If you’ve ever celebrated a birthday at a bar or licensed restaurant with any more than one friend, then you know that birthdays can be very hazardous to your health. In many circles birthdays have come to be little more than an excuse to bring our dearest friends as close to death as possible (presumably without actually achieving death) with the use of alcoholic beverages.

In my circle of friends, it is considered a grievous insult to refuse a drink on one’s own birthday. This leads to two very distinct sets of behavior:

1. The friends of the celebrator begin giggling fiendishly while buying shot after shot of the most disgusting drinks they can imagine. This is how many popular drinks were first invented, which makes perfect sense if you think about it. Can you think of any reason someone would order a “Prairie Fire” (made with tequila and hot sauce) a “Yack” (made with equal parts Jagermeister and Jack Daniels) or a “Wild Turkey” (which is made with Wild Turkey bourbon and nothing else) other than to punish a close friend on his or her birthday?

2. The other behavior elicited by our current birthday tradition is that the celebrator begins dreading birthdays and begins every new year of his or her life with the slurred, mumbled phrase: “I’m never drinking again.”
Given these indisputable truths, it might seem tempting for some to forgo the entire enterprise of birthdays altogether (or at least to stop going anywhere near a bar while celebrating a birthday). This, however, would be a grave mistake, the consequences of which we would all suffer greatly.

“ If it ain’t broke, pour whisky on it.

We are in a time of severe economic hardship. Unemployment is at an all-time high in some places (we know this because we’re told so by the people whose job it is to tell us about how many people don’t have jobs.) The only way to keep our global economy from slipping into a full-blown depression is to continue spending way too much money getting our friends drunk on their birthdays.

You might think that our money could be spent more productively, but if you think about it for a little, you’ll realize how embarrassingly wrong you are.

Getting your friends really drunk on their birthdays not only feeds money back into the economy, but moreover, creates and secures many jobs as well. Taxi drivers, bartenders, vomit cleaners and stomach pump operators would all be out of work if we were to meddle in any way with our birthday tradition of almost killing our friends with alcohol for our own sadistic enjoyment. So I say, let’s keep up the good work.

After all, you know what they say: If it ain’t broke, pour whisky on it. Then pour more whisky on it.

J. Williamez is a local musician. You can catch him every Monday at Shannon’s Irish Pub where he certainly won’t buy you drinks on your birthday.

Published in Volume 63, Number 24 of The Uniter (March 19, 2009)