# 9 – 33 Wine Bar, Lafayette Square (12/13/08ish)

I should really try harder to do these sooner, and then maybe I could keep the dates straight.

The OG is my old employer, back before I’d made the big move to the big city. Out visiting Mom, aka doing laundry fo’ free, and decided to stop by afterwards and see if anyone I knew still worked there. A few did, many did not. It was not as wistful a visit as I expected, but I guess I temporarily forgot it was the fucking Olive Garden.

33 Wine bar is always fantastic. Good wine, of course, but they have a fantastic beer selection. My sister texted me to join her and Bill, her husband, for a drink and I gave a very non-committal answer back, as I was feeling pretty non-committal at the time. But I showed up anyway and got to have a couple of IPAs with a kind of local culinary All-Star team. My sister and brother-in-law are very friendly with a lot of local chefs and other food professionals and thus were hanging with a couple of them that night. Here’s to a couple future drunken hang-outs with chefs, hopefully leading to future hook-ups when dining out.

For a handful of years in the earlier part of this decade, there was an annual tradition shared with my circle of friends. It was always scheduled for the night before Thanksgiving. I’d be lying if I said I could remember every reason we chose this specific date. I actually don’t think I had anything to do with it. It’s weird; I have no specific memory of when it began. Just one year, it simply was. I think there were some friends and acquaintances with birthdays near the end of November. And it was a night when nearly everyone we knew was guaranteed to be off work the next day, so it was an evenind perfect for drunkeness and debauchery. We called it D-Day, and I’m pretty sure that name was strictly for dramatic effect. The D stood for nothing that I am aware of. For a couple of peak years, D-Day would begin at dinner time at some local eating establishment – say Fast Eddie’s – and then move to a bar. Other bars would follow and eventually we would end up at a strip club, and then another, and likely another. We’d get home at 5am and spend the next day fighting hangovers while eating turkey with our respective families.

Then we grew up. Most of us got steady girlfriends and jobs we were a little less careless about. Plus, let’s face it, you just don’t bounce back from a night of excessive drinking and blue balls at 30 like you did at 22. So D-Day peaked, then slowly died after a couple of half-hearted attempts. Gone with a whimper.

This year I was working on Thanksgiving eve. During the evening, I got a text message from Tre’s fiancee Pam, requesting my presence at a bar in Soulard later that night. After a long, slow, very low paying night I met up with my girlfriend and we headed over to the 1860′s Saloon.

It was loud. We were next to a table of 40-50 year old men in khakis and blue shirts, drinking beer and getting really into the blues band that was playing. And we couldn’t afford to drink much. But it’s so rare that any of my oldest friends and I get together anymore, I couldn’t help but have a good time. Still, there were a lot of things about that night that left me fighting a creeping feeling of melancholy. Tre is getting married, it looks as though I am getting married. It was announced that Desiree, a friend with whom I have a very rocky intimate and personal history, will be moving to Chicago in a few months. And even though I thought I knew, I asked Pam what we were celebrating that particular evening. Sure enough, Tre had asked her to put something together in the tradition of years past.

At first I was disappointed by that answer. This was nothing like D-Day! Not that staying up all night drinking and getting sweaty tits mashed in your face is necessarily a romantic notion. I guess it just was another reminder of how our youth has finally passed us all by.

Then I woke the fuck up. I haven’t been to a strip club in a few years and am not really eager to go back to one. Maybe if I was ballin’ and could make it rain like Pacman Jones, maybe then I’d go back. But when you’re just a regular guy with a low-paying job and a girlfriend and an aversion to sexual fristration, it seems like an incredible waste of time and money. Not to mention how much more I cherish the times I have with my friends now. We grew up together, and all of those semi-wild hijinks helped lay the foundation, but I feel such a strong sense of comraderie with my friends now. I’m fucking proud of us, all of us still being as tight as we are, everyone making it through all our own little personal trials to get where we are today.

