Wednesday, October 6, 2010

Regulars No More

Have you ever lost something and not realized how much you depended on it until it was gone?  A giant empty hole in your soul appears and no amount of late night video games, classy southern bourbon, or re-runs of Cheaters can fill the void?  We all have our routines, our niches that we inevitably fall into in our day to day lives.  We're humans, that's what we do.  We find patterns that make us feel comfortable.  Our niche was a bar, a pub to be precise.  For nearly three solid years, the question of 'What are we doing tonight?' was usually answered with, 'The Pub.'  It started off as just another place in town to drink a couple down on the way to somewhere else to do the exact same thing, but as we frequented the joint, it became more than a boozy pit-stop.  Within less than a month, we went from being nameless customers to near 'Norm!' status.  It became our Cheers, our Moe's Tavern, our Paddy's Pub, and we could pretty much do whatever we wanted.  We were safe there and 99.9% of the time, the owner's fought hard to make sure we felt that.  And all was well in the universe...except for global climate change and politicians...everything else was well. I guess not cancer...  When tiny cracks appear in a flawless facade, sometimes you fail to notice.  You're used to it being flawless and it's the furthest thing from your mind that something could be wrong.  But under the surface, factors beyond our control were tearing apart the one haven we had, the only one we'd nurtured over a three year span and now that it's gone, closed with little hope of returning, it's painfully apparent how much we relied on it being there to suit our drunken needs.  

There were some people that didn't rely on it as much as we did.  People had issues with it, it's understandable.  People have their own opinions, their own preferences and it sure as hell isn't my place to tell them they're wrong.  But it wasn't the people who just didn't like it that bothered me, it was the people that outright despised it, and either assumed I felt the same way, or worse, knew that I was a regular and still decided to let me know their insecure feelings about it.  It takes a certain kind of asshole to tell you to your face that something you like is insignificant, or terrible, or stupid.  And I'm not talking about differing opinions here.  I'm talking about the kind of person that walks up to you while you're wearing say, a Led Zeppelin shirt, glances at your shirt, and then sticks their nose up in the air and says, "You know that Led Zeppelin band is a real sack o' shit."  And as you stare at them, dumbfounded, they gurgle through a list of reasons that they most likely read on Let'sHateEverythingThat'sPopular.com (or in Rolling Stone, but that would be the opposite since they like everything in that brown nosing publication).  They're like Patrick Bateman regurgitating what the newest in-complaint is, word for word from the message boards right before they axe you in the forehead.  It's those stellar blobs of humankind that really get to me because of how forced it seems for them to spew hate when their casual, and truthful, opinion would work ten times better.

It's easy for me to sit up here on this rather tall horse of mine and act like I'm some kind of keyboard saint but...nope, no buts, it is pretty easy.  'Cause I went there, and drank there, and kept going back there because that's where we could go and have a good time.  And the people that apparently couldn't just sit back and have a good time and felt like it was too dead, or too expensive, or too uptight, well maybe that wasn't your joint.  Maybe you shouldn't have bitched about it when you weren't there and then kept going back week in and week out and spending money there, which suggests you did actually enjoy it.  Maybe you should have stopped going if you were so adamant about it.  Maybe you could have found a less classy, cheaper, hole-in-the-wall dive bar that sells rusty cans of Schlitz for a nickel where you could find more of your fellow hill people.  Hell, maybe then you could have found a woman who actually viewed your veiled innuendo as dashing.  Probably not...even hill people have standards when it comes to their siblings.  In the end, nobody forced anyone to go there and nobody forced anyone to stay and nobody forced anybody to stage one of the most ill-conceived boycotts in history, although a lot of us did appreciate the humor in it all.  


So now, we wind on down the road, like the end of an Incredible Hulk episode, searching for that next Mecca of booze, billiards, polite conversation, and the same goddamn karaoke song week after week.  One day we'll find our destiny, our place in the night, and we'll sit there, sipping our Gin Rickeys, and our children who we irresponsibly brought out with us will say, "Daddy, tell us about the Pub."  And we'll all chuckle and light our cigars with our hundred dollar bills and say, "Heroes drank there once, long ago."  And they'll be like, "Who?"  And we'll say, "Go to your room." 

Sunday, October 3, 2010

In the Beginning...There Was Blog

Ha!  The title sounds like someone was talking and then threw up at the end of the sentence.  Blooggggggg.  Gross.

There's a certain feeling I get when starting one of these things and I can feel that feeling rising up now.  I feel like I have to be poetic, bust out my thesaurus (I swear many more people secretly use one than I ever thought even knew what the hell a thesaurus was, it's crazy the way people think people talk) and use classy vocab words I would never say, and write with a structure of the Power Writing days of fifth grade.  The simple fact is I write like I speak and those lucky few that know me know that I am no linguist.  And I mean, a blog?  Really?  Get outta here!  No, wait, don't get outta here.  Stay here and read, cause that's why you've been drawn like a moth to the moon to a blog site, rite?  I mean right?  And what better activity for a bored, south-sub-suburbanite, nerd-since-birth to do with his time than to type up every little emotion and thought that runs through that gray mass the eggheads have named a 'brain?'  Actually, I can think of about a zillion things, but if I'm stuck here, than so are you.  I've got some stuff to say, none of it very relevant, a lot of it crass.  I mean, I started it with half a Bible quote and then made a joke about vomit.  It's uphill from here, right?  I hope to not offend on purpose unless purpose is made, but I probably will offend and sometimes with a purpose and in those times most definitely on it.  That's usually why I write these puppies to began with, these word vomits with an end game, because something offended me or made me think.  And usually when I get offended by something I make an effort to think and understand why and putting it down on eee-lectronic paper is a soothing bit of therapy.  

But I could always write my feelers down on The Facebook (in theaters now), yes?  Facebook feels too high school year book to me, not the kind of place for the serious thoughts and opinions that a reputable blog on a random site on the internet is made for...especially this blog of mine.  Nobody wants drama with their long lost high school chums, they want to write in their end of school year book every day.  Instead of 'Have a good trip, See you next Fall!' we write 'Hey there's your face in a small cube next to tinier cubes with all those other people you know!  I'll glance at it again tomorrow!'  Spoonfuls of sugar and sunshine it is, or that's what I think it's supposed to be.  And I'm not knocking Facebook, I think it's a great tool to stay in touch and for people to tell us when they're eating dinner or using the can, I just don't think it should be a soapbox for grievances, although it's too often used as such and sometimes with a baffling attempt at anonymity.  'Hey I hate you, you know who you are!'  And now, so does the Northern Hemisphere...thanks.

Now a random internet blog penned by one of the six billion folks on Earth and read by even fewer, that's my kinda soapbox.  And I kinda like to write, so what better than to catch the loose shit spilling out of my brain on a daily basis and throw it down in cyberspace?  But I do tend to rant.  If you've gotten this far, you figured that out.  I do tend to tangent...don't think that's the right usage there...but I'll give it my best to stay on the track.  And I gotta try not to make this a 'listen to me bitch' blog or a 'look how goddamn cool I am' blog or a 'I deserve to be heard, shout from the rooftops, loudest is right, Glenn Beck' blog.  Although I do go on a tear (really English language?  Tear?  Tear?  Unoriginal swine) once in a great while, I promise to attempt to try to make an effort not to bitch...too much.  But we do live in a world where if someone bitches loud enough and long enough, some poor sap will give in and give them everything they want.  So, I guess if that's the case, we'll just have to see...