It Must be March 1st

So we left the house this morning at 10:00 (that's AM) and this was the sign taped to our door. Our VERY thoughtful upstairs neighbors had put it up to quiet the guests they would be receiving this morning around 7:52.

Why? Today is two weekends before St. Patrick's Day!! Hoboken's biggest holiday, by far!! Not the actual St. Patrick's Day, mind you, no no, as to not compete with the Jersey City St. Paddy's celebration (next week) or the slam bang Manhattan party (the actual weekend of). AND SO we here in Hoboken like to get our Irish groove on the first weekend in March.

And it looks a lot like this...


Drinking is the name of the game, and you go early and you go all day. This picture was taken on my way to work, around 10:12 am. Now, what you're seeing is a line to enter the red building covered by the van (with that yellow bay window above). That building is... you got it, a BAR! And they don't start serving the hard stuff until 11:00 so these guys got about 45 more minutes in the 38 degree weather. But that's ok, cause they're all a bit tipsy already. Gotta keep themselves warm somehow.


Walk a few more blocks and...


This line goes around the corner. Every bar had a line, and here are two true facts about Hoboken:
#1 Hoboken is a mile square.
#2 Hoboken has more bars per square mile than any other city in the U.S.
(Also, it's the birthplace Baseball and Frank Sinatra, but that's a bit off the point.)

So the more we walked the more it looked like this.

Or this....

This is a horse-mounted cop telling a tipsy citizen to climb back in his window before he falls out.

Remember this is Ten O'Clock in the MORNING!!!

Many of you may know the story about last year's bash, but for those of you who don't, I'll give you the short version, real short.

We were walking to dinner with our friends Liz and Jared around 4:00 pm when a very drunk man reached out and grabbed on to Liz and said, (Please censor the following and note that we do not approve of such language but this is what was said and we can only report the facts. Alright get ready.) So this guy grabbed Liz and said, "I would love to be in your butt right now." Needless to say Jared (Liz's husband) punched the guy in the face, (really) and the two fought on top of cars and in the street. THEN drunk guy's friend shows up and starts in on Jared, so I reluctantly step in (trés reluctantly) (and by step in, I mean Lindsay and I come up behind the guy with Lindsay yelling, 'Hey! Hey! Hey!'). Well, the drunk guy turns around and looks me in the eye and cocks back ready to punch, and I do pretty much exactly what you would expect from me, I run away screaming in what would later be described as a mix between a twelve year old girl and the small dinosaur that kills Newman in his jeep on Jurassic Park. Well... Since he was cocked and ready to go, his eyes locked on the next closest target, a beautiful but shouting brunette. In my fleeing I looked back just in time to see him clock my eternal companion squarely across the face. (Here is where I do something that you may not expect.) In seeing Lindsay hit, some little snap in the back of my head snaps and I war cry (not unlike Xena) and propel myself atop drunk man and proceed to scratch at his neck and bite the crown of his head.
Needless to say the fight continues with Jared pummeling this man (while I rode him like a drunk sack of flour) until the cops show up where we promptly inform them that the man had punched this plainly sober woman and we were simply standing up in defense of her virtue. The cops asked Lindsay if she wanted to press charges (which Jared and I most certainly did!) but she declined, asking them to just remove him from the streets. They said they would get him home and that he would wake up tomorrow with a hang over and a hefty fine to pay. (We later found out that the city makes over half a million dollars in ticketing on this day alone.*) While continuing on to dinner we asked Lindsay why she didn't press charges and she informed us that the man never came close to actually hitting her, that he had been as quick and as accurate as a drunk sloth and all she did was move her head a bit to dodge the slow moving bullet. (In my defense, I was running away in blinding fear and may not have had the best vantage point, but I really did think he hit her and I really did jump on his back and punch his shoulders and kick him with my heels like I was spurring on a crazy pony. Something that I had never known if I would be able to do if things came down to it.)

This is the one and only fight I have ever been in that was not with one of my Brothers, and even then it never escalated so high. But I think back on it fondly and often. I fought a guy. Granted he was so drunk that he could not easily stand, but I fought him and, with the help of my friend Jared, I won. And so today, while walking to work on this the anniversary of my fight, I saw this guy...




And I thought to myself, 'In three or four hours... I could take that guy.'

~P






*This year the city posted signs leading up to this weekend informing drunks that they should not break any of the following laws: Public Drunkenness, Disturbing the Peace, Carrying an Open Container, and Public Urination. They then went on to tell the dunks that they WILL be ticketed and that the tickets WILL be up to and exceeding $1,000.00. And so, in true Lawyerly form we found this flier in the street this morning:



So luckily, you CAN pee in the streets. And, if you're lucky, it will only cost you $250, not $1000.00. Happy St. Paddy's!