Our powers grow stronger....

I'm not sure where to pick back up with this, so...here's an awful poem:

In Ireland the Guinness flows like wine
most of it into my belly
Last night I won a drinking contest
And jigged to the sweetest tunes
while watching some skank ball kick a buffoon

Where is my mind?
I'm sorry journal, this sucks ass

Perhaps I should have passed on the grass
No. It put me to bed when Guinness was overtaking my head

A drunken Indian thought his beer was a gavel
and sprinkled the bar as his brain came unraveled

I forgave him, the Pogues were playing and I was full of happy drink
I. Love. Ireland.

The setting for the poems action was Dublin's famous Temple Bar district, which is fucking awesome. That one night of stout pounding, pub crawling mayhem fulfilled my wildest fantasies about drinking with the Irish. What I think city planners set out to do was create, as best they could, a booze hound's Utopia. Every building for blocks and blocks is a pub. No art galleries or pocketbook depots, just beautiful pubs filled with beer and yelling.

I want to take a few lines to thank a young Irish skank for setting the mood for the evening. As we and some random hostel folk approached the bars our eyes were drawn to this Irish rose screaming at some poor guy who had no idea of what was about to happen to his junk. Random skank was making such a scene that all 7 or 8 of us stopped in our tracks to watch as she cocked her black, size 10 1/2 combat boot back and smushed it deep into her beau's loins. At that moment we reacted like a rabies ridden kick-off coverage team and tore off cackling into ultimate inebriation.

The rest of the nights details are sketchy at best. I have flashes of The Porterhouse and its delicious porters and amazing one man band. I remember being thrown out of a bar for talking Braves baseball with a Mets fan. I remember a highly intoxicated and overzealous Indian yuppie touching women and hammering a mug of beer on a wooden guard rail in a bar. Most of all, I remember Oliver St. John Gogarty's. It's a pub. No. It's the pub. I have no idea what time it was when we got upstairs to hear some authentic Irish music, it had to be 4 or later. I can only be sure of one thing; we jigged so hard the Earth nearly shit its pants. The pure joy of being hammered in Ireland, surrounded by happy people while jigging to the Pogues was almost too much for me. Unfortunately, so was the next morning.

I vaguely remember walking back to our hostel and to this day none of us are sure how in sweet baby Jesus' name we found it. I do remember that when we got back I hung outside to smoke a cig while the crew headed to bed and was accompanied by a mysterious woman who offered me a joint. Not wanting to seem rude I accepted and...I woke up. Naked. With an intense throbbing pain surging up from a vein in my ball sack into my stomach. I freaked out, not knowing where I was and threw off my sheets. Bad idea. Suddenly I was sprawled nude on a cot while six strangers stared, mouths agape, at my disfigured testic....nah I'm just kidding. I smoked the joint and zombie hobbled to my bed with nary a scratch on my coin purse.

To be continued...