Gimme a Beat!

Ramblings Post #198
I don't go out anymore. I got out of the habit going to school at night, and now I've gotten comfortable sitting home at night watching TV and playing video games. You would at least think I would be reading or something productive, working on one of my projects. But no. Anyway, the truth is this house is kinda empty, and the city is teeming with life. So here we go. Again.

Atlanta, despite reports to the contrary, consists of more than Waffle Houses, strip malls, chicken joints, circular highways and gentleman's clubs. There is a bit of arty crowd here, with the High Museum, a symphony, a branch of the Savannah College of Art and Design and that eclectic little district known as Little Five Points. And once a year, the good folks at Jack Daniel's sponsor a show called Art, Beats and Lyrics. And no, I didn't go just for the free Jack Daniels.

They held it at The Compound this year, one of the ATL's hotter clubs, which has undergone a major renovation since the last time I graced their doors. Originally it was three installations with a open air garden in front, now the first buildings have been combined and they've added a lot more couches and polish to the whole thing. It was rather impressive. Like out of a music video impressive.

Art Beats and Lyrics is the kind of show I would have to had dragged Sporty too, but once she got there she would have been like 'cool'. I've been a few times, met a few artists - some of whom's art now adorns my walls - and had a very good time. It's a combination Art show, mini-concert and party. There are little attractions, like the light graffiti wall you can "paint on" and a visualizer of some kind I didn't want to get into to do something(?), and this interactive thing hooked up to an XBOX Kinect. Spaced throughout the venue are the art installations, some adorned with price tags (didn't see the artists this time though) from up and comers with proper art names like Kaz, Hebru Brantley, Doubleyoo, Dres13, and A Squid Called Sebastian.

Oh, and free Jack Daniels.

Here are a few shots from show. I like how it all wasn't one style, but an good mix.

In the end though, I got "Ritz crackered".

This is a reference to the old Eddie Murphy joke where he compares not having sex long period of time to not eating for a long period of time, to the point where if someone gave you cracker, that same cracker would be delicious, possibly the best tasting cracker ever. Maybe even a Ritz cracker.

Now, because I had not been going out as of late...to pretty much anywhere except a friends house or two...I forgotten something very important about this city. I believe author Dan Jenkins put it best, in saying "That if in Atlanta on a Friday night you can't meet a woman you'd leave your wife for, then you didn't leave the house." What that boils down to is that there are some very attractive women in Atlanta. But in my many years of going out, I had developed a more refined taste. I needed more than just a cute face, I needed personality, intelligence, a sense of purpose, etc. A whole woman (.i.e., Sporty). But at ABL, it was like I hadn't eaten in months.  And then someone put a whole sleeve of Ritz crackers in front of me. Have I been out of the game that long?

In the end, good night out. True, I was home by 10:30pm...on a Friday...in Atlanta. But baby steps man, baby steps!

Side note: The show goes through DC on November 16th.

So was a good night out. I realized I'm little too old to be doing this regular. I got other priorities , other things I need to focus on. Shole was fun though. Maybe I'll just dabble a bit.

Barkeep. Yes, I will be have the Jack and coke. No, not in the cool pre-mixed bottles, but in a glass. Age has it's privileges.

Bar Chatter

Bar Chatter #3
When it's not enough to make a post, but deserves to go out to the world... it's just Bar Chatter.



Joining Armageddon on the list of films I practically know by heart but will watch again and again and again: Smokey and the Bandit. But why do they only show it at like midnight? And I did not realize that Sally Field's ass was that nice.

Life in the time of Plasma

Personal Rehab Post #3
After my stumble, we get back on the path to "faking it till I make it." Today I joked around with the girl who visits my desk all the damn time ....we'll call her...hmmmm... Swerve... and put the weekend and it's disappointments behind me. The journey of thousand miles. Man I hope I make it.


I was a broke college student. I don't mean the pansy broke that means you're cutting back on food quality, I mean the kind of broke where you're cutting back on food. There were times when dinner cost me $2 or less, as I would stop at the Spur gas station at the bottom of the hill leaving campus and get a bargin basement pint of juice for fifty cents and a dollar's worth of 'tater logs - potato wedges fried in chicken grease (about 6 or 8 depending on how they felt). Occasionally I would spring the extra quarter and get a Little Debbie snack to treat myself.

Thank god my neighbors cable signal bled through the wall so I had a decent number of channels.

But occasionally there would be a need for a boost, a proverbial (and literal) shot in the arm, a few extra dollars. And that, friends and neighbors, is when you would donate plasma.

