It didn’t really hit me until I was talking to the cop who normally guards the referee locker room for the Gladiators games.  He gets paid extra to work the hockey games and after the game he would head off to his night shift.  Since Saturday was St. Patrick’s Day, he was not looking forward to dealing with all the drunks.  He said “St. Patrick’s Day is for amateurs” and I have to wholeheartedly agree.  He’s allowed to talk shit since he’s a 6’5” Irishman who pounds beer on a professional level.

Far be it from me to denigrate the celebration of St. Patrick’s Day.  While living in Chicago I partook of the drunken revelry every year and enjoyed it immensely.  But in terms of the day being a time when every bar is elbow to elbow and it takes forever to get a drink and/or go to the bathroom (God forbid you “break the seal” too early), it rivals New Year’s Eve in terms of “Why exactly am I doing this?”  At least with most establishments, there isn’t a ridiculous cover charge just to enter the place on St. Patrick’s Day.

Green beer?  You can have it.  I’ll be pounding Guinness or Murphy’s or Beamish.  Pretending to be Irish?  This Scottish lass has mixed feelings about that although I can much easier pass for an Irishman than someone with Korean or Croatian heritage.  The plus side to St. Patrick’s Day is that most people are in a good mood, albeit alcohol-induced.  While the drinking connotation might not be the greatest correlation for American people of Irish descent to have, at least it’s an improvement from 100 years ago when being Irish meant you were an unclean immigrant.  They were the “dirty” blue collar workers who did the shit jobs naturalized Americans wouldn’t do.  Nowadays it's "cool" to be Irish, at least for one day a year.

The problem with drinking-based holidays is that, since most people who aren’t normally blitzed are, it’s the only other night besides New Years Eve where I’m jittery about being on the road because of all the drunks.  This is more of an issue in a car-based city like Atlanta or the suburbs of any major metro area.  You’d hope people would be smart enough to have a designated driver or hire a cab, but based on the amount of DUI arrests the cop I talk to makes each year on that night, it’s obvious people don’t plan or don’t care to plan.  If there’s one thing I have zero tolerance for, it’s driving drunk.  It’s never the drunk who plows into the family of four who dies.