Let the front yard grow out, or the back yard: these are men’s choices in grooming.
And that’s when it hits, why any of us would fight for a bar carpeted with the smells of four score years of drink and its terrible consequence, an easy place that beckons men with name and rank on lanyards about their necks, conventioneers’ familiar appeals, Chazz—if I may call you Chazz, and tired shoppers lured by the promise of an elegant flute, because California fizz is just as good as any frog by glass number three, and art school kids sweet on the idea of cheap wells and so don’t stop off at their dorms to drop that five foot roll of duck canvas, which is now propped next to a canvas completed well before their parents could drink. Or then again, how old is this place? The 1890s vis a vis the 1970s, time out of time, the place opens at seven in the morning so who’s really counting?
There are bars, as well you know, that go in search of a name, scenes to be made and fought over, and then there are bars that simply are.
The Gold Dust Lounge is the alpha and the omega, likely cares not for any pretense being made over it, and so may it continue to simply be.
I have friends who make it to the Gold Dust Lounge every week. I managed a good once-a-month back when I lived in the neighborhood. You tell tourists not to go to the Wharf, send them to see a show at Hemlock, and in general provide good will. In return, you get to be surrounded by people who are on vacation, people happy to not be at work or driving between concrete blocks and aluminum siding. Remember what it means to be an outsider, to not know the city’s a grid and it’s actually impossible to get lost (unless you end up in the Excelsior).
Also, point out when someone’s about to step in puke and they’ll thank you for it.
