A Man Turns 34

Note: I will deny the entire contents of this post if my daughter ever finds it later in her life and confronts me with it. I expect you all to back me up in those denials.

So, how did I welcome in 34th birthday? Recall that I was spending it in Australia.

Before I get into the details, I want to take a moment to talk about rules. Rules that you make for yourself. I don’t know about everyone else, but I find that the only time I end up making rules for myself (as opposed to having a philosophical system that I can consult for case-by-case results) is when I have consistently made a mistake a number of times, and thus I end up creating the rules to prevent myself from making that mistake again.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, most of these rules have to do with the consumption of alcohol, and most of them date from the period between my mid-teens and my mid-twenties, when I did my most frequent, and prodigious, drinking. For each of these rules, there was a final precipitating incident which made me cognisant of my repeated errors–apparently on some of these things I am quite a slow learner.

So, let’s look at what a few of the rules are I’ve developed over the years–most of them are stunningly self-evident to anyone with common sense, but to the Irish and the kinds of people I tend to hang out with, they are less obvious and have to be hard-won. And, lest you read this and think I am nothing but a complete sot, I note that these days it’s a rare week when my total booze consumption reaches to the lofty heights of four beers–three being my limit at my weekly poker game (I have to drive home after), and any other opportunity for drinking being a rare thing these days.

These Are The Rules

Do not drink with Australians – This rule I formed at the age of sixteen while travelling around Europe. I spent some time travelling hostel-to-hostel with an Australian guy named Dave. Dave couldn’t leave the particular country I met him in, as he had lost his passportActually, he had passed out on a train leaving Amsterdam after too many visits to the “coffee shop”, and had his passport stolen while he was unconscious. and due to the vagaries of trading in an Australian passport for a UK one in the pre-EU days it was going to take a couple of months for him to get a new one. Anyway, Dave and I did some drinking across middle Europe, and after several morning waking up in a hostel to morning alarm bells that felt to me like the wakeful trump of doom, I realized that I should really not be drinking with Australians.

Do not drink “for your country” – This one I learned really quickly. While attending a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend‘s party in Geneva (well, just outside Geneva) during that same teenage sojourn in Europe, I found myself drinking with the Suisse Romande version of frat boys, and getting really into the “drinking for the honour of Canada” thing. I was sixteen, so it’s kind of forgivable. Later that night while sitting in the parking lot outside, covered in vomit, and enjoying a lengthy bout of the dry heaves, I had some inkling that this had been a bad idea. Doing the walk of shame (well, “stumble of shame”) back to the place I was crashing later than night kind of drove the point home. Waking up in the morning with a powerful headache, and having to find laundry facilities… Well, it only took that one night to make this a rule.

I foolishly ignored this rule one other memorable time, in my early 20s, when I took some out-of-town guys (a Kiwi and a Yank) from my company down to my local. The Kiwi bore the brunt of that incident–spending most of the night passed out, and tucked under the couch at the bar so that he would not be visible should the liquor inspector enter the bar. Oh, and we did put the night’s tab on his credit card as well. Still, I didn’t exactly cover myself in glory that night either.

Do not drink on an empty stomach – A lesson from my “frosh week”. It took me a long time to really understand the importance of “laying down a good base” before heading out for a night on the bottle. I believe the first time I got an inkling of this was the morning after the frosh week scavenger hunt. During our trip to Kingston to kidnap a Queens engineering frosh–300 points!–we didn’t have time get supper, and instead rolled right into the purple Jesus party. The morning was… um… unpleasant.

Do not drink competitively – After a few months of Engineering student chest-beating, I was starting to understand that competitive drinking was a bit silly. Competing for volume anyway (competing for speed, of course, is a fine old engineering tradition). This was driven home at my first-year Halloween party. The details of the particular competition are too silly to talk about, but the evening ended up with me sleeping on the lawn outside my residence, since the whole “unlocking the door with the key” operation was much, much, too complex at the time I got home. I wish I could say this was the first and only time I had been awoken because the dew had made my sleeping form sodden.

Do not mix your drinks – I never did learn this while I was a drinking with the engineers. Many a “batch party” would have had a happier morning after if I had. I eventually learned this from the much more professional drinkers working at the Old English Parlour. With some pointers gleaned by watching people half my size drink twice as much as I did, without apparent ill effect the following day, I finally dropped my traditional pattern of drinking Guinness until I started to get full, and then switching to double rye ‘n’ gingers. Really, sticking with Guinness (at least for 12 pints or less), or to rye, made for a much more pleasant morning. (Shortly after this I realized rye makes me mean, and basically settled into the happy Guinness drinkstyle.)

No penalty shots – Another fine old tradition in Engineering, at least in my discipline at my alma mater, was the consumption of shots that are consciously disgusting or painful, which I humorously refer to as “penalty shots”. The classic, of course, was the cement mixer–a combination of Bailey’s and bar lime which you put into your mouth, and swish around as the lime curdles the cream in the Bailey’s, resulting in a mouth full of disgusting curds. Possibly more disgusting was the “screaming eagle”, which is a similar shot made with Eagle brand sweetened condensed milk and vodka. Less disgusting, but more painful, were things like the prairie fire–half tequila, half tabasco–, etc. I suspect that all of these drinks were common as part of the pre-emptive self-mockery of the my discipline, much in the same way that we used to march into parties singing the “We all know that Systems blows” tune–nothing confused the other disciplines like us mocking ourselves.

