Brewski’s

This bar sucks. It’s a sad little dive bar that could have so much soul. There are a few great, gnarled old men in the front, cheap shitty beer, and throngs of pretentious pseudo-punk, quasi-artsy, hipster asses littering the place. Everybody under 35 in the bar works in advertising, and consequently has no character, soul, warm blood, or content whatsoever. They don’t eat or shit. They don’t even really even need air. There are more hot, horny, glittery-tank-top-wearing Public Relations girls than you can count, and a bunch of snappy-looking, well-dressed, presumably well-paid, fit guys who desperately want to look intelligent, refined, and sensitive, but also strong and tough, all at once. That’s a lot of bases to cover. Good luck with that. I suppose that’s the most effective way to bed a lot of PR chicks. Neither my wife nor I have much tolerance for these types, attractive as they might be. We’re just here to hang out with my friend Dana. A friend of hers, to whom I have just been introduced, begins trying to pick up on my wife right beside me. He shakes my hand, and darts off with a smile once he realizes she’s not having it. I’ve got at least lean 50 pounds on him. I just don’t understand that. Do I look that nice? Motorhead’s “(Don’t Let ‘Em) Grind Ya Down” finally comes on the jukebox. I think I picked that one an hour ago. Every time I come here I promise myself that I’ll never come here again. I was ready to leave, and now I’ve got to wait for my song to finish.

Drug Bust at the Office

There was a drug bust across the street from my office. It was great. It happened ten minutes before the end of the day, right when everybody was about to clear out. Mine was just one of about two dozen faces pressed against the window, watching. Of course I got there a few moments too late to see anything cool happen. Some unmarked cop cars had just pulled over a navy blue, late '90s Lexus on Penn Avenue. It was as big as a boat, with tinted windows and giant chromed rims like convex satellite dishes. Apparently, I missed the part where the cops arrested the guy, confiscating his gun and two bricks of something. All sorts of plainclothes officers were milling about, taking pictures and looking around, in the trunk, under the hood, in the seats. Eventually we all lost interest and left. I didn’t see the guy, but I empathized with him. He had brought it upon himself--all choices have consequences--but getting busted like that has got to be shitty. All of our interest, watching through the relative safety of the glass, seemed very self-righteous to me. We love to watch the bad guy, the man who lives without the same moral yoke that we’ve all taken up ourselves, get taken down a few pegs. We like to watch with our pseudo-moralistic, self-righteous, slave morality…from behind glass. It feels good to see the wolf castrated and kept behind the door. It seems to validate and confirm our virtue and the correctness of the decisions which we’ve made. Doubtless, he’s probably not a very nice guy, but I’m not convinced that we are either.

Slow Going

This night has been slow going. It’s been one empty, disappointing bar after another. As if eventually we’re going to find one that’s got all of our friends inside. As if all our friends don’t live in different corners of the country now. Like bars are lottery tickets, and increasing the number that you accumulate somehow increases your chance of winning something. Like there’s something to win at all. We even stopped to eat dinner to postpone our inevitable surrender and return trip home. We called some friends who still live in Pittsburgh, the ones who haven’t moved away yet. Not much luck. The Girl From Moscow is out tonight, though. She’ll be making her way down to the Moose with some friends. That’s encouraging. It still doesn’t mean that we’ll see her. It means that we might. She’s unpredictable. We’ll sit tight and wait. We’ve got nothing else going on. We shoot pool, badly. This bartender knows what my wife and I drink. He’s great. He sees us approach, and grabs the appropriate bottles, and we all smile and laugh, and we tip well, and we drink. And the Girl From Moscow arrives with Richelle and Jon, and we’re pleasantly surprised. She looks beautiful. We’re not surprised that she looks beautiful, but that she arrived, and I don’t know why she’s always wearing so many clothes, and she gives us each a big hug and a kiss on the cheek. They order drinks, and we continue working on ours. Somebody’s terrible selections are playing on the jukebox. We all talk and have a good time. Everybody is cool, and everything I’ve drunk is beginning to catch up to me, and I’m buzzing, and it seems like the purpose of everything I endured during the week was to lead me to this moment, and it seems like it might have been worth it. And I manage not to say anything stupid the whole time. I'm proud. That’s quite an accomplishment for me. They stay for about an hour, and then they head off to a club. They ask if we would like to come along, but we don't. It’s not really our kind of place. We’re not really club people. I look stupid in leather pants. They take off for the club. We wait a while to straighten up. Then we walk out the front door, into the drizzle, and go.

Cheerios Painted Black

She put her cigarette out in the palm of his hand, because he requested it. How absurd is that? I don’t think I would have honored that request. It seems like a lot of confusion and misdirected behavior. Of course they were both very gothy. Of course there was shitty industrial music pounding. Of course there were candles everywhere. Of course there were more clove cigarettes than you could count. Of course it was a room full of white people, painted even whiter than they naturally were. I think he was just scared to approach her any other way. So he had to wear fucked-upness and psycho-intensity like a suit of armor. It was a way to avoid swallowing his pride, putting his heart on his sleeve, and talking to her like a human. I think she was just playing along. It was relatively innocent, though she should have known better. The goth thing is hilarious to me. It’s for confused people who want so badly to be more evil and fucked up than the next. It seems like a frivolous pissing contest of sorts, just silly. Most of them are about as evil as a bowl of cheerios. They’re just a bowl of cheerios painted black. Asking a girl to put out her cigarette in your palm doesn’t make you intense or evil. I’m not sure what it makes you, but that’s not it.

Merging

You’re supposed to use both lanes clear up to the merge point. Most people don’t. Most people pile into the left lane, sit, and endure the wait. I generally ride the right lane all the way up to the merge point and rely on somebody else’s good nature to let me over. It easily saves me 20 minutes of commute time every day, and renews my faith in humanity to boot. I don’t think this makes me an asshole. Anybody else could do the same thing. Everybody gets to choose. Sometimes, arbitrarily and for no apparent reason, everybody uses both lanes equally, and it really slows me down. This happened today. As one street dumped into another, the Honda in front of me got into the left lane. I got into the right. We sat. We moved. We advanced alternately towards the merge point. It took a long time. When we reached the merge point, I ended up right back in line behind the same Honda.