Google let me know today that it is Alphonse Mucha's 150th birthday.
Saturday, July 24, 2010
Sunday, July 18, 2010
Why I'm Not Going to the Microbrewery Anymore.
Basically, it's because I vomited on myself, the sheets and the comforter at my parents' house. But in the interest of making a more compelling argument, I will go into detail on this particular occurrence and give a few more reasons why I'm not going back, though in all reality, I will.
This decision should be prefaced by the fact that I currently live on the east coast, in an ambiguously located portion of Maryland that is either part of the Baltimore or Washington DC metropolitan areas - I'm not really sure which one it is and I don't think anyone else around here is either. That being said, I'm originally from a small city in Michigan which is full of lots of different types of people, but is dominated by the evangelical religious types. This makes it confusing when you start counting how many bars there are in the city and its outskirts. So the town, like most, has a dive bar. The walls are covered with NASCAR themed beer ad mirrors and the ceilings are lined with shelves displaying 20 years worth of pool team trophies. I rather enjoyed going to the dive bar on weekend mornings or early afternoons and having one or two beers, a mound of fried fish and a few games of pool with my best friend, but those times have passed. Neither of us live there anymore, as a matter of fact, we both somehow crash landed on the East coast, an hour or so apart from each other. Whenever I'm visiting home, my mornings are filled with sleeping, and the obligatory family visits. Also, my wife and I try to make it to as many of our favorite local restaurants as possible. Somehow our little piece of shit town has the best breakfast diner and pseudo-Mexican restaurant in the entire United States, or as much of it as I have experienced so far. So no pool playing for me. At night the hole in the wall bar is filled with violent back-woods assholes and the people from high-school that I never bothered to get to know - and oddly enough, their parents. It's a strange thing about bars in a small town like that - eventually the kids start drinking at the same place as their parents, at the same time as their parents.
Two other bars in town are located in nice restaurants. It's OK to meet there, but for some reason my townie friends are never up for it. There's Applebees, but who the fuck wants to drink there? Apparently lots of people, but not me. I tried it once last winter and I ended up running into the chick that I always loved from my pre-marriage days. Applebees decides where you sit, and they decided to sit us right across the aisle from her and her date. My wife felt awkward, I felt awkward, My friend was oblivious, and the girl's date wouldn't have known what was going on even if I wrote it on my fingers and punched him in the face, which is what I felt like doing, not because I was jealous, but because he seemed like a dick. When she was in the bathroom, the waitress came to his table and asked "how should I split the bill"? Date guy replied "Umm uhhh... I don't know..[silence and indecision]...uhhh, surprise me"? Obviously, elitist me was bothered by this interaction. The places on the outskirts of town are strictly off limits, because my wife and I are strictly non-drunk-driving, or more accurately, strictly non-prison and losing our jobs. I've probably lost a couple of things due to my love of beer, but money and freedom won't join them. At that point, beer would take away everything that makes me American, and that just wouldn't make much sense. All of the downtown bars are within unbelievably fun walking distance from my parents' house, which is where we inevitably stay whenever we're back in town. The last bar in town is the microbrewery/restaurant. The fact that I'm still allowed in this place is astounding to me. Every time I'm there, I'm tricked into drinking high-powered micro-brews and end up insulting a member of the wait/bartending staff. If I don't offend an employee, I offend some dude my wife went to high school with who thinks it's OK to wear an army t-shirt and hug my wife. I don't like the Army dumb-asses and I don't like dudes hugging my wife, especially if in my beer-drunk state of mind, I'm completely convinced that I'm better than them in every way. This happened last time we were there, before I later puked on myself, and I'm lucky I didn't get my ass kicked. I said something to the effect of "Who the fuck is this guy, is he in the Army? his shirt makes it look like he's in the Army, why is he hugging my wife, is he in the Army"? I guess I was way drunker than him which means that despite my confidence, I would surely lose any fight I could manage to accidentally get myself into. Luckily, that didn't happen.
So we met a couple of my oldest friends there that night. When we were back in town the previous winter, my wife and I agreed that we would never go to the brewery again. I woke up with a $70 receipt in my pocket for beer, fucking $70 beer. The beer isn't even that good anymore. The founding brewer was a great one, and an all around entertaining guy. He tested almost all of the beer he brewed, just about every day he was there, and ended up getting fired for getting too fresh with the female staff members. So now the brewer is just some regular guy who names the beers things like "raindancer", whereas the first guy named them things like "snakebite". Obviously the place is going down hill. Another nail in the coffin was when the day's off duty staff members, one of which is my former room-mate and friend, decided to block me at the juke-box, in a move I termed "box-blocking". My friends and I had been playing songs that we enjoyed all night, and paying a premium ($2.00 per song for internet songs) for them too, when this dick decided that because I was associated with his ex-wife, he would forget about any other friendly relationship the two of us had ever had, pretend to not know me, and provide his Chris Farley caricature of a friend with $5.00 to feed the juke-box with popular hits, thereby guaranteeing that no more of our "weird" songs would not be played until the place closed for the night. This move was made by an employee of an establishment that depends on people like me to get drunk and keep on getting drunker thanks in part to my favorite songs being muffled by the din of the conversations of every asshole I went to high-school with. I'm in Michigan for 5 days a year while he practically lives at the bar, and I couldn't listen to another god damned Riverdales song? Never mind the whole defending his freedom thing. I'm waiting for another incident to whip out that old standby.
