The names of those mentioned are changed for privacy reasons. There is no thesis to this piece. This is simply an account of the sights, sensations and suspicions from a day and night spent at the center of the universe.

Dublin is a different city today. Normally, it’s fittingly mid-sized in its pace and operation. People go to work, ride buses, look through store windows at a steady 60 bpm, all with a healthy balance of pride and humble self-deprecation. But not this morning; I can’t tell if the latter has been abandoned or if more weight has been placed on both sides of the scale, maintaining the balance but risking the collapse of the entire system at the fulcrum.

Walking down Parnell Street, I see everyone wearing Irish flag capes and full green suits, a black dog roaming the street without an owner, all moving toward the same central point on O’Connell Street, where the energy permeates. The walkers funnel past the cops and civil defense vans blocking every intersection, forming a mob, a stampede just on the cusp of possibility. The temperature is straddling freezing, with snow barely coming down, but with 100% humidity, the cold is blood deep, and I can tell the time is going to pass slowly today.

The sidewalks of O’Connell Street are filled with green hats floating above bodies. Every socioeconomic class is represented there, crowding the gates, and they all look dopey as sin. Big men walk around with fake orange beards like Irish Santa Clauses. A lot of women are dressed too scantly for this weather. The cops patrol silently near the building walls, appropriately stern faced. The palest woman I’ve ever seen walks by in a knee high green dress, her skin completely devoid of blood flow. The restaurants lining the street are packed with folk already drinking and scarfing down discounted pizza.

It’s about an hour and a half until the parade.

I meet up with my friend Victor, whose already been waiting a few layers back from the blocked street for a while. Not too much happens from then to the parade. More people show up, pushing us in, growing anxious as more and more nothing happens. We can’t really move if we wanted to. We just hold our ground, save our spots.

Then some whistles blow, and the city cheers at an increasing ferocity as a motorcade of black vans rolls by and disappears. A few seconds pass as people wait if there’s anything else. Then a universal sigh rises from the crowd and settles into a murmur, everyone feeling anticlimaxed. A silver van comes and goes, causing another sigh. The snow turns to BB-sized hail. I’m looking over shoulders and tempted to brace-climb the closest electrical pole to get a better vantage point. My right eye is tearing profusely from the cold.

Then a brigade of mounted police trot by, garnering a mild cheer. The guy following behind with the large shit vacuum, sucking up the horse dung, gets the most intense applause. As another mounted brigade passes, the crowd starts getting into parade mode and hold up their cell phones for recording. The parade starts out normal enough. The fire department, some war veterans and some college bands come by, playing beats so heavy that from a distance they sound fitting for a human sacrifice to King Kong.

The elderly walkers of these sections are smiling and giving occasional high fives to the onlookers. Grade school bands follow suit, with some baton twirlers shaking miserably in the cold as they do their routine. When the parade stops with a young marching band two-stepping in front of us, random, unrelated voices from both sides of the street shout, “Hey, Gerry!” causing a drummer boy to look around frantically. A school from East Texas is represented, for some reason unbeknownst to me.

But then the parade gets strange. A man who walks like he’s blind comes along, dressed like a grand wizard, thunder clapping to the grey sky.

Little girls twirl around in pine needle costumes; others stroll by dolled up like Munchkins, playing flat notes on trumpets. More kids, these ones on all fours, wearing animal masks and making the respective grunts and sounds. A pyramid float with an ever-watching eye at the top (I’m thinking this is for some death cult) leads dozens of kids dressed as things ripped straight out of a bad acid trip, doing a space age dance and making turkey calls in all directions.

The parade grows more bizarre as it goes on. Grade schoolers dressed as pizza slices, rope spools, literal piles of dirt, caricatures that would be considered racist to alien species…flocks of seagulls, what looks like a royal army version of Insane Clown Posse, psychedelic clocks pulling along a massive 10-foot heart made of smaller hearts…tea cups, Russian dolls playing dub step (wub-wub), bastard nightmare creatures that should be scorched to ashes…yuppie children talking into huge DynaTAC brick phones, surfers on a flying carpet with synthwave grooves. Everything’s bug-eyed and inspired by hard drugs. There’s an alarming presence of Punjabi Trap beats blasting from many of the floats going by.

None of this makes sense, and it’s so cold now that it feels like somebody’s dumped snow into my shoes.

The weirdness subsides a bit as the parade reverts to college bands and more communal affairs. I’m convinced that a few bombs have gone off down the street, momentarily confused that nobody’s scrambling for the alleys, but I soon see that the suppressed blasts are from a full-body bass drum from one of the bands. This is the parade fizzling out. It ends with an old man riding figure 8s on a sideways bicycle as the watchers disperse.

