You know how they say losing one particular sense - sight or hearing, for example - heightens the other senses. Well losing my ability to drink has heightened all of my senses when I'm out on the weekends. It's been like taking the restrictor plate off a stock car. Although I quickly replaced alcohol with toxic drugs, so I didn't have to deal with any withdrawal symptoms.
I'm much more comfortable at the bar now. There are really only two things that bother me: 1) If I'm at a terrible bar, one of those "I need to drink to make this tolerable" places, like
Rick's in Ann Arbor, and 2) If I have to deal with really drunk people. I can tolerate most people up to a point, but trying to maintain a conversation with
Barry Badrinath or Stumbly McClosetalker at 1am is less than thrilling.
It's not like I was a raging alcoholic (although according to some
government agencies,
everyone is a raging alcoholic). But there's a huge difference between having a beer or two and just drinking water. For me, at least. But my niche interests in sociology and human expression and the like have really benefited from my stint as Sober Sally. I just do a lot of people watching now. Creepy? Probably. But quite interesting. Particularly in Royal Oak. Sometimes, seeing so many
blowouts makes me feel better about my own hair situation.
Friday night, I was in Ann Arbor with a few friends from college, where I made it to a very interesting and relatively new restaurant/bar called Grange. For starters, all restaurants in Ann Arbor are required to put something like
this on your menus and website:
At Grange, our commitment to local and sustainable sources reflects both our commitment to the community and our commitment to bringing the best of the farm’s bounty to the table when it’s fresh and at the peak of its flavor.
Join us for seasonal menus inspired by the fresh flavors of local farms and farmers’ markets.
That gets 4 out of 5 points on the "make patrons feel good about eating at your restaurant so you can add $5-$7 onto each entree" scale. But here's the thing: Grange serves a lot of game meats - duck, pig, venison. You know...animals that have been brutally slaughtered. But the place was
packed. So, props to Grange for finding a way to make Ann Arborites feel good about eating Bambi.
For what it's worth, we ate just about everything on the
bar menu, everything was "good" to "excellent," and the place has an outstanding array of drinks and cocktails. Highly recommended.
From there, it was on to
The Arena, one of my favorite bars in Ann Arbor: Slightly older crowd, best sports bar in town, above-average bar food, and good drink specials. But The Arena also has Boxer:
Boxer might be one of the most ingenious bar arcade games in the world. The game is simple: punch the bag as hard as you can. Put a dollar in this thing, and it's like a
mosquito lamp for meatheads. The first brah puts a dollar in, punches the bag, a number shows up, other brahs gather to try to beat first brah's number, then more brahs gather round and a competition ensues. They actually make an exploding version if you want to rid your bar of steroid-infused males. We could have used these during Michigan State week.
Saturday night brought me to Royal Oak for what appeared to be an unofficial engagement party disguised as a kinda-massive high school reunion - a smaller version of the night before Thanksgiving. The night was quite fun, but also an excellent display of group dynamics and self-delusion (god I'm a nerd). I'll explain.
My friends and I sat around on Saturday afternoon attempting to "plan" our evening. The party was "scheduled" to start at 7:30. We all know there's no way in hell we are going at that time. Plus, responsible as we all are, we know it's not a tremendous idea to start drinking at 7:30. So the plan was to leave at 8pm. So it was decided: let's head to the party at 8.
But then we got into a second discussion about how there was absolutely no way that we were going to leave at our planned time. It just wasn't going to happen. There was football on. We had like five people involved in the trip. So we made a plan to leave at 8, knowing full well there was no chance we were actually going to do that. But if we planned to leave at 9, we knew we wouldn't leave until 10. And we couldn't do that, because we were supposed to leave our friends' condo to head to the bar at 10.
Which also had no chance of happening on time. We then sat there and discussed exactly what would happen at "scheduled bar leave time": absolutely nothing. Ten o'clock would come and go. We would still be hanging out. This would go on for approximately one hour. Then, about an hour after "bar leave time," one of the girls would start screaming about calling cabs. She would get no responses. Some people would commit, others would pretend they had a ride without actually knowing who their ride was. At one point, somebody would turn down the music and make an announcement, to which nobody would pay attention. Then there would be a mass cigarette exodus to the front porch, which means no discussion about leaving for the bars could take place for at least 10 minutes. Then one of the girls would get frustrated and request a number of cabs. About half an hour later, the cabs would show up. One of the girls would scream "the cabs are here!!" and then everybody would find a ride with a driver and walk out of the house toward the poor cab driver who thinks every one of 30-some people are getting in his cab, but nobody ever does.
We discussed all of this on Saturday afternoon. We left for the party at exactly 9pm. We left for the bar at 11:24pm. Seven years after high school, we are one giant, entirely predictable exercise in self-delusion.
And we're also lemmings. I had quite a good time hanging out at my friends' condo chatting it up with people. At no point did I say to myself, "You know what I would like to do right now? I would like to do this exact same thing with the exact same people, only I would like to be run into every five seconds, scream at you so you can hear me, pay many dollars for each subpar beverage, and be surrounded by a crew of people auditioning for 'Jersey Shore: The Midwest Edition.' That is what I would like to do."
We spent the entire trip to the bar - seven people in the vehicle - discussing how much we did not want to go to the bar and how much fun we were having while not at the bar. We got to the bar and paid the $5 cover only to discuss how disappointed we were to be at the bar. And then we stood there and had conversations with the same people we were conversing with just twenty minutes earlier at a much more comfortable location half a mile down the street. I could write a book explaining a lot of things I've figured out over the past few months; this repetitive phenomenon will not be one of them.
One last thing of note: virtually every single one of my friends that I hung out with this weekend has turned out some version of "successful." Out of the 40 or so people I saw this weekend, about eight were lawyers. But the rest of my friends actually have decent, useful jobs. I guess this isn't terribly surprising - we all went to decent high schools and come from pretty good families. But this is notable when 1) it's the worst economy in a bajillion years and 2) our conversations include sentences like "Remember that time we played baseball on your roof with Jimmy John's subs."
The reason I mention this: This fact has a significant impact on my worldview, my politics, and my opinion on things like the Four Loko debacle that I've repeatedly examined on this sight. Take the approximately 30 people I was with on Saturday night. If you saw us at a party eight years ago, you would have said, "Oh my god, what a bunch of screw ups." If you saw us at a party five years ago, you would have said, "Yup, still a bunch of screw ups." My group of friends probably would have consumed some Four Loko back in the day. As it was, they just consumed
Sparks and
Steel Reserve - basically the exact same things as Four Loko, but these things existed before Chuck Schumer figured out that high school kids might be drinking and soiled himself in shock.
But somewhere in between all that acting like screwups, we found time to go to class, do well in school, go to college, get jobs, and so on. Take a look in any college bar on a Saturday night, and it might be hard to distinguish one group from another. But there's a pretty significant difference between people who know when Saturday night ends and those who let Saturday night bleed into Tuesday afternoon.
So the "authorities" - who, quite frankly, have their own heads up their own tailpipes that they can't figure out the rather simple phenomenon that I just described - can ban whatever they want. It doesn't matter. Ban Four Loko, people move on to something else. Shut down a place, people will go somewhere else. If any government official thinks banning something will have any sort of effect on anything, they're delusional. It's gotta be tough to be a bureaucrat with so much power, yet so little power to actually affect anything. The fact of the matter is that there are about a million things that matter more in the grand scheme of things than whether or not somebody drinks Four Loko on the weekend. And my group of friends is a testament to that.
But as fun as my sociological experience has been, I'm pretty happy to be somewhat normal again. At least, as normal as I can be.
