They're hanging folks in Dublin for the wearin' of the green... (1 of a series)

My, my. I am prolific of late.

As if you didn't know this was coming. Now in all frankness, I'm Scottish inherently, but it's not like St Patrick's Day has ever really been about Ireland over wearing green and puking up green beer. People need social pressure valves with which to release all the pent up frustration at thundering mediocrity and hopelessness of the daily grind and what better way than to find another excuse to get drunk. It's like how Halloween evolves from trick-or-treating to fucking a drunken sorority girl dressed as Catwoman in a public bathroom whilst costumed as a police officer. Holidays evolve and mean different things to people depending on their age, status, and current situation in life (ever seen a singles Christmas party? My lord). But I'm digressing, here. When I originally put this up as a kind of way in which to feel like anything I decided to write was being published, only without all the rejection letters and death of hope, I did do something along the lines of promise my audience (AHAHA) drinking stories. So within this update shall be recounted the journey to Boston in the brave year 2010 for good old St-Patrick's.

This idea germinated, as most ideas related to alcohol, in the austere and absolute misery the 1RCR Battle Group underwent during work-up training in Fort Irwin, California. More often than not pre-deployment consists of undergoing temperatures around -50 degees Celcius (that's right, Yanks) in the winter wonderland of Alberta's own Wainwright training area, the irony of contracting frostbite while preparing to fight in in a featureless desert not lost on us in the slightest. So every so often, in coalition with the States, we send our forces on a little field trip down south for some more relevant desert warfare. The double irony of this being that the Canadian Forces war-machine seems to unfailingly drag its native weather with it wherever it goes. Skeptical?

Texas, Summer of '08

Ain't that a bitch. So of course, the Surfboard State was no different - and although none of us actually believed they were sending us to fucking sunny California for training (referring the upcoming exercise as Op California Dreamin' and readying our winter-whites for Wainwright), we would probably have been better off up north. Outside being less than adequately prepared for the weather (it's CALIFORNIA! Surf's up!), the Mojave desert broke it's 22-year tradition of drought to bring us Canucks snowfalls unheard of, sleet, torrential rain, sudden and plummeting drops in temperature, all of which culminating in state-wide flash-flooding which severely interrupted any counter-insurgency operations. 

 'Once more into the breach, dear friends...' 

All two months of California sucked, and I can't remember being more miserable in Afghanistan even during the lowest points of team morale. So of course we needed some form of escapism, and outside the duly practiced traditions of FOB(Forward Operating Base)-wide prankery (focusing on conversations played out exclusively in porta-potty limerick) doing something extravagant for everyone's favourite reason to get drunk played a sizable part in our perseverance. The decision was made on Boston, and like Tolkien's Fellowship, we would return home only to embark upon another journey. 

The trip 'to Boston' became an 'epic Road Trip' worthy of a National Lampoon movie, because when you have nothing to do but keep your feet dry and smoke cigarettes it becomes easier to build on something already long-established. By the time we set off, the journey would take us to Vermont, where we would (assumedly) drink Baileys from crystalline goblets in log-cabin hot tubs while ski-bunny goddesses dripped hot maple syrup down our nubile bodies and fed us helpings of the state's famous cheese- then, to two days in Boston and a Dropkick Murphy's concert, and unbeknown to us at the time, a final and belligerent stay in London, Ontario. We suited up - because no event and no occasion should mar a gentleman from dressing his finest - and entered the screenplay of a raunchy comedy (only with cleverer witticisms). 

Vermont, of course, was an absolute bust. 