I don't see plasma donor spots around anymore, so maybe the laws are different in Georgia. I used to like them because in 40 mins to an hour you could have a fast $20 in your pocket and as an added bonus you got free blood screenings. As long as they would let you donate you knew you were good healthwise. It was like being paid to make a doctor visit, so like groovy.

And that $20 to a college student was a fortune. Or it least it was when gas was a $1 a gallon. A few dollars in the tank, a four dollar six pack and two fifty wing special? Sheeit.

The other bonus was that donating plasma made drinking much more effective. I'm not going to lie, I had worked up a pretty high tolerance while matriculating. One night a friend & I polished off a bottle of 151 proof rum with no chaser like we were drinking soda. It was only after we were done did we then decide we probably should have cut it with something. However, after donating plasma...three beers might leave you to the sleep of babies, drunks and well hung men.

But then I sleep that way all the time. *Rimshot*

Combine the sudden low threshold with the beer barn special where they would fill a gallon jug of cold delicious hops and barley water for $3, young and less than discriminating women and cheap food...well let's just say sometimes you donated plasma to get the party started.

Good times, good times.

Barkeep. What you got back there from 1990?

Not Drinking...The Rules.

I've been reading back through my own posts...smelling my own shit as it were... and I realize now that a blog about life stories, witty bon mots, philosophy and drinking where the author is temporarily (and it's only temporary for real) not drinking has turned this into a series in which I am apparently wallowing in perceived personal failure. Oh woe is me, boo hoo hoo. One might ask as I lay my cards out on the table, why not just speak to her. But there is no need for two to be miserable...or in an even a worse possibility, at the end of that talk there still only be one of us not feeling good. That would be very bad.

I would say I need a drink to clear my head, but in reality I need to drink to blur my vision. I am amazingly self aware and self conscious.

I used to drink a lot. A whole whole lot.

One morning drinking in the shower I realized that I might have an issue. Okay, this story starts when I was still in college, where pizza is a breakfast food and prices a usually quoted in six pack denominations of your favorite inebriant, but I recognized that maybe waking up and having a drink might indicate a growing dependency. Or that I needed to keep juice in the mini-fridge. Either way, I decided what I needed were some rules. Fairly basic rules.

The first rule was "No drinking before noon."

This was easily doable, or so I thought. It wasn't too long before I was on vacation...okay, I was still in college, we were on a "road trip", which to the uninitiated is like a vacation but costs way way way less, sometimes as little as $25 round trip if you can find a dollar menu and drink whatever is offered...but anyway, I was on "vacation" and realized that since I wasn't doing anything why not have a drink. Well it was only 10am...er 9:30ish, so I had a problem.

So the first rule was amended to read "No drinking before noon, unless you're on vacation."

Which worked out pretty smooth. Until I attended one of those "All University Study Sessions", er, bring your own cup, which allow students of diverse backgrounds, majors and relative flexible morality to associate in the time honored tradition of educational institutions everywhere. Sometimes we'd break off and "study" in a more private setting with other like minded students, or wander out and end up "studying" with like minded coeds if we were lucky.

So final adjustment read "No drinking before noon, unless you're on vacation OR it is a continuation of the night before."

Now, as your average college male with roommates, drinking implements were kept at the apartment at all times, and thus after a grueling three or four hour day of classes and hanging out talking about classes, it had become habit to wander into my abode and help myself to a nice cold one. My apartment was also reminiscent of Grand Central Station, three people paid rent, only god knew how many slept there. But still I would occasionally find the spot empty and still get that beer. Which felt creepy. And by the time the inevitable other people showed up and you were already tipsy...and by yourself...it looked even worse.

So the second rule became "No drinking alone."

In my humble opinion, I now view drinking alone for guy as kinda pathetic. For a woman it's okay, don't ask me why it just is. A young lady at home sipping on Cosmos or Martini's watching Sex and the City or chatting on the phone with a girlfriend seems saucy and sexy. A man drinking by himself at home indicates he had no friends and may have a drinkie drink problem. Maybe one drink is okay if you've had a hard day at work, but if that's the case James Bond and Jason Bourne better be your office buddies, cause your day better have pretty damned hard. Saving the world, blowing up shit kinda hard. Or raising a kid, same thing. It's a gender thing. And yes, in a pinch, the bartender counts.

That settled I thought about it and I realized that drinking has never been the way to solve a problem. Any problem. Unless the problem was that you were sober, in which case drinking would in fact be the only fix...and this has happened a number of times so I'm not crazy, but in the grand scheme of things, the reality is drinking doesn't fix anything. Except the aforementioned being sober. It especially does not help feeling sad, which is when you're mostly likely in want of drink. And if you've ever been a sad drunk...well...I'm a fairly talkative, er, ...inbrientee and ones I do remember...ouch.