So perhaps that is the spirit of the new D-Day. We should probably come up with a new nickname for it though.

Oh blog. How I’ve neglected you!

I am obviously behind schedule, but life calls. Between maybe getting another job and preparing to move and planning the rest of my life and working and being addicted to really embarrassing shit on Facebook, I just haven’t had the time. But I have not given up on this spiritual quest. I’m just going to have to spend a month or two drunk at some point is all.

Nevertheless, I did somehow miss a bar I visited three weeks ago. On Halloween I went to Blueberry Hill to meet friends, making it really like number 3 or 4, but we’ll just say it’s number 6.

So I’m getting off work and it’s been a slow night for obvious reasons. Who wants to eat Italian small plates when you can go to parties and bars and celebrate National Dress Like A Whore Day? (I had an early preview at Bar Italia, which you can skim over a couple of posts back.) I sent out some exploratory text messages to the usual suspects, trying to see if anything was afoot. There was a contingent of people at Blueberry Hill and it looked as though I would be able to arrive there around 11:30. This is on a Friday night, remember.

There are times in my life when I question the choices I have made. I look at the people who I know and love and I see how they have a nice car, or medical coverage, and I spend an evening wondering whether or not I should try to go back to school or take some other road to a normal, 9-to-5, Monday-thru-Friday existence.

Then there are nights when park in the loop at 11:45 and recieve a text as I am stepping out of the car that everyone is going home because they are tired. These are all people aged roughly 28-to-32 years, which is not particularly old. None of them have children. They just were tired and went home on a Friday night during a usually fun holiday with no reason to get up early the next day. So yeah, thanks for giving me a reason to reassess those late night yearnings for responsibility and order.

Mr. “3 Ounces Of Responsibilty” was supposed to meet up with me as well, but he also bailed. His reasons for bailing were related to getting laid, and therefore no grudge can be held.

Anyhoo, I did manage to convince my good friend Kevin to ditch the early birds and return to Joe Edwards’ establishment. We talked politics, and when the Hill closed we relocated to the ever dependable Mangia and bumped into Monsieurs Sean and John and talked more politics. The night ended up being far from a total loss.

We’ll see what time I can get out of work tomorrow night. I need money, but I might need drinking and loud music more.

#4 – Mia Rosa, The Grove

#5 – Dog Prairie Tavern, St. Paul, MO

I should have just written about these 3 bars sooner and then I wouldn’t have to tax my stupid brain. I think Bar Italia was on Monday, 10/27. Mia Rosa was last Friday or Saturday night, 11/1 or 11/2, and the Dog Prairie Tavern was earlier this week, on Sunday the 2nd.

Bar Italia ended up on the list because that is where Meredith’s restaurant was holding their Halloween party. I dressed up as the kind of person who would never want to voluntarily attend a party at Bar Italia. Actually, although I am sure I will return there before this year is up, I could live quite comfortably without ever really visiting the Central West End. I don’t make enough money, I don’t have pricey enough clothing, I don’t go tanning, and I am not ambiguous about my sexuality. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. That part of town just isn’t my scene. There was a time in my life when I would try to blend in to those kinds of surroundings; but the blend was really never successful and the music they play in those places sucks anyway. (I was in Mangia on a random night last week and they were playing album cuts from Outkast’s ATLiens. The last time I had been to the CWE was to go to a club named Mandarin where the music was 20 seconds of a Notorious BIG song, poorly faded into 20 seconds of some awful radio bullshit, poorly blended into 20 seconds of an unintentionally hilarious dance remix of Aerosmith. But I digress…)

There’s one thing that is both wonderful and not about Halloween and that is that many (most?) girls use it as an excuse to dress like a tramp. No matter what the costume is, it’s the sexy version of the costume. I’m not just a nurse, I’m a naughty nurse. I’m not just an alligator, I’m a sexy alligator. At this party, there was a sexy mariachi/cantina/Mexican girl, a sexy police lady, a sexy Harry Potter student, sexy military personnell, and at least 17 sexy cats.