The cold is hard and absolutely merciless now. The wind is that of highland summits and drives everyone, including me and Victor, into random shops for shelter. We find reprieve in a Centra, where we get some food and hold out for a while until the wind dies down. Phone service is shoddy, so we both have trouble getting in touch with our other friends to see where they’re at. It seems obligatory to start drinking (“Slammin’ doers,” as one person in the Centra puts it), even though it’s only 1:30 in the afternoon.

Our friends tell us they’re in Temple Bar, to which Victor and I exchange looks of dread, knowing that area’s probably been reduced to dystopian madness by now. But we figure screw it  and head out, relieved that the wind’s been downgraded to a breeze, if only for a minute. Both of us get bashed left and right by the wind as we cross the river over to the south side, where the streets are noticeably more littered with broken glass, green ear muffs and cigarette containers. There is no traffic whatsoever, as people roam the streets freely, aimlessly, drunkenly.

Part of me is a little surprised, but in the same sentence I suppose these are the normal circumstances in an Irish St. Patrick’s Day.

Temple Bar is spilling over with drunkards already. We start off gently trying to squeeze ourselves between bodies on those narrow cobblestone streets, but my patience grows thin quite quickly, and I resort to just pushing people who seem already drunk out of the way. A lot of these people speak with general American accents—tourists, it seems, and their drunkenness especially makes me sick. I’ve come to resent their presence here today, but I barely care. Victor just follows behind me as I leave.

We reach a bar called Elsy’s, which is already so crowded that a brawny man in all official black prevents us from going in. We find Yaro wandering the street, trying to find Elsy’s in the clusterfuck, and we instead go down the street to Trinity Bar, which I have no idea has any relation to the college.

I stave off from drinking for now. There’s no way I can enjoy a buzz with this many people invading  this city, this bar. I put my head up and curl against a pillar to stay out of the way as the other two get pints. I watch the first half of a football game on an overhead TV, and the sound barrier rips open whenever Ireland scores a goal.

A girl from a group project materializes in front of me with the warmest smile you’ve ever seen. Her arms are bent just so, as if to hug me, but I’m not quite sure if that’s her intention so I don’t go for it.

She’s with a couple friends of her own and seems to be having a good time, and I’m genuinely happy for her at this moment. We exchange pleasantries among the chaos, then she heads out with her friends. I savor that moment while my friends finish their drinks.

We try Elsy’s again, and this time we make it in. We find our friends—Norwegian pre-meds named Nina, Eva and Hanne—sitting at a booth near the back of the bar. With them are older men from the Netherlands, double in number, wearing white shirts and sparkle green suspenders. Eva shouts “Aidan!” drunkenly, and one of the Dutch men gives me a fist bump, mouthing my name insistently for about two minutes after, I guess testing the Irishness of it with his tongue.

It’s all smiles and noise for a while. I sit stone sober for about the first hour we’re there. One thing I’ve noticed and is confirmed right before me is that conversation always leads to the use of foreign languages or chatter about home when people are drunk. Most of them are trying to slur different names articulately or guess capital cities. I’m eyeing the Dutch men behind a fake grin to see what they’re about.

They seem a little too comfortable with these women who are half their age, but I figure there’s nothing (I’ll say) wrong  going on, so I lean back and try to enjoy the company.

Eva leans over and tells me that she and the other Norwegians have been drinking since 8:30 that morning and are running on only one meal. I just raise my eyebrow, and this makes her shoot back and laugh toward the ceiling, mouth totally agape. Then she asks me to come visit them in Bergen after they leave in April (they always do this too when they’re drunk), and I say I will, fully intending on it, even if our frequencies aren’t totally aligned right now.

I decide I should try to synchronize and head to the crowded bar, where I order two pints of Guinness. I bring them back to the booth and down them both in about twenty minutes, and this gets me to that sweet spot, where just enough of the material realm slips away and the earth’s rotation slows to the precise speed to allow the mind to let things go. I sit there, listening, jiving in my own little mental corner to whatever song is playing, feeling lighter and good about life. People mysteriously disappear to the bathroom or bar and reappear without warning. When I’m addressed, I speak from a distance.

One of the Dutch men learns from Hanne that I’m American, which causes the man to whip his head around to meet my vacant gaze and fist pump, shouting, “Yeah, Trump!” in a slight upspeak, as if digging for approval. But I cock my head and make a slicing motion in front of my neck, the universal sign for “pump the breaks,” and he just shrugs and turns back around.

A couple of the Dutch men put their jackets on and head out, one of them leaving his full pint of beer on the round table. Yaro asks Victor and me if we want to go to this “life changing” place for some food. We’re both down, so I drink the unmanned beer in two chugs.

Out of the mist appears a quote in clear lettering, something I think Tom Waits once said in an interview: “I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.”

I giggle to myself over this as the three of us stand to head out. When Hanne sees us putting our jackets on, she asks with a distraught look, “Are we never going to see you again?” We assure her that we’ll be back soon, then head out.

