when added to 2 10 lb. sacks of grain plus a few hundred grams to account for the weight of the bucket, results in a weight of, more or less, 10 Kg.

Grain scale now recalibrated, life can get back to (relative) normal.

I was recently visited by a young stonemason (that is, a stonemason, not a stoned mason), who mentioned something about his training “back in the day.” He didn’t look old enough to have an actual period in his life that could be called “back in the day,” but you couldn’t say the same for me, and suddenly I was transported to my very own “back in the day,” when I worked at Mass General Hospital as a young 20-something, some 100 years ago.

I was a brain surgeon back then. I’d cut into people’s heads to fix aneurisms and so forth, and occasionally would screw with people’s minds by performing a little sneaky rewiring, as a kind of practical joke. It was hilarious to visit patients afterward and see them try to drink from a cup of water but instead pour the water over their heads or throw it into their faces. (Don’t worry – I’d always fix it later, for a relatively small fee.)

When I wasn’t performing high-end brain surgery, I was ordering supplies, making photocopies, and answering phones for the cardiac unit. I’d get calls from vendors about bills, and sometimes from lab personnel calling in sick. “Cough, hack, achoo! Tell Dr. Stragglebeard that I’ve got the dreaded cantankervirus, and I’m very contagious.”

One guy always used to tell me when his wife had diarrhea. “Can you tell Jerry that I have to take care of the kids today? It’s my wife: she’s throwing up, diarrhea, whole bit.” I heard this often over my tenure. When he called in sick, diarrhea was often involved.

I was made to tell his boss these details each time. The throwing up. And the diarrhea.

Now you understand what life was like back in the day. Wasn’t pretty, that’s for sure.