Opinion |

Confessions of a barstool dreamer

Local bars offer drink specials, taste of the good life

By Nate Katz

Posted on Monday, April 11th, 2005, 12:00 am

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I’m at my friend’s house and she’s asking us if we love Eddie Vedder. Of course I do – I think it’s kind of a package deal for our generation. Yes, I loved Pearl Jam, as I am an American teenager in the mid-nineties. I remember when I first heard Ten. My dad bought a copy. I’m not sure if that makes me uncool, or him very cool. He had heard they were a great new band. It’s twelve years later and I’m still watching Pearl Jam, on a video this time. Twelve years. That seems amazing.

It’s the night after a really late one; it’s been three nights like this, only now we’ve reached what seems to be the end. The Bear Brew is me and I am the Bear Brew, surely neither could exist without the other, but tonight we may have to. I’ve chewed my lip into a ripped sore of what it was. I go back to a place where I constantly humiliate myself. I give my money and my pride, a true price to pay night after night. Surely, this makes something special of me. Have I attained the status of the guys I saw there when I was a freshman? A hallowed Bear Brew regular? Or has it all changed so much that I’m just one of their junkies getting kicked around and coming back for more degradation and the amusement of others?

But not tonight. When we’ve all reached that point of exhaustion and we can sit around without pressure to make any real plans beyond bringing beer. Around town, everyone is doing this tonight; sitting in small groups, joking and talking. I love nights like this; time seems to be inconsistent as hours fly by and the night progresses slower and slower. People’s birthdays come though and those nights where you sit at home go away. You go out. You go back to the Bear Brew. You go back to the scene of all your nights that have blended together not from drink but from similarity and all the constants, where you forget who you’ve seen and what happened. All you have to differentiate between them is an event; a birthday, falling down the stairs, anything to set the night apart.

There’s a private party in Soma, but if you walk up the stairs they’ll give you a ticket stub for a free drink. A friend is moving out of the place he’s lived in for three or four years, ever since I’ve really known him. We need to have a party there before he goes. I need to say goodbye to that apartment.

For $4.50 you can get a tequila shot. For seventeen dollars and sixty-eight cents, you can get four. They come in shallow shot glasses with thick deceiving glass and it’s no deal. The clock will always work against you in bars. When time matters the least to you is when it will always mean the most to others around you. It’s a rough thing to have to follow a clock as a boss. There are those that do want to forget when to start and when to stop just as much as you. A clock does nothing but tell you when to get up, when to go to bed, when to work and when to stop. I’m starting to hate them and I own two watches.

Eventually, bartenders and bouncers come to know your name, I think. Never the waitresses though; theirs is a different role in the pub style hierarchy and I’ve yet to figure it out. They’ve started charging tax on drinks through the waitresses. Avoid them, unless you know them, then support them wholeheartedly.

I know this guy Benji; he has a kind of awesome mullet. He never goes to the bar because he says that it’s all the same and nothing happens there. He waits at home for people to come back and party with him. What a sad existence that must be. Waiting alone for the party to come back. What if he falls asleep on the couch and misses the party? What if it was really at the place it’s been night after night and no one comes back?

Nate Katz is a senior journalism major.