So there I was... drinking with my wife and friends, the strong microbrews inhibiting my every judgment, ounce by ounce. My friend ordered her mother a gin and tonic, which was politely refused, so my other friend and I lady-and-the-tramped it down with two straws. I ended up getting a $50 bill and rudely asked the waiter (which happened to be the Farley-esque box-blocker from before) to "show me what's goin' on here, itemize this thing for me". My wife told him it was fine and payed the bill.
We then left the establishment. On the walk home, my friend picked up a large, reflective (and blinking) traffic barrel and he and his girlfriend went their seperate ways, blinking off into the twilight. I started talking about vomiting. My cigarettes started to make me gag, and I started to feel a general misery that I only ever feel after drinking muddy beer from the brewery. For some reason I kept myself from puking, though upon later analysis, I decided that doing it on the playground of my old elementary school would have been the perfect capstone to a night out on the ol' town, and completely preferable to throwing up on the bed later. But that's exactly what happened. My wife was pissed that I was pissed about the brewery, and I was piss-drunk...accidentally. At that point, I threw-up. My wife asked, "are you ok, do you need help"? I answered "I just want you to leave me alone". I ran the bedding down to the basement and stuck it in the washer, but was notified by my mother in the morning that it didn't work, which was pretty embarrassing. The bar made me poor, embarrassed and sick. I know it sounds a little weird that I'm blaming everything on the bar, after-all, It was me that kept on ordering beers, and who didn't stop, but I am completely convinced that If I was at any other bar in town that I would have gone home and slept soundly and without consequence. It is with profound and complete confidence that I declare, here and now, that I am no longer going to the brewery, but If I do, It will be a year from now and as usual, I will have forgotten valuable lessons from the past.
This decision should be prefaced by the fact that I currently live on the east coast, in an ambiguously located portion of Maryland that is either part of the Baltimore or Washington DC metropolitan areas - I'm not really sure which one it is and I don't think anyone else around here is either. That being said, I'm originally from a small city in Michigan which is full of lots of different types of people, but is dominated by the evangelical religious types. This makes it confusing when you start counting how many bars there are in the city and its outskirts. So the town, like most, has a dive bar. The walls are covered with NASCAR themed beer ad mirrors and the ceilings are lined with shelves displaying 20 years worth of pool team trophies. I rather enjoyed going to the dive bar on weekend mornings or early afternoons and having one or two beers, a mound of fried fish and a few games of pool with my best friend, but those times have passed. Neither of us live there anymore, as a matter of fact, we both somehow crash landed on the East coast, an hour or so apart from each other. Whenever I'm visiting home, my mornings are filled with sleeping, and the obligatory family visits. Also, my wife and I try to make it to as many of our favorite local restaurants as possible. Somehow our little piece of shit town has the best breakfast diner and pseudo-Mexican restaurant in the entire United States, or as much of it as I have experienced so far. So no pool playing for me. At night the hole in the wall bar is filled with violent back-woods assholes and the people from high-school that I never bothered to get to know - and oddly enough, their parents. It's a strange thing about bars in a small town like that - eventually the kids start drinking at the same place as their parents, at the same time as their parents.
Two other bars in town are located in nice restaurants. It's OK to meet there, but for some reason my townie friends are never up for it. There's Applebees, but who the fuck wants to drink there? Apparently lots of people, but not me. I tried it once last winter and I ended up running into the chick that I always loved from my pre-marriage days. Applebees decides where you sit, and they decided to sit us right across the aisle from her and her date. My wife felt awkward, I felt awkward, My friend was oblivious, and the girl's date wouldn't have known what was going on even if I wrote it on my fingers and punched him in the face, which is what I felt like doing, not because I was jealous, but because he seemed like a dick. When she was in the bathroom, the waitress came to his table and asked "how should I split the bill"? Date guy replied "Umm uhhh... I don't know..[silence and indecision]...uhhh, surprise me"? Obviously, elitist me was bothered by this interaction. The places on the outskirts of town are strictly off limits, because my wife and I are strictly non-drunk-driving, or more accurately, strictly non-prison and losing our jobs. I've probably lost a couple of things due to my love of beer, but money and freedom won't join them. At that point, beer would take away everything that makes me American, and that just wouldn't make much sense. All of the downtown bars are within unbelievably fun walking distance from my parents' house, which is where we inevitably stay whenever we're back in town. The last bar in town is the microbrewery/restaurant. The fact that I'm still allowed in this place is astounding to me. Every time I'm there, I'm tricked into drinking high-powered micro-brews and end up insulting a member of the wait/bartending staff. If I don't offend an employee, I offend some dude my wife went to high school with who thinks it's OK to wear an army t-shirt and hug my wife. I don't like the Army dumb-asses and I don't like dudes hugging my wife, especially if in my beer-drunk state of mind, I'm completely convinced that I'm better than them in every way. This happened last time we were there, before I later puked on myself, and I'm lucky I didn't get my ass kicked. I said something to the effect of "Who the fuck is this guy, is he in the Army? his shirt makes it look like he's in the Army, why is he hugging my wife, is he in the Army"? I guess I was way drunker than him which means that despite my confidence, I would surely lose any fight I could manage to accidentally get myself into. Luckily, that didn't happen.
