Taking the Dive
Recently, after nearly forty years of business, the nearby Social Club Tavern has closed for good. There’s a special sadness when the wild things in life die.
Still, it’s strange to feel sentimentality for something that was one hell of a long way from sentimental during its existence. The Social Club was rough and tumble. I saw some guy punch the window out of the front door after a fight with his girlfriend. A piece of plywood replaced the window for about a year. I usually like to glance through the window of a bar to get a feel for the situation. Since the Social didn’t have any other windows except the one on the front door, entering blind was a roll of the dice. Only hell knew who or what waited inside.
My dear friend Janelle (not her real name, but close enough) got me kicked out for a month on a karaoke night sometime in the 90’s. Jan gets a tad mouthy after her fifth drink. Until then she is fun and tells stories about the Old Days, but after five screwdrivers she begins to snarl.
“I didn’t call you a whore, stupid, I said your daughter’s one.” I have told Jan that the quotation should be on her tombstone. Because it’s what she said to a woman at the next table for a reason I have never been able to fully grasp, other than Jan was past her limit. It began an old fashioned bar brawl that spilled out onto the street. I was still sober enough to be a peacemaker, but the bartender told me to stay away for a month and Jan for life.
You can never take that sort of thing too seriously. I was back the next night and forever rolled around the following Friday with Jan at the bar, the sixth screwdriver in front of her, that look gathering in her eyes.
Time moves along, and change is constant. Yet there are times when the loss makes no sense. Times when you have to ask why must time take everything? Still, I can trace the end back to 2005 when the do-gooders passed a law prohibiting smoking inside all businesses. The do-gooders are the same people who allow eighteen-year-olds an opportunity to die in overseas wars but do not consider the same eighteen year olds mature enough to decide if they want to have a beer or a cigarette. It’s the same old shit that’s been going on since and before the era of the three-cornered hat.
I like irregular looking things, like cigarette burn marks on bar tops; the extremely lived in faces of the people you never see anywhere else but in a tavern. Women whose voices are similar to late-stage Lucille Ball and old barflies who forget to put in their dentures and still try to tell you a joke anyway. And the smell. A mixture of B.O., beer, smoke and various colognes that the stores do not place behind glass. And matches, there’s something about a struck match I love–which is why I never use a lighter. I also fondly recall rolling dice against the bartender for control of the jukebox on rainy Tuesday nights when we were the only ones in the place.
Thirty years ago there were fifteen little taverns within a six block radius of the waterfront in my hometown, today there are two. And they are taverns only in the technical sense–“sports bars”–which, for me, are strip mall taverns and not real bars. You cannot trust a place that has more baristas than bartenders. It disturbs the natural disorder of things.
I was fine with the new world destroying the old world, as long as they left my little refuges from reality be. But the do-gooders must take everything. Gentrification. The do-gooders want a world in which everyone’s a sober, non-smoking winner (except the occasional eighteen-year-old soldier), astonishingly dull, and one in which the Ghost of John Wayne is damned to tuck his junk between his thighs and dance in a mirror like Buffalo Bill. Now that the do-gooders have sent my last dive of refuge under, I am out and I will continue to have plenty of observations to make about their beige, yoga ball shaped asses as I drink alone in the night.
It’s not my object to be nasty to the current generations, it just comes out that way. Like times gone by, I’m invisible now and when the man with the Siamese Cat on his shoulder beckons me, I call him an old whore.
No writer should go gentle into that good last call…
Another Week that Was
This week was brought to you by writers who have done good, but not in the cynical fashion. Subjects range from an interstellar Amphibian looking for a good time, a horrid conflict of principles, the general free range craziness in our world that occurs when we meet new people, the greatest sadness a parent can bear and proof that humanity is for all and not a chosen few.
Long time site friend Doug Hawley opened the week with Brave (not nude or new) Newt World. Dough has a wonderfully cock-eyed point of view. He is able to bring forward the silliest of premises with humour and wit. I can only hope that Newt doesn’t hook up with the Giant Gila Monster.
Otto Alexander hit on a brilliant idea, Tuesday. Clean Hands shows what can happen to a mind sworn to healing, yet must act in the opposite manner. Brilliantly done. One of those things I wish I had thought of–lying right there for all to see forever.
