Franzia-mosas. Now that is a Sunday morning cocktail after a morning full of praising our good Lord. It’s definitely not helping this not-so-booming economy, but it sure makes for a nice break from the bible beating endured at First Baptist or any other narrow-minded cubicle for cookie-cutter college kids and residents. That’s a total lie. I don’t do churches in the town of Oxford. It’s a social scene for politics and a good facade after binge drinking on the weekend. It’s an excuse to go to bed at night because you successfully fell asleep in a pew for an hour on a lovely Sunday morning.
Alcohol is a problem. So is parking on the square. So what, they’re two totally different problems on the spectrum of life in Oxford, but let’s be honest, they’re both a pain in the ass. Our heroic ‘religious leader,’ Eric Hankins, pastor at the First Baptist Church of Oxford, thinks Oxford needs a break from drinking for the week. It just so happens Sunday is that day, that one epic day of the week where we can’t indulge in funneling booze and shooting cheap liquor because we’re too broke to buy the good shit. I’d win an award for being the best liar. You know these fratty, sratty kids aren’t buying Taaka or Evan Williams Black Label. These rich kids buy Crown and Goose. The smart ones buy cheap.
What’s even more comical is that these eighteen-year-old alcoholics use their school scholarship money or loan money from the government to buy such royalties. Isn’t it funny the funding we use to better improve education at Ole Miss is also used to hike up DUI numbers and MIPs? Get it Jones, we are totally on the right track to the think tank…I mean drunk tank.
As Brandon Neimeyer wrote in The Local Voice, Oxford’s best locally independent newspaper, there are locals who work and live here that this situation should also be directed toward. No, I don’t want a special card confirming I have graduated and now work and live in the same town so I deserve to buy a bottle of wine on Sunday. I do, however, work in the food industry.
I work in an industry that walks on thin ice through summer when the rich kids abandon ship. The industry that booms during football season, regardless of the disaster of a team we call the Rebels, and is funded by high reservations made for sorority and fraternity formals. We’re also greatly funded by the result of Ole Miss baseball. Wait, that’s a lie. Instead, last baseball season some genius decided to schedule home games, Thursday through Saturday, between six and seven p.m. I loved feeding the masses of oxygen in our restaurant when all the patrons were getting wastey-face in the baseball stadium.
Alcohol might not bust us out of the never-ending economic trouble this town seems to stay in, but taking away business on weekends is definitely is not helping.
Needless to say, I don’t get weekends off. Neither do other people who live and work in this town. Sunday is my day to drink and delve into devilish debauchery. How delicious does drinking a bloody mary out of a bell pepper garnished with pickled okra or green beans sound? It would be after church, that I more than likely didn’t attend, of course.
It’s my Sunday Funday too, and I say a small prayer for those good folk sitting in pews while I’m sipping on my brew in my boxers, wafting the dust off my bible.
