Way too far beyond last call: We carry on as best we can in life without bars (but we surely don’t have to like it)

Sign at Barney's Bar on Michigan Ave.

The hairy guy's report:

Here we are, stuck at home, hoping for better days -- a return to things we took for granted. Who ever knew that the simple act of hanging out at a bar with a beer would become just a fond memory? 

One friend reports being given a bottle of hand sanitizer made by a distillery and notes, longingly, that it “smells like a delicious bar drink.” How sad is that?

Sure, you can stop in at some places for a carry-out burger. And you can still drink at home. But would you rather have a conversation with someone on the next barstool or with your cat? And if you write a blog about bars, what do you do when the bars aren’t there?

Having bars closed isn’t as bad as Prohibition must have been, though we don’t know anyone old enough to ask for perspective. Even Bob, our 94-year-old next door neighbor, can’t remember it. “Prohibition? That word never even entered my mind,” he says.

Some creative minds, without their normal diversions, devise fascinating new things. For instance, somebody recently posted a video showing how to make Bloody Mary pickle jello shots. They might look bad. But so did peas when you were a kid.

Mrs. Hairy Guy raises the idea of turning the house into a bar, citing a country song by David Frizzell called “I’m Gonna Hire a Wino,” about a guy (this is about somebody else, remember) whose wife gets pissed because he keeps coming home drunk:

"I'm gonna' hire a wino to decorate our home,
"So you'll feel more at ease here, and you won't have to roam.
"We'll take out the dining room table, and put a bar along that wall.
"And a neon sign, to point the way, to our bathroom down the hall."

When will all this end? Will all the shuttered places survive and reopen someday? Will it be the same? Will too many people discover they can do without bars? Eventually, we’ll find out.

Jenga, fries and more

How are bar patrons surviving in these dark days? We surveyed some friends.

-- Gerald reports via messaging that he had four empty booze bottles in his recyclables one recent morning – “a new personal best by about three.” But he concedes that some of the bottles were already open: “Sort of like spring cleaning for old booze.”
    He adds: “And then I see an article about how liquor (alcohol) lowers your immune system. Great. Now I have that preying on my mind.”

-- Kathy, who had been on a mission to visit every bar in Bay County, writes:
    “I do miss bars! I absolutely miss bar food. I am seriously regretting that the last time I was at the Rathskeller, I did not get one of those glorious cheeseburgers. Probably what I miss the most,

Sign on the door of the Oasis

though, is the wonderful and interesting people you meet in bars. I love conversations with strangers.”
    Kathy figures she’s drinking less since the bars closed – in part because she doesn’t want to risk picking up a virus while going to buy cocktail ingredients.
    “Speaking of strangers, one of the last times I was at the bar, it was Duso's,” she goes on. “They have giant Jenga there. We got the entire bar to play giant Jenga. I cannot wait to go back and get a full-bar giant Jenga game going again!”

-- Jessica sounds like she’s unloading her troubles in a therapy session: “The last time I drank was March 21st. I had a gin and tonic and a margarita. They were delicious, but I had a hangover for 48 hours afterwards. I took it as a sign that I should only drink in bars. Maybe it's the ice?”
    She especially misses fries. “Some of the best in town are Coonan's and I like the style and quantity of Mulligan's basket. I'm really looking forward to some fries and a Tanqueray and tonic with a juicy lime wedge.”
    And, she adds: “No one has heard me sing The Who's ‘Baba O'Riley’ in karaoke in almost two months. I'm sure the community is suffering.”

-- Tom, who has kept working, says he still gets enough social interaction.
    “I am missing those bars that had great food! Glad that some have been able to offer take-out,” he writes. “So for now I only drink with George Thorogood.”
    Thorogood, by the way, is known for the song “I Drink Alone,” which includes the lyrics:

“Yeah, the other day I got invited to a party
“But I stayed home instead
“Just me and my pal Johnny Walker
“And his brothers Black and Red
“And we drank alone, yeah.”

-- Mary Ellyn doesn’t hang out at bars much but recalls a childhood trauma caused by her uncle’s bar in Owosso, where she lived as a young kid. The bar had a “Drunk drivers go to jail” sign, which she thought said “Junk drivers go to jail.”  
    Soon after, her family packed up to move to Bay City. “All of our junk was in a truck, and I was worried the whole trip that we were going to get arrested.” 

Other worries

The current state of affairs is indeed a sad situation, though for sure others may worry about things weightier than lost bars – such as whether someone coughing four feet away (instead of the prescribed six) will result in a lonely death in a hospital bed.

For possible literary inspiration, we tried out a website that claims to offer great ideas for blog posts. You give it some nouns and it provides five topics to write about. Great.

We typed in “bar beer pandemic,” eagerly clicked the mouse and got these suggestions:

• Bar Beer Pandemic: Expectations vs. Reality
• Will Bar Beer Pandemic Ever Rule the World?
• The Next Big Thing in Bar Beer Pandemic
• Bar Beer Pandemic Explained in Fewer than 140 Characters
• This Week's Top Stories About Bar Beer Pandemic

Does any of that sound worth reading about? We didn’t think so either. In fact, the one suggesting world domination – well, we don’t want to go there.

 

Useless thoughts

This is also a good opportunity to unload some of the notes we’ve squirreled away in hopes that they’ll someday come in handy for blog post topics. They haven’t yet, and it’s a great time for housecleaning:

-- Another blog’s posting on “Why Your Favorite Booze Bottles Are Shaped the Way They Are. And Why You Should Care.” (“If you’ve never considered this, well, you’ve probably never been a bartender.”)

-- Big Flats, the house brand beer at Walgreens drug stores with an unappealing name, supposedly named for flat boats once used on rivers in upstate New York. We discovered it a few years back, priced regularly at $2.99 a six-pack –50 cents a can. We haven’t thought much about it since then. Turns out it’s been discontinued.

-- A bar joke for those of us who took Latin in high school:
    A Roman walks into a bar and asks for a martinus.
    "You mean a martini?" the bartender asks.
    The Roman replies: "If I wanted a double, I would have asked for it."

-- A bar of soap containing bourbon. "Does bourbon benefit the skin?” the makers ask. “We have no idea, but bourbon tends to make everything better, so why not?"

-- A fine essay on the romance of bars, titled “A love letter to drinking in bars.” An excerpt: “Going out isn’t automatically more romantic than staying in, but sometimes, even once a year, you should go to a wonderful bar and stay there until they throw you out.”

-- An Ig Nobel prize (a parody of the Nobel prize) in 2013 for a study finding that people think they’re more attractive when drinking alcohol. "People have long observed that drunk people think others are more attractive but ours is the first study to find that drinking makes people think they are more attractive themselves," a professor said.

-- Finally, many local vehicle license plates start with the letter B, which makes for plates we’ve seen like BAR (of course), BAY, BAT, BAA, BAB, BGT, BAH, BAD, BUD, BUC, BUY, BRR and BAG. We’ve looked for a clunker with a BMW plate, but no luck. We have seen a BLT and a BVD but not a pair of them. 
    You might wonder how this one was ever going to fit into a blog about bars. We have no idea.