This article is supposed to be about yesterday’s Saint Patrick’s day festivities. As a diligent reporter, I grabbed my notepad and a pen, and went out to see what’s what. I arrived at noon and got right down to business. Unfortunately, only the first page of my notes is fully legible. I suspect that the other pages wouldn’t be readable even if they weren’t saturated with beer. Regrettably, I also have no memories of last night.
My cellphone camera has several dozen new photos on it. Only one of them isn’t either mostly obscured by my thumb or simply black. It’s a selfie. I don’t know the person who took it. She and her boyfriend do look like a cute couple though. Thinking back on it now, I do remember lending my phone to someone who asked if they could borrow it to take a picture. I also remember that making perfect sense.
Got a text. “Hey you. Do’n smtin l8r?” Area code 907. Alaska. I got another one before I could respond; “Sry wrong psn.” Based on how everyone is arranged in my contact list, the last person I texted was my mother. It was a grammatically correct, perfectly coherent message about how I was really sorry that I couldn’t make it home for her birthday and I would be sure to make it up to her. Which was all true. But last I remember, I hadn’t gotten around to telling her.
Why are computer screens so bright? It seems like such a waste of energy. This headache is killing me.
There’s a number in my notepad. The handwriting isn’t mine. I’m not sure how I got it; the elderly Indian woman who picked up didn’t seem to have any sort of hangover at all. In any case, she confided in me that she thinks clubbing is more of a “young person’s game.” Very unfortunate.
I have resorted to scanning though my friends’ Facebook pages for pictures of me. Its long, tiresome work, and has so far yielded only 3 images. None of them are of me, by the way. But they all feature my green “Kiss me I’m Irish” shirt. I recognized it with the help of something I managed to decipher from my notepad: “There bots of glitter around. Some orlando and black and put on me. I’m Halloween.”
It now seems clear to me that I will not be able to figure anything out before the deadline for this issue. Upon re-examining my assignment, I realized that it did not specifically say “Report on Saint Patrick’s Day.” Rather, it says to “report on your experiences.” With only one hour until layout starts, the best adventure I have is trying to figure out this God-damned mess. It may not be what the editor wanted. But in my current state, he should be glad he got anything at all.
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