Wednesday Mark Russ took us to a train platform where his interesting MC examines The Doppler Effect in both the analytical and human sense. Like all the works this week, this too works on different levels and demands the reader’s full attention. And I had to wonder if it was a happy end or simply the interruption of the inevitable.
Eggshells by Amy Rains is the perfect title for this delicate and moving piece of work. This kind of story is attempted often because the subject is affecting. But it is seldom done as well as it was here. The juxtaposition between the infant in the ICU and the wildly healthy child at home is striking.
Anne Marie Potter closed the week with Beards. Although I’m hard on the human race (myself included), this work does show the best in a person–the determination to live with some dignity no matter the situation. If we believed all the cruel stuff others say about us, hardly anyone would leave the cage.
There they are, please give each one a hearty congratulations, for all deserve such.
I do not believe much explanation is necessary here–for they are appropriate ways to celebrate a new holiday of my own invention. Mostly, I shake my cloven hoof at the following:
Cloven Hoof Shaking Day
- People who play their music so loud in cars you can’t hear your own radio
- Parents who insist on bringing their young spawn to decidedly adult places, like work, for instance (I can only pretend to enjoy the company of a small child for so long)
- Clerks who conduct conversations with someone else while waiting on you. (I no longer put up with that.)
- Nickels that now too closely resemble quarters
- People who refer to their Dogs as daughter or son (please stop insulting the poor critters)
- Craft beer bartenders who look at you as though you are uneducated for ordering a domestic lager
- People who actually believe it when large corporations tell them that they are all about justice, equality, kindness and compassion. The same corporations whose CEO’s should stand as war criminals for taking advantage of the pandemic to triple prices.
- Pumpkin spice. I still insist the stuff is mind control powder
- Poop supplanting Feces as the scientific word for shit
- Rant away, old chum
Leila
literally stories 
Thanks for the mention of the Giant Gila Monster. I regret that crappy old monster / sci fi movies are harder to find. Used to was there was an abundance on Amazon’s Prime video and Comet TV. Now, not so much. Sigh.
Here in the ‘burbs where I reside we had two pubs within two blocks close enough to crawl home pre-pandemic, but now zero. Second sigh.
I agree with most of your rants (editor will tell you I’m a ranter too), but I don’t mind pumpkin spice, my main objection is that it is too weak. Pumpkin pie – yum. I want craft beer (Terminator Stout, Black Butte Porter – the inspiration for “Dark”), but I would go for $1 bud night if I could find one.
Kitzhaber (named because he would be a crappy gobernator too – obscure local reference – they do it, so I can too) the cat would not like to thought of as a “furbaby).
Keep on rocking, ranting, reading, riting, rolling in the free (?) world.
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Good morning and thank you, Doug
I truly enjoyed the SF and monster movies of the fifties. I especially recall the giant lizard ones that were usually Iguanas with extra long horns glued to their heads and such. I imagine that animal groups would fight that now. But they always appeared to be having a good time.
Thanks again!
Leila
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Leila – I am sorry for your loss. Pubs in UK are disappearing at an alarming rate, doesn’t seem too bad herein France but then they are not pubs they are bars of various denominations and as such don’t have the same atmos. As for hoof shaking day I have to include people who post pictures of children covered in food and think it’s cute. Actually add to that children covered in food. Teach the little ahem ‘persons’ to eat cleanly.
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Hello and thank you, Diane
Ugh, little Timmy and Suzie covered in oatmeal. Why anyone finds that endearing is beyond me.
Leila
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We all get attached to places and the memories they hold. Your post captures this well. I’m not sure how you come up with so many great lines (such as “Women whose voices are similar to late-stage Lucille Ball”) but if you can ever bottle it, ship me a six-pack. As for the list … I’m not a wine connoisseur, but know enough to stomp my cloven hoof when the waitress at our favorite dive bar asks us if we want ice cubes in our glass. Or maybe that’s what helps make it a dive bar.
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Hi David
Ah, a glass with ice in it. You travel in a classier level than I
Thank you as always
Leila
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Hi Leila,
You have really instigated some memories and regretful decisions by those who were there and now, through no choice of theirs aren’t there anymore.
Life went to shit when bars let in kids to eat the food that they were more interested in selling than the booze.