This leg of the journey was orchestrated by Jeff. Jeff (I wish I had made-up monikers for the dramatis personae of characters who will probably never discover the online record of this journey) is an agent of chaos - and I don't mean the sort of chaos resplendent in the work of Douglas Adams, but the mathematical chaos that decrees by law all organized systems will break-down inevitably due to equally inevitable agents of change. Jeff is like the weather, as unpredictable now as ever and always will be, a man whose sole existence seems to exist beneath the skin of his peers, to find the cracks in armour, to light matches against the tar-soaked foundations of reality. To say he's an alcoholic would be a misnomer - he merely propagates his will into the more socially congested intersections of society - the alehouse. He will be understanding and accepting towards incredulity and awfulness, belligerent and unruly to provoke humane responses, say the most horrible but verbose things (with a kind of poetic vulgarity) to chase away and disgust outright, or act in a depraved and savage manner (or goad others into doing so) in order to shake the comfort zones of those who find themselves in his terrible gravity. He orchestrated this trip probably to tick another social experiment off the terrible, motivational machine which floats him through life. He is the kind of guy who publicly demeans anti-war protesters and shrieks "Babykiller!" into the faces of newly recruited soldiers to just revel in the resulting negative harmonic frequency. In any case, though I immortalize him on the page he is as easily dupeable as the rest of us, and so did we land at the Golden Eagle Resort in Stowe, Vermont. 

   

 A far cry from...

...what we expected.

We really should have taken the hint just driving through Stowe - a city (village) with an antique shop on every street corner and a population of fifty. Nevertheless, we'd booked the resort in advance - making the beds we'd all have to sleep in. After much accusatory verbal torture (directed towards Jeff) and public hysterics on my part (when the "resort", already looking more like a Christmasy bed-and-breakfast, was found to be filled with the elderly playing cribbage), we decided to capitalize on our collective losses by getting really, really drunk in our hotel rooms. Which we did, shot-gunning Coors and Bud by the crate and sloppily throwing on our suit-jackets and dress pants over dress-shirts and v-necked tees in a kind of sharp-casual mess which screamed of too-long inebriated motor-skill and coordination. After an increasingly ridiculous succession of drinking games the question remained as to what in the fuck we would do with our night which seemed all but squandered in the sleepy and probably fundamentalist community from which we thrust our hands through allegorically barred window-panes. 

"Bars?"

"Bars."

St-Patrick's of 2010 found itself hopelessly on a Wednesday, which meant of course that this new and exotic bar-scene we were trying to "quote-un-quote" hit-up would be revealing to us all the excitement and possibilities of an average Monday night. Now say what I will about the Golden Eagle (where fun goes to die), it has a pretty sweet local transit system consisting of a bus which makes its way around the local public distilleries. We stumbled out into winter darkness and eventually found ourself on the fucking sweetest bus ride ever. This was accentuated merely by the fact that our driver, a middle-aged black man with a kind of underlying contempt for his current station in life despite his very sociable personality and brilliantly jovial antics, was balls to the walls awesome. He laughed hysterically when we demanded carriage to the local pub-scene (like the word "scene" was so out of place in this sleepy graveyard of an interstate check-stop it had become a fairy-tale in itself) in slurred tones of voice and offered to ferry us about this 'winter wonderland' all for the sake of his personal amusement. Also because he very clearly had nothing else to fucking do - really the question "Slow-night?" would've probably drawn offense at this point. We discovered that Stowe really isn't such a sink-hole every day of the year, and in fact we'd missed the rush of "nubile and boozy females", who blow through the resorts and liquor-stores every year, with the early wane of winter. No skiing, no heartbeat. 

In that light (a stark and unforgiving one), he offered to drive us up to Burlington, where the college kids roam free-range through the wine-soaked gutters and hostels. Of course, Jeff and me stood up and mouthed yes with such mirth and solemnity we might have been Kirk Douglas in Spartacus - but this idea was quickly negated (and probably for good reason, although I still fail to see it) by our remaining group (who out-numbered us despite our winning personalities, those treacherous pigs). Now the secret to a solid road trip, I found, is a combination of personalities which can thrive and feed off each other or at the very least spur on the weaker iterations into tomfoolery. The three dominating forces of this particular example being Jeff and me, and Tim. Tim is a big (not even really big, mind you, but made out to be by defacto group-stereotyping) and boisterous Chris Farley of a man with a dream of Dulce-Gabbania and an illusion of class and sophistication so dramatic he postulated the "Smoke-and-Mirrors" theorem of bar-hopping - that despite your character flaws, financial moorings, and terrible habits, you can still be a social leader by disguising all of these in a finely tailored suit with minuscule, flashy accessories, sharp wit, or at the very least a larger-than-life personality. He is a man who is most often quoted as apologizing the next morning for something he did the night before. Tim is a leading personality, he is capable of commandeering the most socially awkward of personalities and dragging them through such alcohol-related adventures as to warp their perspectives on life entirely. The malformed and obnoxious gravities of us three would for the four days drawn so many into our orbit the number of lives partially affected by our savage debauchery is just nonsense. The argument, thus, was long and ferocious and drunk as all fuck but Tim managed to win out and we bid farewell to Burlington, crushed a few more tall-boys, and explored every nook and cranny in a town that seemed to be constructed of... well, nooks and crannies. 

