So be easy and free when you're drinking with me,

I'm a man you don't meet everyday.

When you are single and wild, Irish and 29, you come upon a crossroads nearly every weekend. Friends are falling off the edge of the earth right and left, like your grandparents and uncles and step-parents before them. There is the seduction of alcohol in the wildness, as a cure for loneliness, as a bit of transcendence if you are too boring to imagine much else. I am a sucker for maudlin poetry and inebriated sentimentality, am genetically and behaviorally predisposed to alcoholism, and have a deep selfish well of gluttony that food can longer satiate. So I am setting up roadblocks and always cautious regarding liquor and beer, because I feel alcoholism hanging around me like a soft, fringed scarf, like wet hair on a hot day.

However. This is St. Patrick's Day, and we are who we are: four cousins, full Ohirish, drinking all day. Diana Gomez, bless her loving, troubled heart, gave a speech once about the function of 'spirit' in Armenian life, and in the lives of the poor and drinking, in general. She had joined AA after she survived the drinking that killed her husband, but then she started drinking again, and felt it was leading her to holiness. One of the holiest moments in my blessed life was in an Al-Anon meeting. Who am I to judge? I mean, really. Who am I? I spent the whole day listening to Shane MacGowan songs, and he's an actual pickle now, he's retarded and toothless. But before he was retarded and toothless he was a better man than I will ever know.

These pictures document the tradgectory of the evening. At some point Shannon and Kevin staged a fight that no one else knew was staged, and the help was coming from the kitchen to watch. At some later point it seemed a good idea to drag her to the front and force her to Irish dance. She didn't want to, she said she couldn't feel her legs, but she actually looked amazing. Because I was enamored of cousins, and had some sheets in the wind, I didn't mingle enough or collect the random friendships that St. Patrick's Day brings. I will say, however, that I have been in many, many restrooms, drunk and sober. And there is no kinder, sweeter, chattier place than a crowded women's' restroom at an Irish bar on St. Patricks Day. There were many slurred compliments, questions about our last names, and pointless stories about what this guy at the bar said. We're best friends! I love your hair! It was a team effort to remove toilet paper from the bottom of my sparkley shoes.

There are moments of crystalline clarity and real joy, and then moments of horrible physical pain and humiliation. St. Patrick's Day is the sum total of human life, maybe? Anyway. We have spent the last two days walking slowly and eating only greasy and puffy foods. We are thinking of what people gave up and tore themselves from; we are living good lives, big, rich, loving lives, and so I thank the drunks and saints and martyrs that came before us. Thank you, thank you, thank you.