Some ‘Mens Pubs’ (Aye fucking sue me you woke wanks for seemingly being sexist – It’s just what we called certain pubs!!!) did have the odd pot of lentil soup bubbling away on a hotplate just next to the bog for some of the regulars who needed to water down their alcohol / blood ratio. This was a free service to put some lumps in their nightly vomit!
All of your hoof shakes I agree with. Although I can’t say anything about the spice as I have never tasted it. (Now on my to do list!) And for obvious reasons, the coin issue isn’t relevant.
I would add –
People who think that they are irreplaceable at work and believe that the hierarchy value them. (In other words, the naive piss me off – Oh do you know that Evian is naive backwards – Paying for water is as just as paying for air!)
–
Fussy eaters – The bastards have never been hungry!
I despise rudeness to waiting staff.
Your answer to Doug reminds me of ‘Scrooged’ when Bill Murray wanted paper antlers to be stapled onto hamsters.
I agree with Diane and that would make me add those who tell us about their fucking ‘Regan’s’ projectile vomiting and even worse, the hysterical poo (their fucking word not mine, wrap it up all you want shit is shit!) in the bath – Oh how they laugh and how I want to beat them over the head with their shit machine. (Again, sensitives fuck off, I’m being ironic!!! Maybe I should state that I am not advocating… Nope can’t finish that, if you are so stupid to think anything else, just – Fuck off!)
Dave’s ice comment is interesting, I have the opposite problem, I don’t take ice in my drink and always need to be quick in saying or there is a half glass of lumpy water ready to dilute the alcohol.
Brilliant as always and thanks so much for stepping in!
Hugh
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Hello Hugh
Yes, I remember bars that would have hot dogs sitting in pot of hot water when, as you say, the blood alcohol level was a bit wrong. Some kind of chili looking stuff too. I don’t know if the UK had those jars of pickled eggs and weird bloated sausages in fluid. In forty plus years of sitting on a bar stool I have yet to see anyone eat either.
Hope your computer woes are better and/or your liquor cabinet is full.
Leila
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I wish to fuck I had money, cause if I did, this bastard would have been tommahawked (Spelling – Fuck knows how to get it with this!!) and then blow-torched. I thought I had the highlighting sussed, but then it decides to ignore what I was originally doing, probably due to the cunting idea of a fucking pad that you need to finger! I also can’t work out how to drag a heading – Spent about an hour and a bottle of Malt on that. It was that bad, the whisky didn’t even touch on calming me!
I love more and more the idea that Elvis shot televisions when something was on that annoyed him – I could do that…Oh and my toaster is also being a tit – I mean four sections and every one gives you a different colour of toast – I think it is related to this fucking computer.
I need to get a wireless mouse cause mister high and mighty laptop baws doesn’t accept a cable one.
But what the fuck, that probably won’t help!
…Smoke signals , the Original Americans had the right idea! (Hah! Don’t mean to be argumentative but I have always reckoned that ‘Native’. was a bit wrong and contrived and possibly named by others. I am Scottish but would never consider myself as Native Scottish, I have always been here so I don’t need an adjective!!
…Smoke signals -So smokey and there is fire involved – I like fire!!
Hugh
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Aborigine? Here in the USA some argue “Indians” are immigrants from Asia and palefaces are just later immigrants. Then there’s the colonist vs. winner of the war vs. just evil story. I’m tired as usual, but I’ve got my love to keep me warm and a lot of heavy clothes.
One could explain that too much power leads to evil an I wouldn’t object – Aryans to India, British and French to the world, Russians to surrounding people, Mongols, Arabs, Romans, Persians to much of the world. Whatever your opinion, it is a playbook that goes back thousands of years as has environmental devastation.
I know, nobody asked.
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I feel for you, Hugh
I’d open a new bottle. I bought a fancy toaster about a year ago. I am convinced that the damn thing hates me. Bagels get stuck even though it is special made for them. I extend my sympathy and wish you better luck!
Leila
Leils
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Excellent weekly round up as always! Craft beer bartenders are today’s version of the 1970s HiFi salemen.
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Thank you, Paul
You appear to be very busy today!
Leila
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Finally finding some time to catch up after a couple of hectic weeks in the real world!
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