Category: Boozing

This Bud’s for you

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 23 Comments
We should be so lucky.

Ho hum. I see some deep-pockets blowhard strolled in and out of court again yesterday, without consequences, as per usual. Not even a mug shot.

Shit, I’ve done more time than this blabbering plastic sack of fast-food farts, a serial liar who cheats at golf and would sell his idiot children to the Saudis, if he could find one dumb and mean enough to buy them for sex toys and/or dog food.

And I didn’t have to lip off to the cops, DAs, or judges to get jugged, either.

No, that would’ve been one of my bros, the dude who told the graying Colfax beat cop with the rookie partner: “You can’t arrest us for walking out of a bar with a beer.”

Ho, ho. Wrong again.

This regrettable incident took place in the Glory Days, when my friends and I were basically ambulatory recruiting posters for the War On Drugs. We’d have let the feds put our faces on a “Know Your Enemy” flyer if they paid us in cocaine and Stoli.

None of us was wealthy. We had no well-connected allies. We had dedicated ourselves to scaling new heights of impairment and then tumbling down the other side into a crusty rental house that used to be part of a Glendale nursery. For plants. Not children.

And thus we learned how to talk to cops. Be polite. Rely upon the short, simple words you can still pronounce without drooling. Don’t let the nice flatfoot see the devils raging behind your blood-red eyeballs.

And never, under any circumstances, tell a cop, “You can’t arrest us for [insert your offense here].”

My friend forgot this cardinal rule — only for a moment — but that’s all it takes. Loose lips sink ships, especially when the crew is hammered. And so we all got a fun ride in the drunk wagon and a night to remember in the Denver calaboose, where we met some fascinating people.

One was a duster (crazed on PCP), and he was quickly awarded the entire drunk tank for his earsplitting arguments with people or Things who were not there. We more numerous but much less scary drunks got packed into two-man cells so we could enjoy the floor show from a safe distance.

Another was a glum-looking permed and pastel-leisure-suited gent who had gotten popped for soliciting a hooker who turned out to be a vice cop. He could see his apartment from our cell, but not his wife inside it. He was not looking forward to seeing her in his new digs.

We got sprung in the morning without charges. Go and sin no more, you silly little shits, they told us. But goddamn it, we did our time.

If only we’d been riot-inciting former presidents of the United States whose Florida resort’s crappers were overflowing with national secrets instead of addled stoners getting sideways with a Colfax cop.

We’d have been back in the Satire Lounge before closing time.

We’re open, but Dave’s not here, man

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 22 Comments
Chance of rain, but not much of one.

New Mexico is “open” again, whatever the hell that means.

Also, apparently you no longer have to toss your mota when pulled over by a chota, though the officer may have a few pointed questions regarding the expired plates on your auto, your lack of insurance for same, and the stolen ATM in the back seat.

Of course, you can’t actually buy the mota here legally because, like, nobody can remember where they left the fuckin’ paperwork, man.

Things darkened up a bit on my ride, but I never needed the fenders I didn’t have.

And when I motored down to the grog shop this morning for a selection of bottled alternatives, I observed that most folks in newly “open” New Mexico were keeping their face-holes closed to the general public. So I did likewise.

Outside the boozeatorium, meanwhile, my fellow primates were busy proving Darwin wrong.

On my way there I saw a westbound motorist casually swerve into the eastbound lanes on Comanche to hang a left into a driveway, rather than pull a sloppy U at the next cutout like every other drunkard in Duke City.

On my way back I saw a truck full of Natural Light Seltzer — bearing the legend, “The Seltzer You Never Saw Coming” — blow through the red at Menaul and Louisiana, at least two seconds late.

Ho, ho, etc. I not only saw it coming, I was expecting it. I always look both ways and count at least three Mississippis before I proceed on the green. I am in no hurry to discuss my CV with St. Peter.

Made it home alive, set a loaf of bread to baking, and then pissed off for my first bicycle ride this week. It was pleasant indeed to swap climates with the Pacific Northwest for a short while — neither the A/C nor the sprinkler system has come on for days — but Paddy needs his sunshine.

In other news … oh, hell, there is way too much stupid shit going on in the news for a small-time operator like me to face stone cold sober. Maybe tomorrow I’ll pick a pile and roll in it.

Sometimes I have a great notion

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 25 Comments
No, I’m not snorting a line. Not right at that moment, anyway. …
Photo 1981 by Tom Warren | Corvallis Gazette-Times

Somehow I never thought of Oregon as a place that would burn.

I never thought it could burn.

In my mind Oregon remains a damp, dreary place where I spent a lot of time indoors, either working, hammered, or both. The only place I never owned a bicycle. Occasionally I walked, but only if I was too drunk to drive.

All my people were back in Colorado or in California, where I spent some months trapped in a Simon and Garfunkel song:

Asking only workman’s wages I come looking for a job

But I get no offers

When an offer finally came the job was in Corvallis, in Oregon’s Mid-Willamette Valley. It was good to be working again instead of sponging off friends and family, but the baggage I brought with me held more than T-shirts and jeans.

I made some friends, most of them on the job, your typical newsdog. And we had some laughs, catching Andy Irvine and Paul Brady in concert at a tiny venue downtown, or motoring to Portland to hear Johnny and the Distractions.

