St. Patrick’s Day: A Pukey Holiday

Today is St. Patrick’s day – otherwise known as a fairly conflicting holiday for most beer drinkers. For every good thought of celebrating Irish culture and exceptional Irish beer, there are several billion thoughts about wearing a hat so big everyone can’t help but know how wasted you are. For every pint of Guinness sold, there’s got to be a dozen thirty packs of Bud Light in green packaging sold (can’t stress to you how much I respect the marketing people in St. Louis who are tasked with also making beer).

My two favorite St. Patrick’s day stories involve the same thing: puke.

The first was when I was in 2nd grade and went to school having drank 18 Budweisers. Ok, that’s not true. I went to school and was overly excited to be wearing green and having red hair (the things we get excited about when we’re kids!). This was my day and I was going to soak it up. However, the other thing that is known to “suck things up” is sawdust when it is applied to vomit. I know this because, for no reason that I can remember, I threw up in the carpeted hallway at school. After the janitor applied a fairly lazy amount of sawdust, I was forced to face the embarrassment and ridicule of everyone in my school as they walked by a pile of sawdusty puke and laughed at my misfortune. To this day I’m convinced sawdust does nothing but act as a way to embarrass kids who throw up at school so they learn to hold their breakfastes down.

The second story about St. Patrick’s day puke happened many years later. I had just moved to New York and, in walking home, walked by a normal bar. As I walked by, a group of flubby characters who looked like they were on hour 21 of a 15 hour binge came stumbling out. One of the more awkward looking ones saw me and screamed, “Hey! Look! That guy’s a Leprechauauauahhnnn!” He might have held the word Leprechaun forever, if it hadn’t been for the extreme amount of vomit that came shooting out of his mouth and nose. I’d never been closer than 20 feet from this guy and I still had to jump out of the way of his puke.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day.

He expelled the snakes out of Ireland, but they had to go somewhere. Be safe, be calm and don’t don’t do anything a Leprechaun tells you to.