The best part of the bach­e­lor party wasn’t the fact that it was Pat’s first time being drunk1. Or the fact that he was break danc­ing next to street musi­cians down­town (the video of which shall not be shown).

It was the fact that he was com­pletely off his guard, too drunk to remem­ber what hap­pened the next day, but he was the same old Pat: fun, friendly, and con­sid­er­ate2.

Imbibed by the great truth serum, when all the bad and angry thoughts have a chance to come out, we dis­cov­ered that there isn’t a spot of dark­ness in his soul.

He also said two affect­ing things, lucid in his drunken state.

The first, in slurred speech, he advised us bach­e­lors, “Find the right one. Just make sure you find the right one. She might not be the per­fect match, but she is the right one. Just remem­ber that. If you look for your per­fect match all your life, you might not find it. Just find the right one.”

The sec­ond was when he was going around the room, and he came to me: “Jeff, you too. You’re going to live a happy life. Sometimes it’s rough on the edges, but you know what’s good for you. You know what’s good for you, you know peo­ple will take care of you. Don’t worry, man. You’re going to live a happy life.”

“Life is rough on the edges”, he said. Not that my life is par­tic­u­larly bad, I just don’t han­dle things very well, and this is often when I turn to him. It’s nice to hear from some­one — whose opin­ion which I respect greatly — that things are going to be alright for me, that peo­ple will take care of me when things get bad.

Because I knew in my heart that when Pat said “peo­ple”, that included himself.

  1. Not that Pat has any­thing against drink­ing, as he some­times has a beer with din­ner, he sim­ply doesn’t see the point to drink­ing to get drunk [↑]
  2. About throw­ing up on Mike’s “natural-oak, natural-stain lam­i­nate floor”, or “wast­ing money” I spent for his hal­ibut din­ner [↑]