Now the names of the bars escape this blogger. The names of people and the passage of events in many of these adventures is foggy at best and a blackout otherwise. We cruised through quite a few - some closed and almost boarded up, some vacant but for souls so crushed by factory work the beers they consumed after work and into the night kept them anesthetized though the following day, some but for the snowboard instructors and resort workers stuck in time dilation between then and the next snowfall - and some with some interesting characters indeed. Our driver stopped in for a brew or too as well, before heading home an hour or so away past the end of his shift. In any case, we quickly made friends and raised questions and drinks alike, and were eventually followed around by some of the board-jockeys whose Monday just got somewhat more interesting. We ended up at a meagre little pub where a couple of old boys were drinking and smoking and the occasional townie stopped by to say hello over a pint and a cigarettes. There we met two rather interesting characters - two older, both of whom had been on multiple tours of duty in Vietnam as part of the Marines and Engineers (I thinm) respectively and with whom we got right proper shit-faced, and if they ever stumble upon this - you boys made our fucking night.

Now all through the weeks leading up to and the road trip itself we were perfecting a sublime and exaggerated fallacy in which we would disguise ourselves for the sake of our personal entertainment. This was posing as deep sea bulldozers, a lie so polished its plausible deniability surpassed its stupidity. Combining the austere manliness of deep-sea diving and salvaging with a fabricated acceptable ratio of 'operational casualties' to rival the French Foreign Legion's, we took bits and pieces of roughnecking, submarining, and every other interesting job we could think of and began to create. Everything from hidden cultural references to alarm those with granules of intelligence (like naming our 'aquatic dozer' the HMCS Bellafonte from the Life Aquatic), to a fabricated slang language to grease our own comfort level (and thus, believability), to ancient post-Industrial schematics of hypothesized undersea machinery, to an outright insane hierarchy of crewing positions like 'first science officer' and 'skipper'. A 'dig' was an operation consisting of excavation on the ocean floor, a 'push' was removing debris, we were 'aqua-dozers' for short. We even fabricated a legend surrounding Jason's father, the 'greatest dozer' in the history of the job, who'd died rescuing Jeff from an accident that left him physically scarred (more on that later). 

This shit was eaten up with such eagerness it makes one somewhat misanthropic, but even if more than half those people didn't believe one bit of it, it was all in great, great fun.

Of course, we dropped this facade when we ran into the 'Nam vets, because it was quite simply more interesting talking with these guys than it was dragging along jockey after jockey on our insane lie. The highlight of the night was enduring one of the townie's swearing by 'the time he tried to join the army' and the reasons he wasn't able to, a story every enlisted man has heard a million fucking times by a million fucking slobs all trying to work their fingers into the cracks of a private conversation or simply to offer thanks for something of which they know absolutely nothing and understand even less. Raising his glass with an unstable arm, he toasted to the 'men who protect our freedom' or some such drivel while everyone else at the table kind of looked around uncomfortably and then, tuning in on the same vibration - a kind of frequency through which was communicated every feeling of alienation against the civilian world - one of the vets smiled, raised his glass and said 'Semper Fi, you hosers' to which we all cheered uproariously. 

Our trip through Stowe ended with the first of an increasingly painful chain of morning-afters, blasphemed by the rays of the sun and the noise with which it crept through our shuttered windows. I can't remember if we drank more when we got back to the hotel - although I think we staggered in unevenly one at a time from wherever we ended up - and for some reason (as inexplicable as the suddenness of an earthquake) Jeff had shit in my favorite hat and left it there as a testament to his individuality. Even I couldn't help but laugh.

We crammed into Cody's Ford and set off for Boston - ready to turn the city into our toilet. 

Stay tuned for the next entry, which will cover in detail the following morning and...