I have a distinct memory of the moment when I realized that I didn’t have to endure even one more cement mixer–that in fact, I was inflicting these things on myself. What a relief that was.

Do not drink tequila – I’m kind of embarrassed how long it took my to figure out that every time I had an evening that involved tequila, it was followed by a morning that involved pain. One morning in my mid-twenties I woke up, and announced “I am not drinking tequila any more. The no tequila rule is in effect.” For several weeks after I had to endure some ribbing from my compatriots, but eventually they stopped trying to talk me into drinking tequila, and stopped buying rounds that were tequila based when I was there. Hell, one of them–Paul, the chef–also saw the wisdom of the policy, and adopted the ‘no tequila’ rule for his own use. That lead to a whole other story involving a Zippo, and long lost Padraig Eamon Flynn…

Do not drink shots – I think the day I got up an realized that drinking shots is never a good idea was the start of my real adulthood. It was suddenly so clear to me that drinking shots is about getting smashed, and I was more interested in a long, gentle evening of drinking a nice stout and hanging out with my friends, than I was the bed spins or sleeping on the bathroom floor. I’m honestly not sure when that day was, but clearly it was after my no tequila revelation.

Do not taunt the bartender – Do I even need to explain this? It’s like a rule not to tell the chef at the Indian place that you want your vindaloo “hot, and not just ‘white boy hot'”. It should be self-evident. (I note that, fool that I am, I had to learn that thing about the not taunting the chef the hard way as well.)

Spacer drinks are a good idea – For a long time I worked on the theory that if I got home really drunk, I could eat a handful of analgesics, and drink a litre or two of juice or water for hydration before passing out, and this would result in a lessened hangover. While that’s actually true, what I eventually learned is that it’s much better to keep hydrated while drinking–and, doing so also slows down your drinking rate, which makes it less likely you will end up at the passing out point. This is also something that I picked up from the professional drinkers who worked at the OEP. Have a couple of rye ‘n’ gingers, and then have a pint of soda water with lime, repeat. You’ll drink one or two less drinks an hour, saving money and getting less wrecked, and between poisoning yourself less and having more water in your system you’ll feel better in the morning. It’s not rocket science.

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So, what do all these should-be-self-evident rules have to do with my 34th birthday?

In short, I broke them all.

It started out as a simple “come with the developers from the Melbourne office for a pint after work on Friday”. How do you say no to that? I mean guys are guys, the world around, and if the boys stick there head into the meeting room and say “It’s pub o’clock”, then you go to the pub.

So, we went around the corner from the office to the Cherry Tree, which apparently is “the local” for one the Melbourne lads.

Cherry Tree Hotel

Things started out sociably enough, with the lads introducing me to Mountain Goat AleWish I had known there was a stout! in a clean, if somewhat crowded pub. It looked something like this:

Inside the Cherry Tree

As we drank our pints, the guys started leaving, one at a time, to head off to their various Friday night activities. Except for the fellow whose local the pub was. He’s also the guy in Melbourne I’ve worked with the most–kind of the outward ambassador for the technical guys there.

I made some comment about “maybe wrapping it up” and “heading back to the hotel for some dinner”, when he uttered the phrase that is probably responsible for the disaster. “You’re not going to deny me the chance to drink Chris McLaren under the table, are you?”

So, it was on.

We were well taken care of by the staff, who all knew this guy well (it being his local, and he being far from an amateur drinker).

Eventually the bar started to look like this:

Blurry and Dark

Yes, as the sun set the bar got a lot darker. And somehow blurrier, as well. At some point in there we passed midnight, rolling right into my birthday. Neither of us noticed, or commented on it.

To make another already too long story shorter: we closed the bar, without ever having dinner. We drank beers and cocktails, eventually falling into drinking shots, and even shots that the bartenders specifically invented on the spot to hurt us. I believe I did Canada proud, with my Melbournian friend eventually (about 15 minutes before last call if my hazy memory is to be trusted) conceding defeat. Frankly, he was drinking out of his weight class, and he did a tremendous job–although he later claimed that I had given him cirrhosis.

We stumbled back to work to pick up our gear sometime after 2AM, and then I made my way back to my hotel where, after some length key/lock problems I managed to crash out for a couple of hours.

Of course, I had to be up at 8AM, since I had plans for the actual Saturday of my birthday starting at 9AM, and I definitely needed to shower and get my head straight before those started… but that’s another story.

I note for the record that I suspect that the 66 hours of being awake on the way to Melbourne, followed by a week of intense work, followed by this particular bit of drunken madness, and indeed compounded by what followed and the flight home may, in some small way, have contributed to weakening my immune system, setting me up for that cold I was whining about below. A man makes his own bed, etc.

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada
This work by Chris McLaren is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada.