Ah, Sunday. Day of new beginnings, day of checking in with oneself, day
of laundry and the fat Sunday paper waiting to be disassembled and
dispersed across the bed...I started this one with a long, much needed
hike through
Tennessee Valley down to the beach, where I read
The Sun
Magazine before heading back up. Inspired with all the fresh air and
healthy bodies I met on the trail, I decided to continue the trend by
going overboard, as I am wont to do, and am now frankly feeling a
little sick after eating sesame kale, seaweed salad, and drinking
kombucha from
Whole Foods. But it’s all good.
After a night out trying to have a couple beers with a friend, I am hard pressed, much as I am with Sunday’s
A Prairie Home Companion,
incidentally, to see the appeal that bars on the weekend hold for most people. It
seems I am completely estranged from that culture, and hopelessly stuck
between two generations. I like having a social life which brings me
out of my hovel, but can’t stand the atmosphere once I’m out there.
Crowded places, for one, already make me cranky. But then there are the
inevitable men on the prowl, who often aren’t the sharpest tools in the
shed.
Bar one, an overpriced restaurant jobby with a saloon-type lacquered
bar, presented us with a group of three Brits staring over and
whispering, to the point that I was distracted from my conversation and
glanced over. At this, one of them walked up to us and said in a rough
accent reminiscent of
Eastenders,
“Oy. I’ve just, like, won a bet wif me mates. I said, like, that you
girls was fancying us somethin wicked and would look ovah at us in like
ten seconds.” Irritated, I responded, “Yes, well generally, when people
are staring and whispering, you’ll find it’s human nature to look
over.” “Too right, too right.” he said. He proceeded to ask us what we
were drinking, when what we were clearly drinking was beer, and he
lifted (yes he did) his shirt up to show us his abs, saying he never
drank beer because he didn’t want it to make him fat. So impressed was
I. Are people serious?
So we left there, and went down the street to a dive bar called the
Silver Peso, where an older man asked us if we were there celebrating Spring break. “Like
Girls Gone Wild”,
he actually said, “Woohoo!”. As my friend and I were certainly not
dressed anything like hobags in Daytona Beach, both dressed fairly
conservatively, and we were also clearly engaged in a deep
conversation, I said, “I’m 33. And Spring Break at the Silver Peso?”
“Fine. Just hit the delete button,” he said drunkenly. “There it is.”
He pointed to a knot in the wood on the bar. My friend hit it. “I was
looking for the fuck off button", she said when he’d gone. Luckily, the
bartender at our final destination turned out to be a charming
conversationalist, however, and was wearing a
Righteous Babe
T-shirt, which scores points with me. So there was one
point of light in the sea of yee-haw partyers. I think I’ll stick to
restaurants next time my friends and I want to grab a beer and chat on
the weekend, though. We are too old for this.
I find myself yearning for some kind of old-fashioned social club,
where one can have a drink in big leather chairs, or out on a veranda,
intimately and undisturbed, next to old men playing Pinochle. We have
actual conversations about relevant matters, and everybody is literate
and cultured. A writer friend and I were talking about this recently,
and I said I’d like to reinstate something like the
Algonquin Roundtable, where writers/the literary set can drink and exchange witticisms, but then for our generation. I figure that means the
HoJo or
Ramada Roundtable.
Bring it.
