St. Patrick's Day: Recovery and Prayer

Yesterday was my religious holiday of religious holidays.  A day where I bury my lapsed Catholic life even deeper and embrace the traces of Irish heritage in my blood.  It's a day where I forego my usual seven hundred dollar a bottle scotch and indulge in the guilty secret that I like Jameson on the rocks better.  It's also a conflicted day for me, because St. Patrick's Day allows this "everyone's Irish on St. Paddy's Day" mentality and it makes it a little hard to separate the wheat from the chaff for genetically bred hardcore drinkers.  Everyone tries to line up shots and go like it's in their blood, and the aftermath of that can prove tragic to witness.  A perfectly attractive woman not wearing any underwear can end up covered in her own vomit mumbling about elevators while she tries to sleep it off against the outdoor ATM of a 24-hour pizzeria.  Who wants thats?

Not that I'm any better, I often have to reconstruct my St. Patrick's Day exploits from receipts and traffic cam footage, but I'm proud to say I actually remember fleeting memories from last night.  My years of heavy drinking have taught me a number of things, one of which is that there's good pizza and there's drunk pizza, and the pizza I want when I'm drunk happens to be somewhere in Penn Station.  Not sure where since I'm always blitzed, but I've spent a lot of time eating pizza in Manhattan's "other train station." St. Patrick's Day is the best day for drunk pizza there because you get to watch the drunk Jersey trains fill up and ship out.  Some fake tans, overly layered haircuts, college kids with gin and juice in their Poland Springs bottles, fat people in their late fifties drinking the same but wearing a lot more plastic green bowler hats... the spectacle can be worth the trip.  Granted, I'd rather take a stiletto heel to the groin then get on a train to that forsaken land with those forsaken people, but watching them shuffle and stumble while I down seven slices of buffalo chicken baked ziti pizza (according to one receipt) ended up being a good time.  I don't remember who I went home with, what they did with one of my thumb rings, or how I got to DUMBO afterward, but that's neither here nor there.

But here I am back at home, making sure to eat plenty of greasy eggs and bacon, surfing around on my laptop.  I went over to Facebook for a bit just to see what my arch-nemesis, Sarah Palin, was posting about today with all the wit and insight of a malfunctioning Roomba and got distracted.  A lot of pictures and stories on the "walls" of my "friends" about St. Patrick's Day.  Some funny, some sweet, some typical, some boring, but there was a moment where I came dangerously close to getting Facebook.  Almost posted a picture myself until I realized my pictures were all drunk shots of my own balls.  So I went back into some of the history on these "walls" of "friends" and saw something that snapped me back from the brink of Facebook make-believe.

I mentioned earlier that I'm a lapsed Catholic, but that doesn't mean I'm still not spiritual, maybe more than I care to admit at times because what I saw shocked me a bit.  People, in their status updates, were constantly asking for other people's prayers.  And those people were constantly responding to the original update with confirmation of prayers on the way.  Some were genuine and serious, a gravely ill family member took a turn for the worse.  Most, though, were so trivial... pray for my lawn mower, pray that the soup special has a decent vegetarian option, pray for minor crap that distracts me from just how fortunate I truly am.  The prayer requests were so prevalent that they couldn't have been sincere, and not the kind of sincere when you really like someone's t-shirt.  The kind of sincere when you're dealing with God.  At this rate, there's going to be a Pray button next to the Like button on Facebook just to save time and cap the meaninglessness of most of it.

So there you have it, another St. Patrick's Day in the books and another day wondering how Hemingway and James Joyce got as much writing done with all the drinking.

Sadness.

I've been sober for 4 days now, but then I see this.  Not much to say, just wishing everyone Godspeed through this terrible time.

Melissa Gilbert and Bruce Boxleitner Split.

I hope we all see each other emerging from the darker side.