I have a question...WHY does every bar in Seattle have to be so damn DIVEY? Honestly, it seems like most of the late-night joints between Pioneer Square and Belltown are involved in some sort of hellish footrace to see who can out-dive each other. I like Shorty's for the pinball (across from Mama's Mexican Kitchen in Belltown), but is it against the owner's religion to install lighting? Or maybe a signal flare halfway to the backroom? This isn't wartime Morocco, and even Rick's Place was better lit than this.
But the Comet Tavern on Capitol Hill has Shorty's beat in the dive-bar Tour-De-France like it was wearing a jetpack & everyone else was just running in place. Seriously, the only thing missing from this joint is a springboard, a deep end and a lifeguard. I happened to be meeting a friend downtown last week, and he asked me to pick him up there. This section of the story will be titled; "And here, my troubles began".
The Comet Tavern is as close to the number one spot of a top-rated filth circus as I've ever seen a bar get. There were strip joints in the seediest places in Bangkok that I felt safer in. The bar looked like a small busload of innocent children had crashed into a wall & they just never dug it out. A lonely, ratty pool table was being hoarded by a group of early 20-somethings that looked barely old enough to drink...and they had Pabst Blue Ribbon on tap.
In the corner was the savior, weeping a damn river of sweet, sweet tears.
There's no way to get that smell of provincial misery off you within the first 24 hours. When I got home, my pet opossum turned away in disgust. I needed a Silkwood-style scrubbing the next day, just to feel close to a carbon-based form of life again.
Mostly, I've found that bars in Seattle divide into three categories: Hipster, "Hey-Bay-Bee!" joints (a phrase that makes me feel like sicking up my lunch to this day) where the bars are made of formica and most of the clientele are wearing pork pie hats and listening to some local cover band heartlessly murdering a rendition of some forgotten Cab Calloway song. There's usually free Wi-Fi in these shrines to consumer conformity, and a $4.50 well drink will get you about 45 minutes of free browsing in a room too dimly lit not to go blind in.
The second are the dim, red room - style lounges where the drinks cost a small fortune for less alcohol than you would put on a skinned knee and the music is some warped concoction of a Swedish kazoo band trying to impersonate Herb Alpert's Tijuana Brass. Oh yeah, the bathrooms are usually covered in red velvet, so if you fail to pick up some psuedo-intellectual two-faced bloodsucker who acts like she's too good for your company but really works at Starbucks during the day, you can always fuck the lavatory doors.
But the worst...THE ABSOLUTE WORST are the dive bars. What they save in lighting and electricity, they also save in employee wages - I defy anyone to find a single bartender in these places - Just one, mind you! - That doesn't have a single tattoo...Or even, one that has less than ten. If it's a woman, odds are that she's got more piercings and holes in her body (besides the natural ones) than a deserter from the French Foreign Legion facing a firing squad.
But still, I notice that people huddle in homo habilis-like groups of eight at a table built for four, and bunch in as close as they can at these places. Really, what's the attraction? It's almost as if these types of bars exist to snub their noses at the high-falootin' folk who populate the first two categories, saying "Look! All we have to do is buy a single lightbulb, some scooby snacks from the local Wong's Take Away, and keep a keg of Pabst Blue Ribbon on tap! To hell with your damned "atmosphere!""
By the way..."Pabst Blue Ribbon". Did it really WIN a fucking blue ribbon for something, or was it just named that the same way "Mad Dog 40-40" has no actual "Dog" in it? Does anybody know? It's difficult for me to believe that this liquid atrocity ever won anything but "Best Arsenic Substitute".
I'm still off the drugs, by the way. Still writing, too.
3 comments:
Pabst is hipster swill.
The reason for the proliferation of dives is because they've discovered that hipsters like it because of what they call "authenticity."
Hipsterism is a growing trend and I find it extremely disturbing. People that I think of as "Sensitive Beardfags" are all over the place all of a sudden. There was some sort of tipping point and it's just gotten out of control.
There are also the bald, goatee'd hornrim glasses type who annoy me just by existing.
I'm starting to understand why people become dictators for the purpose of doing horrible things to certain demographic groups. As I get older I find this kind of thing more and more intolerable, it's like glass shards under my skin for some reason.
Many of the former dive bars here have been taken over by hipsters and are now unrecognizable. One of the most annoying things they do is to flaunt t-shirts of what I consider good bands like Black Sabbath. But they do it in a mocking way, the same way they drink Pabst.
If porkpie hats or LUCIFER FORBID THE HORRIBLE HANDLEBAR MUSTACHES should take off here I don't know what I will do.
There is no rational reason why this stuff bothers me so much. I don't know why it does.
I just know that it does. And it needs to die.
It really did when a blue ribbon once upon a time
1893 at the Columbian Exposition (commonly called 'The Chicago World's Fair'.
In some places you can get "Blue Ribbon" from a well bred steer or pig. Same places where you can win a dance contest paired with your sister.
Now...you dance the Tango with a sultry sow and that's a "Red Ribbon". Go Pabst...pull out all the stops!
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