Calm down, ye amadáin, I’ve not a drop taken: That’s a Guinness 0 so.
Birthdays. Some of us get overserved, others get 86’d with the cork barely out of the bottle.
Whoever’s in charge of this party seems a bit random. Can’t tell the top shelf from the well, the class from the dross. Proper ladies and gents given the shove while the most appalling tossers have the run o’ the place.
Take me, if you can bear to. Here I sit, roaring up on an age at which I had fully expected to have been stone dead for at least 39 years. Upended many an office pool I did.
“Who picked 69? 69? Well, doesn’t matter, because the bugger is still alive!”
Turn your radio on.
Meanwhile, there’s many an empty stool in this shabby shebeen. Where’d everybody go? They were all here just a minute ago. …
Herself is back east with family and friends to raise a belated parting glass to a lifelong friend carried off by COVID last fall.
I’m right here, having charge of the cat. But recently I spoke with one of my old pals, the former Live Update Guy Charles Pelkey, who has taken a few sucker punches since a cancer diagnosis a dozen years ago but is still on his feet in Laramie, all bouncers be damned.
It may be my birthday that’s on tap come Monday, but I’d buy Charles a round to celebrate his most recent lap around the sun, may it not be his last. Lucky for me and my 401(k) I don’t drink anymore; I don’t think he does, either. ’Tis unknown the amount of money our younger selves could piss away in a proper pub.
At the publisher’s expense, of course.
But that’s neither here nor there.
And anyway, it’s the thought that counts.
So belly up to the bar — unbeknownst to the landlord, who is manhandling another tray of industrial lager to the hoops-watching gobshites glued to the TV in the back of the pub, we’re uncorking an 18-year-old, double-cask, single-malt episode of — yes, yes, yes — Radio Free Dogpatch. And sláinte to yis.
P L A Y R A D I O F R E E D O G P A T C H
• Technical notes: There was an inordinate amount of racket in and around El Rancho Pendejo this week, but after a series of false starts I was finally able to nail something down using my trusty Shure SM58 mic and the Zoom H5 Handy Recorder. Editing was in Apple’s GarageBand, with a sonic bump from Auphonic. Music and sound effects are courtesy of Zapsplat, Freesound, and Your Humble Narrator.
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