The Irish Drink

"The Irish Drink"
by Jake Kilroy

PREFACE:
I’m doing you a favor, chum.

The Irish Drink is a conversation starter. Is it a sentence? Is it a noun? Is it the book you’ve come to keep next to your family photo albums? Is it maybe the favorite book of the blonde at the bar? Is it 21st Century's Ulysses?

I don’t know (but I think we all surely doubt it's not the last one). However, I don’t live with you and we're not drinking buddies…yet. Hold tight, I’ve got a book to write. Yes, of course this book will have scattered rhymes. I’m Irish, you know. There’s poetry in nearly everything I spout.

Still, the Irish remain drinkers, and drinkers still consider it a good destiny to be Irish.

So let us consider what history has been made by the Irish and what of it had to do with a good pint. Maybe a dirty whiskey sitting on ice. Maybe a cleaner bill of health. Maybe a cleaner bill of dirty whiskey.

History has drinkers. Drinkers have history. Only sometimes you can drink history.

They named a whiskey after Michael Collins. Eamon de Valera didn’t even become a rum. Maybe it was because he wasn’t sweet enough. But then again, what philosophy can you imagine with ice instead of dreams?

Whiskey was first counted in the early 15th Century as being distilled by Irish monks. History!

Some cultures have peyote, some cultures have whiskey. The Irish are clearly under the latter umbrella. And a good pint is and has been the cornerstone of all western socials.

But I think it's hard to know what came first, the person or the problem.

I suppose I may be reading too much into a book that I didn't write or read. But I did write this book. Haven't read it since though. A problem? Oh, I've got shelves of them.

And, you know, maybe it’s not so much that I’ve got a drinking problem. Maybe the drink has a me problem.

I mean, didn't you ever wonder what you were toasting to?

Cheers,
Jake Kilroy