Recently I went to a bar in Bend, Oregon. I had never been to a bar in Bend before. I looked over a drink list of some of the local beers in the area before asking the bartender to get me a pint of whatever his favorite was. He served me some dark brew and I settled into my Bend bar experience. I took a sip and then thought the same thing that I always think after ordering whatever the bartender´s favorite beer is, ¨Not bad. I would´t order it again. But it´s not bad.¨ I then took advantage of watching muted sports highlights in a town that I´ve never watched muted sports highlights in before. It used to excite me to go to bars in cities that I´ve never been. Not so much anymore. If it was up to me, I´d have that one bar that I went to, and that was it. But going to the same bar twice is nothing more than a fantasy of mine. That´s fine. With the exception of a small minority, all bars are pretty much the same anyway. They all have the same beers, the same types of vodka, the same bar games. They are just all arranged in a slightly different manner than the other.

IRISH Bars

All irish bars have that green tint with wood and brass over the entire interior. Nostalgic Guinness signs mixed with zingers towards people who don´t drink Jameson line the walls in between pictures of Ireland that were probably purchased from some Irish bar start up kit. If you order a Guinness, a shit head stranger sitting at the bar will start talking your ear off about how Guinness is actually supposed to be poured. He´s usualy wearing some douche bag hat, like the kind an old man would wear fifty years ago. He´s usually by himself. There are two types of people in this world; those who purposely go to an Irish bar, and those who wind up at an Irish bar. If you wind up at an Irish bar, your probably a descent human being. Conversely; if you´re someone who earlier in the day said, ¨Let´s go to an Irish bar tonight,¨ then you´re the reason I don´t like going to Irish bars. If another patron at an Irish bar asks you if you´ve ever been to Ireland, that´s their way of telling you that they´ve been to Ireland and that you´re about to spend the next three U2 songs hearing about it.

Sports Bars

Every Sports bar has a stench that is a combination of old miller light, stale french fries, and shattered dreams of athletic achievement lived vicariously through one of seventy seven televisions scattered all over the establishment. The size of the t.v.´s range from tiny plasmas located over the urinal, all the way to jumbo screens as big as the void in the regular´s lives that they are trying to fill with sports. The inside is wallpapered with any type of sports memorabilia from banners to jerseys. They are the same banners and jerseys any typical sports fan possesses with the exception that these have frames. Photographs consist of a local sports celeb posing next to some random dude that nobody knows wearing a Hawaiian shirt. Autographs consist of people that the average person has never heard of. If it is someone famous, the legitimacy is often in question. For instance; the glass case that holds an old football that looks more like an half deflated basketball with shoestrings glued to it signed by Secretariat. Forget any variety in your drink selection. Your choices are beer, beer in a bottle, and beer bottles in a bucket. Your waitress is either the girl who asks how you´re doing nine times before you´ve even sat down. Or the girl you see once and that´s about it for the rest of the night. Once you give up on her ever coming back, you go to the bar to find some cheese ball bartender who either looks like or actually is Styles from Teen Wolf. He also takes his sweet time cause he´s to busy talking to another waitress at the cherries and olives area of the bar that you´re not allowed to go to. ( It´s the part of the bar where instead of a bar stool there are two swimming pool rails like someone is getting out of the deep end.) When he eventually turns around it´s either to fix the pen behind his ear or it´s his turn on the mega touch machine. You see that the girl he´s talking to is your waitress that never came back. She gives you a look like she knows from somewhere but can´t put her finger on where. Above the bar is a huge banner that proudly states that wings are obnoxiously cheap on some day that is never the day that you are there. Most important of any sports bar, the Golden Tee machine. Three to four guys spinning a ball, slapping their hands against a screen. Every once in a while is a loud screen because some guy was ¨to aggressive¨ and hurt himself on the machine. He´s the guys who yells, ¨You Bum!!¨ at the seventy seven t.v.´s every five minutes and brings up on a daily basis how he would be in the majors if he didn´t tear his ACL in high school. Tomorrow ACL boy will have to explain to his coworkers at Mailboxes Etc. how he didn´t just hurt himself playing golf, he hurt himself playing video game golf.