Anyway, I mostly stayed out of the way. Then I had to take a phone call and spent 45 minutes in a quieter room off the dance floor area.

Mia Rosa could be considered a cop out, I suppose, since I work there and all. But I actually rarely drink there. On busy nights, we are entitled to a shift drink and I was known to stick around a month ago or so. But honestly, our beer selection sucks and I’m usually eager to get home and do nothing or meet up with friends and a far more entertaining venue. Last weekend, though, after a rough night and waiting for my ride, I did sit at the bar and sip a skunky beer. It was fine. Come visit the place sometime, jerks!

The Dog Prairie Tavern almost qualifies as a road trip bar. St. Paul, Missouri is a tiny community nestled between the most rural outskirts of O’Fallon and the middle of fucking nowhere. My sister, my mother, my brother, his wife, their son and I were there to attend a benefit for the family of my step-uncle, who had recently passed away from lung cancer. I was semi-close to the family in my childhood and adolescence, but had seen them perhaps twice in the last ten years. So it was a sad occasion, but only vaguely so. I saw and spoke to a few people I hadn’t for many years, saw a couple more who I wish I still hadn’t seen, and got to hang out with my family, so it was ok. I did my job as uncle, whipping my toddler nephew into a frenzy just in time for his parents to have to restrain him in the car for what I am sure was a long ride home. I talked to a girl whose boobs I touched when we were both around thirteen. And despite the fact that we were in a place where Bud Light surged through the bloodstream of anyone who ever set foot inside the doors, I managed to find a couple of O’Fallon Wheat beers hiding in the deepest regions of the cooler.

So I needed to visit an average of 8 bars a month and I managed only five in the first few weeks. Some stepping up will need to occur.

I was supposed to be working that night but business has been inconsistant lately and so I was called off. Though, as I have often said, I was born without a work ethic, this unplanned night off was not an experience that was giving me joy. I was/am broke and needed to work, even if it only meant $40. Anyway, I was sitting at home, wearing the kind of comfortable clothing that I would not wear in public and watching television. My phone rang again, around 9:30 and it was my sister, Ellie. She and my uncle Harvey had shown up at Mia Rosa unexpectedly, assuming I would be there. Clearly I was not. I agreed to meet them at Newstead Tower Public House, which is only a block or two east of Mia Rosa.

Honestly, I had no real interest in having a drink. I had $20 to my name and had spent the day unshowered and hitting the “Stumble” button on my internet browser eleven thousand times. But my uncle lives just outside of Anchorage, Alaska and this could be the only time I’d see him for another six months. So I threw on clothing only moderately more appropriate for a public appearance and headed to The Grove.

It’s a good thing I did. I only had one beer (Schlafly’s Baracktoberfest, ha ha) and fortunately, thanks to familial generocity, I did not have to break my lone Andrew Jackson. There is something about drinking in a bar with an an elder family member that makes me feel like a grown up, which is not a way I generally feel. Over a too-brief hour, the three of us talked about life and work and relationships. But my favorite part of the conversation revolved around art. My uncle is a drummer, from when he was a teenager in a local band in the 60′s through his current twosome who plays original music in Alaskan bars and small venues. My sister was once quite an artist, primarily painting and drawing, and after a decade or so of dormancy recently began taking art classes with her former instructor and has reawakened her spirit for such things. And, of course, I fancy myself a writer. At least someday. And it was inspiring to me to listen to my uncle, who despite never “making it”, refuses to ever stop playing and writing music – truly believes his happiness depends on it. Our discussion reaffirmed my belief that I myself can only be complete and happy if I write something, anything. A job is a job, and I am certain that I could continue doing any number of things to collect a paycheck. But the act of creation is what all of us should be working toward.

I’ll cut out all the cliches and hyperbole that was about to folow that last sentence. This got embarrassingly corny very quickly. Sorry about that.