This life changing place turns out to be the Bubble Factory, located snugly in a Diagon Alleyesque back street, which is bottle necked with drunkards, their comprehension pissed out of their bladders a long time ago. The Bubble Factory serves ice cream in a gigantic fluffy waffle cone, and what I get—some kind of chocolate/peanut butter concoction—right then and there ruins ice cream for me and probably gives me diabetes.

We get a message from the girls that they’ve moved on to a place called Havana’s, a Cuban food joint, a few blocks west of Elsy’s. We head over there and find some of the Dutch men still with them. Hanne’s missing from the picture, having gone elsewhere with about four other Dutch men. I’m sobering up now. The age gap between the men and the girls is really pressing in and I can’t help but eye the men suspiciously from the bar, where Yaro, Victor and I drink tap water. I can’t help but be on edge, no matter how warm or charming the men seem.

There’s a young man in a black SUPREME t-shirt walking around the restaurant with a kettle drum, serenating the female patrons by tapping the dream off beat to the muzak. One of the men’s hands is over Nina’s. A vaguely Bruce Springsteen-sounding song plays from the end of the bar, and I internalize the fact that I’m frozen in place, staring at the wall, overtaken by a deep sadness for things lost and the implications at play.

The men are showing the girls family photos, but then regress to showing naked party pictures of themselves with Santa caps hung over their genitals, which the girls laugh hysterically to.

I’m desperate for an out, as now I sense everyone’s humanity depleting with the light outside. It’s a city under the influence, where nobody’s entirely themselves anymore, making it impossible to place myself firmly within context of the night. My outlook is bleak, and I just want everyone safe. I think Yaro sees the concern in my gaze and pats me on the shoulder knowingly. This makes me half-grin, helping me come back to a first-person perspective of the world.

We don’t stay at Havana’s for very long, and when we leave, the Dutch men part ways to some other bar while Yaro heads for a bus back to campus for some sleep. We decide to go look for Hanne. Mr. SUPREME exits the restaurant and gives us all hugs, then goes back inside.

Hanne messages us that she’s back at Elsy’s, but the overabundance of misspellings suggests she’s too far gone, which makes me a bit anxious. We head back to Elsy’s where outside a voice calls my name, but when I look around, nobody addresses me or meets my gaze. Hanne messages that she’s outside, but she’s nowhere to be seen.

Well shit, I think, we’re just a bunch of drunken twenty-somethings, lost and with money to spend, and this sucks the color out for a while. I just try to focus on the objective: find Hanne.

The other girls are growing impatient and decide to find some friends that are in the area and meet back with us later. This annoys me a little bit, but I say that’s fine, and then they’re gone. Now it’s just Victor and me. We scour the nearby streets and alleyways as one might drag a river for about half an hour, all the while the temperature keeps dropping to brutal lows. I have to take refuge in a fried chicken place a couple times just to warm my hands.

There’s a suffocating urgency now, and seeing no luck outside Elsy’s, I bend over backwards for the bouncer (if you can call him that) to let us in. We find her in the all-the-way-back room with one of the Dutch, who has the knotted beard and man bun commonly shared by crusty drifters often found in vacant parking lots, smoking hash.

I try to suppress my anxiety as we wait for Hanne to finish her drink as “Bizarre Love Triangle” plays at full blast. Victor messages me that the man seems weird, and I share my agreement without even making eye contact with him. Hanne knocks back the last of her drink, then we head out, I again push the unaware drunkards out of the way and leave the Dutch man behind.

The 40-minute walk toward Hanne’s apartment is brutal. Nobody talks, as we’re using all our energy to fight back the violent winds and the snow that’s coming down in flurries. The streets empty out as we head farther west, moving into the suburbs, where no one walks and windows glow comfortably and the long roads stretch into darkness, implicating eternal sleep, a relapse into pre-birth, coming full circle around the life-and-death cycle. It’s a storybook image.

My God. The world is sleeping, and it’s a beautiful thing.

We reach Hanne’s apartment complex and say good night to her as she heads through the heavy metal gate toward slumber. We then turn toward Victor’s place and push ourselves against the wind. I need to follow the river to return home, but I don’t know what direction it’s in, so Victor selflessly leads the way past his place and down some streets until the river comes into view. We shake hands, say our good nights, and head off.

Now I’m running. I run straight home.

Past the late-night stragglers. Past the shivering sleeping bags. Past the empty double decker buses. Past the shivering sleeping bags curled under bank fronts. Past a Robert Plant lookalike trying to hail a cab. Past the same old blocks and a digital sign that reads “Buckle up, Please slow down” and old women pleading for cops to find their missing children. And past a graffitied heart with “Good vibes” scrawled inside it. I’m desperate for warmth, desperate for sleep.

And I get them. It’s 2:00 in the morning and I fall into bed. I welcome the darkness, and the last thing I see is the orange glow of the street lamp outside my window going out like a candle flame.