And so the third rule is "No drinking when depressed."

If you thought you were unhappy before, trust me there is a whole lot you've repressed that you can be much more sad about after five or ten drinks. And with luck everybody else will be too drunk to remember any of this, but that's now how it works. Somebody will remember. There will will pictures. Your peoples will never let you live it down. Now I've found that I'm a horrible sad drunk. And as a sad drunk is sad sad person indeed, well, you kinda see where this is going. So that's like a double rule with cheese.

The fourth rule is "Drink because you WANT to drink, not because of peer pressure."

Why is it the day you're not drinking, everybody is buying? Or that's the one day they pouring top shelf at half price because the manager is feeling good for the first time in 15 years? Or your friends are drinking so you figure how much harm can one do? Looking back I didn't want to drink anyway and it sure would have been cool if the officer had at least one sober person to reassure him that we weren't all gonna die of alcohol poisoning. Why drink on a Tuesday when you know you've got that big meeting on Wednesday at eight am? Trust me, not a good idea. I wouldn't do it. Again.

I came up one last rule, primarily because more than five is hard to remember - which makes you wonder which of the Ten commandments you're breaking now, don't it?

The last rule is "if you don't know what's in it, don't drink it."

This is much more an operational rule than the others, most of which come into play as you're considering that first drink and not four or five drinks in. It's a handy rule to have, and probably would have saved me and Chuck that night we accidentally drank that rubbing alcohol...which doesn't burn as much going down as one would think - this being after we had already pre-burned them earlier that evening. This rule is one you should pass on to Bungee Drinkers...those folks who want to "try" that new drink at the club. I do all my drink experimenting at home, so I can tell the barkeep what to put in the glass. In the bar is not the place to discover that tequila thinks you're great dancer, or that gin thinks you're a great comedian. Trust me, gin is lying.

So those are the rules. I've lived by them since 310 Westwood (a way way inside joke) and with luck someone else can use them. And if I'm really lucky...this chapter of my life will be a scant few pages that get stuck together when I read back through years from now.

Barkeep...Grape Koolaid please.

A Drink Sabbatical

Every year for the past few years, on January 1st I stop drinking for a while. A while being a varying period of time usually lasting from January to April or May. This is not like a drinker's normally stopping drinking, i.e, I stopped drinking for the night when I switched from hard liquor to beer, cause beer is like soda, no, this is a complete stoppage of the imbibing of all fermented, aged, distilled and or mixed together in a bucket beverages until such time as it's spring. And oddly my nickname is Bartender. Go figure.

A few years ago I had an accident on New Years Day, around 2am. I woke up January 1 in the hospital. I woke up January 2nd in the Intensive Care Unit. My understanding is that I just missed dying. Just.

Shade (a new addition to dis blog) drove two hours and snuck into the hospital to visit me. She drove two hours, stayed I guess and hour and then drove two hours back. But that's a whole different story.

You might think this prompted my getting out, doing more, but in reality it made me think harder about slowing down a bit, about taking the time to stop gallivanting in the streets and see what else was out there. I was already out and about five nights a week, jeez! Maybe this is all a dream and I'm still lying in that bed in ICU. And if that's the case I need a pillow.

Not tipping for four or five months is probably as close to empty as I can get, but I'll usually have one drink during my dry months at some point, but only one...usually at the behest of a beautiful woman. Sporty and I went to La Grotta during this period once, so we split a bottle of wine. At a party this chick I had always liked in brought her own ingredients to make me a pomegranate martini, so I had one. But other than that, no beer, no wine, no drink of any kind. Not even rum cake.

You would not believe the difference a drink makes.

Sometimes it's psychological. One drink hardly has any effect at all, but the idea of one drink is powerful. At a party or social event I feel more comfortable with a drink in my hand, sometimes even if the glass has been empty for a hour. It makes me more social, more talkative. It's like a license to be a little off.

Sometimes alcohol really does make you ten feet tall and bulletproof. It's why I got a phone number or two, I can't lie. It's why I've walked into a party house at I'd never been to like I owned it, not knowing a soul, and meeting some fantastic folks. I mean, they didn't throw me out, how bad could they be?

And I'm more observant stone sober, less forgiving. I'm more apt to leave a boring function early, whereas a drink or two might have encouraged me to wait it out (and some of the most interesting things happen after a good wait).

One of my partners just celebrated 2 years off the sauce, not that he had a problem, he just decided to quit. I'm not sure if I could ever do that. Everything in moderation, including moderation. Usually he and I hang out a lot more during this time.

So how long this time? Don't know. So how many more times? Don't know that either. But it's all gravy baby...and I got the gig.

