Fabulous West

It’s not somewhere you go, to get laid, although it can and has been known to happen on occasion. I know from experience. It’s not a place you go to shoot pool, but on any given night you might own the table. It’s not necessarily a place you go to, to get drunk but 9 out of 10 times that’s what happens. It’s not a place you go to when you’re all that angry but at the end of the night you might end up trading licks with some other patron there that night. In fact you might even wake up in a bathroom with your head split open, wallet gone, phone gone and your stuck in the hospital with 18 stitches in your scalp and turns out you won’t be leaving the hospital for 4 days because you have pneumonia. But you know what, you still keep going back. You may vomit on the bar, throw a pool cue at someone, or try and choke the bartender. You may end up in a submission game with someone on the vomit soaked carpet because you believe he stole the quarters you put on the pool table. You might even start the night out chasing after the guy that bludgeoned you over the head with a beer mug and end up fighting your own friends. Yet despite all these possible outcomes you still continue to return again and again. Why? Why allow yourself to be subjected to such possibilities? I’m sure there are 1,000's of reasons why any one person might show up on any given night. But if you really stop and think, I mean really evaluate why a person would voluntarily endure such an atmosphere, I can reach only one conclusion.

It’s not somewhere with flat screen TVs, with pay preview fights on every Saturday night. It’s not a place with young hard bodied girls serving you piss warm beer and fake smiles. It’s not a place where the latest food critic raved and/or desecrated the menu. It doesn’t serve baskets of complimentary peanuts, or have some straight out of the box trivia game where you win obscure DVDs and novelty gifts. It simply is what it is. Nothing more or nothing less. What I think is so appealing about it is familiarity. Believe me I am not lost on how cliché it sounds what with the whole cheers and everybody knows your name bit (Woody Harrelson was the bomb), but that’s what it ultimately boils down to. It’s a sort of comfort zone that you become accustomed to and learn to accept... the good and bad. While you may go out to these other places to find and experience something new, you always end up back at the same spot. It’s becomes your security blanket, it becomes home. Sure the different and new places are fun initially but eventually you realize how you’re just lost in the crowd, just another table number or some poor sap playing trivia by him as a one man team. After the unfamiliarity sets in, the bright lights fade, and the cute waitresses are now occupied with a table of 12, who happen to be the 2010 trivia reigning champs, you feel used, abused, and abandoned. So what do you do? You run home, to where there could be a fight at any moment, you could be in a fight at any moment, or you could just simply fall asleep at the bar. Anything could happen but it happens at a familiar place and for a lot of us who don’t have a place to call home, that’s all we need. That’s all we want. We just want to know there is a place to go where the door is always open, a good looking bartender who asks for nothing but for you to show up and have a seat, and we can be content with ourselves if even if it is for just a brief moment before whatever else may happen.

Peaces and Creases
TBN