I cannot adequately express my affinity for day drinking.
Now let me stave off the accusations of alcoholism by articulating how one of the aspects that makes day drinking such a gem is its rarity. Okay, semi-rarity. (Drinking is not a problem until I graduate.)
It may also have to do with the conditions under which day drinking takes place. Game days are the most obvious circumstance. Awash with school spirit and the camaraderie of my fellow Badgers, my naturally enthusiastic disposition is magnified tenfold with the encouraging words of friends to do JUST ONE MORE three-story beer bong.
Then there is the merit of the unexpected day drunkeness. One time last summer, a new friend invited me to an afternoon pig roast (don’t ask, I don’t know), and I ended up deeply entrenched in a game of flip cup before 3 p.m. As the hazy lens of keg beer set in over my 20/20 vision, it soon became time for us to leave. Naturally, my next move was to go for some ice cream, one of man’s greatest culinary creations.
Traipsing down State Street, mothers likely shielded their children from my uncontrollable spasms of seemingly random giggles as my two companions and I tried to maintain our poker faces for the sober surrounding world.
After what I’m sure was a delicious encounter with some Banana Bread or Zanzibar Chocolate ice cream (my only regret of that day is that I don’t better remember the taste), my friends and I quickly realized, even after all that fun, we still had the whole day ahead of us.
This is, by far, the best part about pre-nighttime drinking. Instead of counting down until everyone finally decides to go to the bar at 11 p.m. and staying out until an ungodly hour (the stupidest thing ever, in my opinion. Let’s start a revolution, y’all. Drinks at five, bed by 11, wake up feeling refreshed and ready to seize the day, “Newsies” style. It could be a thing.), you suddenly find yourself with daylight to burn.
During this sudden free time you have an overwhelming amount of options: sober up and do something productive (HA), watch a movie, get food, continue drinking—the list goes on. You’re already drunk, so you essentially have a free pass not to worry about doing real work because you actually cannot. Oops.
You can also make everyday tasks more fun, since businesses normally closed during party time are still in full operation. Like grocery shopping, for instance.
This past Saturday when most of Madison went buck wild for the surprising wave of April sunshine, my roommate and I decided to join in on the celebration and head to The Vintage for a brew. Somehow we had both neglected to eat our usual regimen of snacks in the several hours prior, and one pint later, we most definitely had a slight buzz (yes we are lightweights, leave us alone).
Not anticipating this level of intoxication at the still fairly early hour of 7 p.m., we still had a few things to accomplish so we could follow through on plans to make dinner.
I gotta say, picking out a ripe eggplant and searching for the bread aisle has never been so entertaining. And as a side note, I am also still perplexed by the man behind me in line whose only purchase was 10 cold cuts of steak, to which I proclaimed, “That’s a lot of cold cuts.” Drunk and blunt are clearly synonyms in my book.
Upon returning home, the hilarity continued when we discovered the “repairs” done on our toilet earlier that day had rendered it incapable of actually flushing things. I’m not going to get into it, but let that be your background information before we cut to our next scene at Walgreens (with a pit stop at Fresh Market to ease our busting bladders) where we went to seek out a plunger.
I take back what I said earlier. The single best thing about day drinking is the dinosaur poster now hanging in our living room.
Yes, as we made our way to the cash register, plunger in hand, still giddy with sunshine and Fat Tire ale, I paused in my tracks.
“Holy balls, Becca, look at this poster,” I said.
“We’re buying it,” was Becca’s succinct and natural response.
The poster in question now hangs proudly in our living room and features roaming long-neck dinosaurs and a meteor shooting across the starry night sky over the words “NEVER FORGET.” I love this poster.
And being the symmetry freaks that we are, the accompanying poster of The Dude now hanging parallel to the dinosaur wall art was also a totally necessary buy.
Yes, this bout of day drinking may or may not have led to $21 in poster and plunger purchases, but whatever, YOLO—am I right?
Were you entrapped by The Vintage’s Bloody Mary Bar and the 73 degree weather this past Saturday as well? E-mail Jaime your drunken shenanigans at jbrackeen@wisc.edu.
