St. Patrick's Day

It dawned on me as I got up this morning that today is St. Patrick's Day. Hunh. I'm part Welsh, and I've got some Scottish blood in me, too. But not a drop of Irish blood.

Which reminds me of a scrap of insanity from my younger years, when my brother and I somehow came up with a routine (in William S. Burroughs' sense of the word "routine") which included the following bit of doggerel:

An' 'ither de hither de gither de skuy,
In de augghhtermauthe o' S'int Padraig's Duuy!

Enunciated in an industrial-strength Irish brogue, with the gghh in "augghhtermauthe" pronounced as a grand throat-clearing Celtic "chhhh," sort of like a "kh" but worse. Awwchhhhtermawthe!!! And somehow (in an aspect of the routine which now escapes me) these lines were attributed to our father. My brother and I had zillions of routines like this one.

And, St. Patrick's Day being what it is, I imagine there will be plenty of people suffering the "augghhtermauthe" of it tomorrow. I could go into the St. Patrick's Day of my freshman year in college— actually, the day after St. Patrick's Day, when they were disposing of green beer down at the Copper Grid for a dime a pint— but it still makes my stomach turn just to remember it. I mean, I can't drink green beer to this day.

That was the evening when I recall stumbling into the men's room, falling to my knees as I opened the men's room door, and surprised to see a piece of wood about the shape and size of a chair leg skittering in across the men's room floor ahead of me. Now, what was that about? Afterwards, when I came out of the men's room, there was Craig the bartender, lifting the shattered remains of a wooden chair up off the floor. (It seems I had tripped over the chair, without even realizing it, on the way to the men's room.) He said, "Well, the least you could've done was to pick it up!"

Oh, and then there was the next morning. "Augghhtermauthe" indeed!

I think I'm going to stay home this evening, and play Shogi against myself instead.