-- Friday, March 17, 2000 --

6:26 p.m. Ah, the green, green grass of home. An emerald isle on God's green earth. Green, green -- it's green they say, on the far side of the hill. You can see clearly now ... that it is, in fact, green.

Ok. So I'm not Irish.

Tonight we ate corned beef and cabbage, something called a Dublin coddle, and something called colcannon. I had a few sips of beer, and I'm still not Irish.

I surely wish I were, though. Who wouldn't want to speak with a lilt and a brogue? Who wouldn't want that ruddy coloring and that lush exuberant hair? Irish people are so pretty*, and I rather like a country that has an established fondness for drink.

And a holiday for indulging. I'll drink to that.

I've always believed that drunks are fallen angels, first-time humans not yet accepting the rules of gravity. Dreamers. Big thinkers. People just a little too sensitive for this mortal coil, so they drink to forget their new limitations.

Sure, they're not very dependable. Sure, they skip town and don't show up for work. Yes, they can break your heart when they're not trying to break down your back door. But even though they inflict their fair share of it, they feel more pain than the rest of us.

So, maybe they drink up the babyfood money before their paychecks even clear; and maybe they've slept through most of your formative years with a cloth on their foreheads and the shades pulled down.

I still can't help but admire their spirit, crushed and pressed against glass though it may be. A little bit of butterfly dust still adheres if you catch them between the second and third drinks.

Songs come easiest then, and hugs.

Well, this entry has certainly taken an odd turn. All I was really going to write about was the fact that we got a brand-new bottled water set-up today, complete with stand and pseudo antique crock and a big five-gallon water jug glug glugging every time you turn the spout.

Hot and cold running water on tap, and now we have real bottled water for those people too squeamish to drink from the spigot. And there are a whole lot of them in this part of the world -- heavy drinkers of expensive mountain stream effluvia.

Heavy drinkers -- healthy specimens, careful and prompt and dependable, but no fallen angels.