Barkeep, red koolaid. What do you mean Cherry or Tropical Punch? I said RED koolaid!

Back in Stride again...

Man am I glad it's Monday. Straight from a four day parley and getting back to work is refreshing.

Thursday night - Vino Libro in East Side Village & Leopard Lounge.

Vino is a wine/tapas bar that looks so damn comfy. The chairs are low and the drinks are strong. Leopard was well, Leopard on an Thursday. Wall to wall and damn fun.

Friday night - Chivas Studio & Strip.
Chivas Regal gave away free drinks, with live music and gourmet food. And nobody came. If they had fifty people in there I would have been surprised. But the drinks were strong plus. Strip is done by the way...they almost had more security than patrons.

Saturday night - House party
Ten minutes from calling it a night, a got a call with directions and walked in on a phat party down off Campbellton Road. The bartender had on red hot pants and fishnets, they had trays of food left, and a stripper pole in the basement.

Sunday afternoon - House accident
It wasn't planned, but over at my partner's spot we ended up getting a little foolish. The Cowboys won, the folks got a little raucous and fun was had by all. Except ole girl who swore her booty was 39, until we broke out the tape measure.

It was that kinda night.

Barkeep - Water. I've been drinking for four days.

Bye Buckhead

July 2007 ends an era, as the last of the Atlanta bars in that adult playground that had become part of the city's identity closes it doors and the "Developers" take over. The city's former sin district - Buckhead Village - is no more. By September the razing of the empty buildings will begin and at the end of 2008, the homogonized and professionally bland will have completed sucking part of the soul out of our fair city.

When I first moved to Atlanta in 1998, I moved to Buckhead. It was vibrant and full of life, Friday nights the streets packed with people roughly my own age drinking and flirting and wandering the streets. True, few of them looked like me as I was black and they were other, but found place after place that let me wander in and spend my money freely. Drinks at the World Bar were $2. All of 'em. On Sunday night's Otto's looked like something out of music video. The Havana Club had a live Latin Band that jazzed up the place. The Backroom at CJ's Landing. The place simply known as Bar. Goldfinger's with the continous Bond films on loop in the basement. The rooftop decks and back alley stages and that little guy in the cart that sold $3 hambugers and $2 sodas at 3am and made a killing.

I had regular forays on Fridays at the now razed to the ground club Liquid Assets, a club that on a given Friday night would 1) let you in free 2) give away free drinks until 10pm and 3) serve a free breakfast buffet at midnight. Many an evening found me a friends with 20 or more to be drunk drinks on the table easing through another warm Georgia night. When I was "between postions" me and similar situationed friend spent many an afternoon after interviews in the Buck ensconsed in a little wine bar before we wandered down to Fellini's to finish off.

At it's height, the Village had over 100 businesses with liquor licences in less than a 4 block radius. I think I went into all of them.

Then things went downhill. The popular consensus was that the infamous incident involving Ray Lewis' friends started the downfall, but it began before that. And as much as I hate to admit it, we finally finished it off. And when I say we, I mean we as in the black people. At least the young black people.

Now we didn't start the problem, the area had always had issues - DUI, rape, assault. It was nothing to see five or six folks hauled off everynight. But one of the cool things about Buckhead in the late 90's was that everybody there, could get into everyplace there. However when "we" showed up, you would have thought the party was in the street. Underage patrons abounded and as far back as 2004 I stopped hanging in the Buck simply because of this. I still hit Mike & Angelos from time to time, but the Friday nights were a no-no.

Older brothers had been hanging out in Buckhead off and on for years. But the younger, wilder crowds eventually followed seemed to believe that sitting on the corner was preferable to actually going in anywhere. Provided they could get in. And their reluctance to leave an area once they realized they couldn't get in scared off patrons who might actually spend money. And so the clubs went away.

I hate to say it, but it's the truth. The change of club hours by the city in a blatantly obvious ploy to build up their own dying venue - the underground - was merely the final straw.

You can blame a certain degree of racism, but that's simply the world we live in. This not to say that all black people or gatherings do this, but once the standard is lowered, the downfall is inevitable. Even among black events. Freaknik. First Friday. We as a social group have a tendency to crowd and then overstay our welcome. And though the places we patronize respect our dollar - which is just as green as the next man - they're in it for the long haul, and we are a fickle bunch. See Shout, Twist, Dave and Busters, and so on. We come, party hard and disappear after having run off their other customers, and wonder why we get strange looks.

So bye Buckhead. Sorry about that. But we still have Midtown. For now. At least until Trump gets here.

Barkeep...gimme and old gin and tonic. For an old friend.