Ah, Opening Day. I tradition since, uh, last year. Roll back the tarp, dust off home-plate, and let’s get our drink on!

[Ed.: Sure, it’s April 20th — Opening Day was almost three weeks ago, but I simply don’t have the stamina and constitution that Forty does. He got his article out April 4th! Frankly I think he was still recovering given all the misspellings and grammar errors.]

Hoss and I agreed to arrive at The Rail promptly at 9am. I was a little late because I ran into a guy I know in my building with his three-year-old son on their way to daycare or something. He asked what I was up to. I could’ve said, “well, I’m off to The Brass Rail to start drinking, and I’m in a hurry — it’s almost 9am”, but instead I said I was on my way to “run a few errands.” He then noted the bag of potato chips and hot dog buns that I was tasked with bringing to our little gathering. He said, “Opening Day, eh?” “Yup”, I conceded, and we left it at that.

I headed off in the direction of downtown, and when I arrived, right around 9:15a, there was Hoss standing outside smoking a cigarette. I could tell it was going to be a beautiful day. We went inside, and as expected, there was Fu Dog tending bar and making sure things were just right. He’s very meticulous that way. You do not want to be in the path of his plutonium-powered eyeball laser-beams if he catches the cash register just a centimeter to the left of where it should be.

I bellied up to the bar and had a seat on my favorite bar stool. Fu Dog slowly rose from his dish-washing, sauntered over, and spoke.

“Well? What’ll you have?”

“I’d like a Hamm’s, please.”

“Would you care for a glass?”

Now I usually don’t drink my Hamm’s out of a glass, but Fu Dog always asks this question, and considering it was a special day, I said, “you bet.” Hoss and I then decided that we would drink out of a glass all day. It just seemed so proper and civilized. To wit:

Fu Dog spoke again: “So what brings you in this morning?”

“It’s Opening Day!”

And in his usual slow-speaking yet always salient manner he replied, “Well, there’s no baseball til noon.”

Well, we couldn’t argue with that logic, so Hoss and I clinked our glasses and toasted to what was sure to be a beautiful day of day-drinking. Oh yeah — and baseball. Almost forgot.

I think Hoss tweeted it best: “Nothing beats getting served by an octogenarian at my favorite watering hole at 9am to celebrate America’s pastime. #OpeningDay”

Around 9:30a, Coulter showed up. After Hoss and I scowled at him for a bit, he issued some bullshit excuse about sampling his Italian beef, which was strangely absent, and that he had started drinking at 7am. Whatever. Since we still had about three hours to kill, and the pre-pre-pre-game show wasn’t living up to expectation, a sense of ennui set in.

And while we’re at it, here’s a shot of Fu Dog cracking 2048-bit NSA codes.

Things, though, quickly picked up. Soon none other than Mr. Duane Mills graced The Rail with his presence. Here’s a blurry snap of that bal’ head o’ his:

Since Easter was the day before, he actually had a drink instead of a 7-Up before mumbling something about having to go to one of the various sororities he does work for on campus. I’m perpetually amazed: The man has to be at least 112 years old, he can bench-press an MTD bus, and he does maintenance in sororities. I hope I’m so lucky some day. At this rate, it’s not looking good.

Things continued to pick up as more folks started filing into the bar. Hoss usually works Monday days behind the bar, so a substitute had to be found, and she was. Right on time, Margarita and her colossal hangover showed up at noon to take over the reins from Fu Dog and continue shoveling drinks into patrons’ maws.

In the forefront there, we see Hideout, which leads me to a very relevant portion of this post: our first Hamm’s Hat of the day! Gotta stay true to the blog, right? While I have not done the calculations, when you consider the sheer number of day-drunks respectable gents, the time at which we started, and the actual number of cans of beer in a case, well, YOU do the math.

Granted it was a Busch Light hat, but if you have a problem with that, you can sit on the racist side of the bar. Later on, I had the fortune of winning an ACTUAL Hamm’s Hat. This having been probably the 46th beer of the day, I chose to use my eye-hole as a nose-hole.

Yes, it was a glorious day. Hoss won too! Gotta love Baltimore’s expression in this one.

By 6pm or so, we were all pretty shitfaced decided a change of venue was in order. Last year folks went to Tumble Inn and The Other Bar, and so we decided to do just that. Turns out trivia night was in session, so we signed up using the only clever name we could come up with at the time.

All in all, an absolutely wonderful day. Here’s the whole gang, as stolen from Forty’s article.

Yahoo, Federali, Yukon, Overdrive, Tod, Steakhouse, Looksee aka Cappy, Applejack, Hoss, Baltimore, and Forty.

Oh yeah. And I think we watched some baseball. Yay, baseball!!!