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."