In my lameness at not joining my comrades, I trolled down Seamus O’blogroll to catch up, and if y’all aren’t reading Skot from Izzle Pfaff!, a pox on you because he’s freakin’ BRILLIANT. Immerse yourself in the beauty of his prose, will ya?

Some months ago, Budweiser had the astonishingly shitty idea of teaming up with Clamato to release this . . . beverage that they called “Chelada,” a perversion of a perfectly fine Southwest/Mexican drink tradition of leavening shitty lager with tomato juice, lime and salt in order to create a refreshing summer drink (I swear this is true). And when it came out, J. managed to sneak a can of it into my fridge as a joke; when I discovered the offending thing, I swore to him that I would make him drink it.

This was the night. I pulled out the giant can--24 deathless ounces--and squinted apprehensively at the label, which, yes, was still trumpeting the good sense of this collison of Budweiser and Clamato. With a coroner’s clinical eye, I examined the “nutritional information” boxlet, and encountered this terrifying fragment: “Contains shellfish/clams.” I clouted J. about the head and torso and wept at our fate.

I poured the stuff into a couple of glasses; pinkish and wan, it looked like poorly oxygenated blood, or perhaps a pleural effusion. It bore virtually no head whatsoever, the carbonation presumably overcome by the angry, imprisoned shellfish/clam zombies. Even pouring it was dispiriting, like watching suicides falling from tall buildings. We smelled our samples and were not encouraged: it was a hellishly chemical lime nose that seemed to grouchily throw punches at the only other olfactory note, which was a sickly tomatoesque sweetness. Finally, we took a sip.

This was possibly as close to the American tradition of St. Patrick’s Day that we got that evening. For one brief horrifying moment, J. and I drank an alcoholic beverage that was, for all intents and purposes, like drinking pure, unadulterated malignity. For a mere moment, we were as one with all of those douchebags out there in all of those Stygian Irish bars, drinking the undrinkable.