The Dive

Every dive is filled with the most important aspect of the dive; the people who don´t think it´s a dive. Every song on the juke box starts out with a hollar, a fiddle (the poor drunk man´s violin) or a gunshot. It´s the best juke box in town. No specials. Don´t even ask. There´s probably not a door to the bathroom or a seat on the toilet, let alone specials. Your choices to drink are beer in a can and some lableless bottle of whiskey. Half of the regulars are asleep on the bar. The other half work at the bar. Sometimes you can´t order a drink until the bartender´s turn on the lopsided pool table is over. Mismatched chairs. Mismatched tables. Mismatched faces. There is nothing in the establishment that doesn´t have a sign of the attempted carving of initials or misspelled profanity. The kitchen consists of a microwave and a chip rack. If it´s a really good dive there will be a dog running around that doesn´t seem to belong to anyone. The dive is the type of bar that when you ask the bartender how they are doing they reply, ¨I.D.s¨ The bartender could be any number of people, but 9 out of 10 times it´s an old lady who thinks a poorly angled black and white television adds to the atmosphere. Behind the bar there´s always something weird, like decorated plates you would buy at a small town gas station. Or dolls. After looking at each I.D., intensely, for a good minute each as if it was the most bizarre thing they´ve ever seen, the bartender reluctantly asks what everyone wants with a disappointed tone that says, ¨This place will never run out of business if you all keep spending money here.¨

The Club

From the minute one enters the club, all conversations are held at the volume level of conversations held inside a helicopter landing at a jack hammer convention. It´s pitch black with the exception of purple and aqua blue lights on the outskirts of the bar area. That´s how you can tell how cool a club is. The more purple and aqua blue lights and things made out of metal, the bigger the headset on the big bald guy in the black t-shirt carding people behind the unnecessary velvet rope at the door. The same guy who puts needless blue paper wristbands on everyone as if he´s tagging Canadian geese migrating south for warmer climate and stickier floors. The ten dollar cover will ensure that your watered down, over iced drinks are served in the flimsiest of Solo plastic cups. Specials consist of a bottle of Budweiser for six dollars, or a vodka tonic that was the recipient of a wrongly dropped roofie. The main party area has a light show that´s the equivalent to if someone ate a police car, the mall store Spencer´s, and every piece of entertainment technology from the 1970´s, and puked them up from the ceiling to the dance floor continuously till three in the morning. ¨Music¨ consists of a twelve track rotation of hip hop sprinkled in with ambulance sirens, strung together by a d.j. who mixes and samples together songs that by themselves were already the result of other songs being mixed and sampled together. Every guy in the club is trying to get laid. How a guy dances dictates his chances on getting laid. There are those who can´t dance. They won´t get laid. The only reason they´re at the club is because they couldn´t find that Irish bar they wanted to go to. There are those who can dance. They got a shot at getting laid if their spikey hair and unbuttoned shiny shirt have anything to say about it. Then there are those who dance, as it they´re getting laid at that moment.This is the guy who thinks everyone´s starring at him because he´s practicly knocking up some girl on the dance floor. When in reality if anyone is looking at him it´s only because they´re trying to figure out what a grown man is doing wearing a shell necklace. The girls dance in big crowd with other girls to make it harder for the guys to the gyrating guys to hit on them. Even though meeting a guy is exactly why the girls came to the bar and why they´ll complain the whole ride home at the end of the night that no guys hit on them. The guys who dance in a big crowd with other guys do it to hit on the other guys dancing in a big crowd with other guys. At the end of the evening, all the lights in this warehouse of a bar go on at the same time, revealing just how ugly the person you´ve been dancing with all night really is. Once the club goers spill out into the street, you´ll find that one in four girls are crying, one in three dudes are ready to fight, one in two girls are calling Kelly a bitch, and one out of every one group of dudes is explaining to the bouncer that the reason the bouncer shouldn´t beat the shit out of their buddy that threw up all over the bartender is because, ¨Dude, it´s not his fault. It´s his birthday.¨

Every bar has the same wall of liqueur with the same smiley bartender or same disinterested bartendress. The same I´m tough but probably a big dork door tender. The same WE CARD HARD sticker on the corner of the same window. The same letter font on the same sign right above the same sidewalk. They have the same back alley with the same brown dumpster. Right next to the same brown dumpster is the same puddle that always looks like the same good place to rest after they kick you out for the same reason; you were so drunk you tried to pee in the urinal while laying down. You wind up passing out in the same position, waking up the same next morning, next to the same homeless guy who´s thinking the same thing,¨ Crap, I woke up next to this same homeless guy again.¨ You use the same newspapers as shelter from the rain and the same cat as a pillow. The same bar manager find you the next day and calls the same police for the same loitering violation. They all have the same reaction when you say that you´re not loitering, and that this alley is your new home. They use the same billy club for the same notion that you aren´t ¨cooperating¨. They all have the same standard procedures that put you in the same holding cell. They give you the same jail sentence and the same fine. And then they have the same picture of you up the next time you go back to that same bar with the same small print under it that says, ¨Don´t let this man in, or let him go to his back alley dumpster home,¨ I would love to go to the same bar twice. In essence I´ve gone to the same bar every time. I´m not allowed to go into the same actual building more than once, but I have little to say in that matter. So until something changes, the only bars I´ll ever be able to go to, are the bars I go to every night, in cities I´ve never been.

15/04/2007
RSS 2.0 / trackback