Occasionally I’d meet my old buddy Merrill in Seattle, a change of scenery for us both. He was trapped at a newspaper in eastern Washington, which was another sort of hell altogether.

But I spent a lot more time slouched in Squirrel’s Tavern or in my tiny apartment, huddled with my dogs next to the wood stove, or taking aimless solo drives out to the coast, places like Newport or Depoe Bay.

Mostly I remember rain, damp, the kind of cold that a Colorado winter doesn’t prepare you for, the sort that settles right down into your bones and makes itself at home. I got fat in self-defense, trying to make my bones harder to find.

If you’d told me the place would burn I’d have laughed out loud and poured another one. But I don’t drink anymore, and I’m not laughing, either.

• From Oregon Public Broadcasting: How you can help.

Irish, stewed

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 29 Comments
The wearin' of the green.
The wearin’ of the green.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day to the lot of ye. May yis be in heaven a half hour before the divil knows yeer dead.

This seems as good a time as any to disclose to anyone who hasn’t figured it out that I will not be tipping a pint today because I no longer imbibe.

’Tis so. Quit the drink more than three years ago, and while I occasionally miss the idea of having a drop taken, I can’t say I miss the actuality.

There were no DUIs, no 12-step programs, no health issues. I didn’t wake up underneath my truck in a driveway not my own with a blinding hangover and a cast on one leg (though I have done that).

But while battling a nasty upper-respiratory bug in 2013 I thought it would be a good idea to leave the drink be while the pipes were rattling. Then I recalled that I hadn’t done my once-traditional sober January in a few years, so I thought I’d revive that practice.

We have some (ahem) issues with the uisce beatha in my family. None of us aspired to become drunks, as far as I know, yet more than a few of us have, so since I have some small experience with addiction (to nicotine) I liked to occasionally take stock of myself, see if I simply liked to drink or had to drink. There’s a line there somewhere, but damn few signposts. Mostly we see it in the rear-view mirror, after we’re already upside down in the ditch, wheels spinning in empty air.

So, yeah. January came and went, and I thought, “Hm. Let’s go for February.” And then it was March. And then it was 2014. And 2015. You get the idea. It just sorta grew on me, the way hair doesn’t anymore. Not on the head, anyway.

I didn’t experience any withdrawal symptoms, not the way I did when quitting cigarettes. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, was that ever a trial by fire. So maybe I wasn’t addicted to alcohol the way I was to nicotine, though I was a drinker far longer than I was a smoker.

Whatever. Now I’m just being stubborn about it. I have this streak going, and I’m riding it out.

Sobriety hasn’t made me any smarter, though. All those brain cells I started with are gone for good. Why, I arose this morning without pulling on anything green. ’Tis lucky I am that Herself didn’t pinch me.

• And now, a musical interlude: The Chieftains performing “John O’Connor and the Ode to Whiskey.”

• Editor’s note: The header photo of O’Grady’s Marina Inn in Dingle, County Kerry, Ireland, was taken by my sister, Peggy O’Grady, though we are said to have our roots in County Clare. As for the Irish above it, it’s a rough Google translation of “Bigger. Hairier. Closer to the ground.”

Wild at Ivywild

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 6 Comments

I had not yet been set loose upon the world on Jan. 1, 1954. That blessed event occurred nearly three months later, on March 27, in the hospital at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md.

As family legend has it, Mom’s obstetrician, upon learning I was to be named Patrick Declan O’Grady, proposed inducing labor to get me born on St. Patrick’s Day. Mom declined, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Out west in Colorado Springs, the Ivywild School was already open for business, and had been for years. In fact, it was one year older than my old man, who was born in 1917 in Bogalusa, La.

I didn’t attend Ivywild — by the time we got here in 1967, I was a ninth grader, and anyway, after a brief flirtation with a bomb-shelter-equipped home in the Skyway area we settled well outside downtown proper in what a newspaper colleague would later confirm was most emphatically not part of Colorado Springs, our suburban trilevel being well east of Hancock Avenue.

Ivywild gave up the ghost as a school in 2009, but was reborn recently thanks to local entrepreneurs Joe Coleman and Mike Bristol, who turned the picturesque old pile into the new home of Bristol Brewing, plus a number of other ventures: The Principal’s Office (booze and java); The Meat Locker (deli and charcuterie); Old School Bakery (breads and pastries); Hunt or Gather (seasonal foods from area farmers); Bicycle Experience (the second location of a neighborhood shop); and office space.

I hadn’t conducted an inspection tour since Ivywild’s resurrection, but last night Herself and I, along with a neighbor and the latest tenants of The House Back East®, dropped in to scope out a New Year’s Eve bash in the gym (think back-in-the-day sock hop, but with the booze actually sold on site, plus more and older wastrels).

It was pretty damned impressive, as you can see from the pix if you clicked the link above. The music was less so — the gym was a mighty small space, with either an indifferent sound system, poor mixing or a combination of the two, plus lots of chatter in the audience — but still, chapeau to all involved in making the Ivywild revival happen.

Ivywild is a welcome reminder that it’s not all Industrial Christianity and LiberTea here in Bibleburg. I plan on sentencing myself to a few rounds of detention there in 2014.