Working Class Corner/What I Know About Bars, Nightclubs, and Strip Joints.
(which is more than I can write at one sitting.)
Russell Scott Day
I got fed up with the way I was being treated or spoken to by the bartenders of my favorite after work bar, and have quit going there after work, as was my normal habit.
Other bars seem out of my zone, or schedule, so I have been coming home earlier and possibly saving some money, plus I have been writing my column more frequently.
About religion and your spiritual life I say that once your religion inhibits you more than it inspires you, it is useless.
Where you go ought not be useless.
The best bars are places where you can give a job, or get a job, and have a fine amount of fun that extends out of the bar.
Don’t do drugs with people you don’t like, or take food from people you don’t like, or you know don’t like you.
Drinking alone is not the point and part of the reason that bars exist. They can be similar enough to Churches that I feel no guilt for going or not going to them.
But at anyrate what I know of significance about bars is they have a life of their own. They have a cycle.
In awhile the bar that was in my time and travel zone for bar life may change back into, or forward to, a place and mental landscape appropriate to my reasons for going to a bar, or church.
Last time I was in my favorite bar, the owner who was bartending spoke to me in answer to my question about the heating and cooling system in a way so offensive I left before drinking a third of my first beer.
My God, I remember talking to a bartender at the Banana Boat by the airport in Fort Lauderdale about her snapper pussy, or the time I punched a guyy out and the owner told me if it had been anyone but me, I would have been barred.
In 35 years of drinking I’ve only been thrown out of two bars, and once cause I cussed them out for not having any coffee for me when they cut me off, and the other time for noting that the bartender was stealing money from the till.
Twice I have been severely beaten up.
The first time was in the nightclub where I did lightshows, and the other was in my local bar in the East Village of New York, Brownies.
My only direct paid work for bars has been lightshows and general and stage lighting for them.
The beatings taught me quite a lot.
My main lessons from the beatings is that for Security Personnel they need balls and brains in the same body, and need to be focused on their job more than using their power to let girls in they think will fuck them or their friends.
Three guys on coke that show up with no girl are particularly dangerous, and you might as well call the cops as soon as that set walk in the door.
If one is a red head, just do that.
The layout, interior design of a bar, and the bar itself have great influence over whether or not the bar is a good place to consume "spirits" with others.
They don’t call them "Spirits" for nothing.
If you drink enough you come to know there are good spirits and bad spirits for you.
If you are going to indulge in adult vices with others, the time spent really must responsibly have better influence on you and your community than harm your community or yourself.
I myself wonder if maybe the Cannanite Priestest Church, Temple, as a combination of bar and strip club might be a better religious and cultural institution than the conflict between Islam and Catholisim that assaults my peace.
But it is good and safer if the bar bathroom doors are in easy sight for the bartender and security, or in otherwords bars with bathroom doors in hallways are less safe than bars where the bartender can see who is going in and out of a place they cannot see into.
I know this because I was punched in the face as I came out of a bathroom door that faced a parrell to the bar short hall, and understand this would be much more unlikely if the door was seeable from the bar.
Music is very important to a bar atmosphere.
The owner of the bar that was my favorite bar in my bar driving and walking zone likes ponderous depressing music and I am some hated for playing the juke box.
It is a difficult juke box even to play with a multiplicity of obscure or the worst of artists music.
The better bar will have good music either live or on the box, or played by the bartender/DJ.
The most civilized bar I regularly frequented had a marble countertop.
Copper countertops to bars are second for me really.
Still I am certain that there is less violence in bars with white marble countertops.
I am certain that if I made an integrated bar of all the classics, the photo area of decopage would be where all the fights broke out.
Terrible of me to think of an environment as a sociological experiment.
Still we must admit that the prospect of making a bar of all the classic bar surfaces has not been done and documented for its effects on the actions of inebriates, and its conduction would add some scientific understanding of the psycology and sociology of us.
The full understanding of environment and spirits, and what they in combination produced is the experiment that a bar and a church share in potential for Sociology.
I will codify this later.