Memorial Day: National Day-Drinking Day

Memorial Day. Everyone's off from work (even co-blogger Craw!), the weather's usually nice (unless there's an ominous black cloud that fills the sky, I'll get to that), and inhibitions are long gone.

"Hey man, I'm going to get absolutely wild on Memorial Day, I'm pumped!"

"Dude, it's like January"

This is a true conversation you'll hear in just about every office in the United States. Direct proof that holidays gain/lose significance as you age. Back in the day Memorial Day and Yom Kippur meant the same exact thing to me. I get to go hard on Mountain Dew: Code Red and play video games all Sunday. As the years went on, the Mountain Dew bottle slowly became some sort of alcoholic beverage and it turned into one of the best holidays of the year--plus you don't get work off for Yom Kippur, unless your Jewish, I think?

Memorial Day '10 isn't any different. You probably got rocked, tossed a football, and maybe-kinda-sorta hit on a girl or two. You're just living the American dream. My dream was rattled a bit when I awoke at the brisk hour of 12:30pm and went outside to see a black cloud legit covering Boston. Because I'm the 6th bravest person you know, I didn't panic, turned on the news and heard, "never mind the black cloud in the sky, it's just smoke from Quebec." Hmm. Was there a fire in Quebec? Did Quebec straight up burn down? Are they trying to salt our game because they don't have a "Memorial Day"? Needless to say, it truly affected me for about 6 minutes before I completely stopped caring about it.

Another strange hitch in the day occurred when I saw a fucking "Sonic" out on the thruway. Maybe I'm just out of touch with society, but I really thought it was advertising genius and there never was a Sonic fast-food place. Oh well, even really smart people like me are wrong occasionally. Next, our stereotypically necessary Memorial Day beach football game was one of the most poorly constructed ideas of gaming ever. For some reason, we played 3 downs, had arbitrary touchdown spots, and the idea of "out-of-bounds" wasn't even mentioned. We played for 2 hours, scored a total of three touchdowns between both teams and unanimously quit the game because people were starting to get hurt. In retrospect, it was embarrassing, but it had to be done in honor of our troops.

So, next time you see a black cloud in the sky that is presumably the remains of Quebec, you forge ahead. Why? Because miracles do happen and you learn through a pulled groin, blisters, shoulder separations, and concussions, how to effectively play beach football.

Work's going to suck tomorrow/today.