Tomorrow is Saint Patrick’s Day, a day on which Irish-Americans often stay home to avoid the onslaught of non-Irish-American fools and some Irish-American fools who use the feast day of an Irish saint as an excuse to drink themselves stupid mid-week.
Cheap alternatives to a DUI arrest:
1) If you must get drunk, go to your favorite liquor store, buy the cheapest alcohol you can find, go then to McDonalds, buy a Shamrock Shake (R), go get a hotel room, dump the booze into the shake, drink the disgusting concoction and watch a bit of The Gangs of New York or The Molly Maguires, and sleep off your drunk. Booze: $13.00. Shake: $2.00. Hotel room: $90.00. Movie: $4.00.
2) If you must go drink and celebrate to get tipsy, go to a large active bar that cabs will come to, or where you can catch a designated driver ride from someone else. Drink your drink, get tipsy and catch a sober ride home. Booze: $20-30.00. Cab ride: $10-$50.00+ depending, or free lift home if you are lucky.
3) If you want to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day the real Irish way, get yourself to Mass to celebrate the Feast of St. Patrick. Then go visit a pub, not a bar, and enjoy a meatless meal with no beer, as it’s Lent and you half-likely gave up meat and beer for Lent anyway. Mass: free. Meatless pub grub: $7.00 or so.
4) If you want to help out the bottom line of some criminal defense attorney and bail bondsman, ignore the foregoing, get drunk, drive and T-bone a law enforcement officer’s squad car. DUI fee: $1500 and up. Administrative hearing: $300 and up. Bail bond: possibly $500.00 down on a $5,000 bail, maybe less. Fines: $250-$500+, plus probation fees, loss of income, medical expenses, bus pass once you lose your license, deductibles for your car, deductibles paid for liability to the County, gas for your girlfriend running you back and forth to work once you are suspended, a massive increase in your insurance if they don’t drop you and maybe an unemployment insurance attorney’s fee to help you get benefits once your job fires you once they figure out that you cannot go visit clients and customers any more as a suspended or even revoked driver.
That hotel doesn’t look so expensive now, eh?
Don’t drive drunk, seriously. Pull an extra $60.00 out of the ATM for a cab, and ruin the bottom line of some criminal defense attorney like me. If you have to sleep in your car as a stationary shelter to avoid drinking and driving, do it (but in the shotgun seat or back seat and with the keys OUT of the ignition, ideally thrown under the car for you to grab once you are strictly sober in the morning.) Better choice: drink like a responsible adult or abstain from alcohol entirely, drink Diet Coke and be a designated driver for someone else.