So we met a couple of my oldest friends there that night. When we were back in town the previous winter, my wife and I agreed that we would never go to the brewery again. I woke up with a $70 receipt in my pocket for beer, fucking $70 beer. The beer isn't even that good anymore. The founding brewer was a great one, and an all around entertaining guy. He tested almost all of the beer he brewed, just about every day he was there, and ended up getting fired for getting too fresh with the female staff members. So now the brewer is just some regular guy who names the beers things like "raindancer", whereas the first guy named them things like "snakebite". Obviously the place is going down hill. Another nail in the coffin was when the day's off duty staff members, one of which is my former room-mate and friend, decided to block me at the juke-box, in a move I termed "box-blocking". My friends and I had been playing songs that we enjoyed all night, and paying a premium ($2.00 per song for internet songs) for them too, when this dick decided that because I was associated with his ex-wife, he would forget about any other friendly relationship the two of us had ever had, pretend to not know me, and provide his Chris Farley caricature of a friend with $5.00 to feed the juke-box with popular hits, thereby guaranteeing that no more of our "weird" songs would not be played until the place closed for the night. This move was made by an employee of an establishment that depends on people like me to get drunk and keep on getting drunker thanks in part to my favorite songs being muffled by the din of the conversations of every asshole I went to high-school with. I'm in Michigan for 5 days a year while he practically lives at the bar, and I couldn't listen to another god damned Riverdales song? Never mind the whole defending his freedom thing. I'm waiting for another incident to whip out that old standby.
So there I was... drinking with my wife and friends, the strong microbrews inhibiting my every judgment, ounce by ounce. My friend ordered her mother a gin and tonic, which was politely refused, so my other friend and I lady-and-the-tramped it down with two straws. I ended up getting a $50 bill and rudely asked the waiter (which happened to be the Farley-esque box-blocker from before) to "show me what's goin' on here, itemize this thing for me". My wife told him it was fine and payed the bill.
We then left the establishment. On the walk home, my friend picked up a large, reflective (and blinking) traffic barrel and he and his girlfriend went their seperate ways, blinking off into the twilight. I started talking about vomiting. My cigarettes started to make me gag, and I started to feel a general misery that I only ever feel after drinking muddy beer from the brewery. For some reason I kept myself from puking, though upon later analysis, I decided that doing it on the playground of my old elementary school would have been the perfect capstone to a night out on the ol' town, and completely preferable to throwing up on the bed later. But that's exactly what happened. My wife was pissed that I was pissed about the brewery, and I was piss-drunk...accidentally. At that point, I threw-up. My wife asked, "are you ok, do you need help"? I answered "I just want you to leave me alone". I ran the bedding down to the basement and stuck it in the washer, but was notified by my mother in the morning that it didn't work, which was pretty embarrassing. The bar made me poor, embarrassed and sick. I know it sounds a little weird that I'm blaming everything on the bar, after-all, It was me that kept on ordering beers, and who didn't stop, but I am completely convinced that If I was at any other bar in town that I would have gone home and slept soundly and without consequence. It is with profound and complete confidence that I declare, here and now, that I am no longer going to the brewery, but If I do, It will be a year from now and as usual, I will have forgotten valuable lessons from the past.
Friday, July 2, 2010
OMAGOD
From Pitchfork
This video by The Books is funny but also a little creepy, which I imagine is just what they were going for. Let me just say that I've had 5.5 Molson Canadians at this point so my opinion may be a little skewed. This stuff reminds me of the visual collages that were a part of children's TV programming back when I was a kid (minus the threats of violence and the gender confusion). It may just be because there are so many kids with 80's/90's haircuts, but the editing style still seems familiar. At any rate, this is what I envision children's programming to be like in another ten years. After-all, each generation of kids seems to be a little more fucked up than the last.
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