I tried to play pool in Bethesda, MD on Sunday. I should have known better.
Continue reading ‘Pool’
Tag Archive for 'Lush'
Like most normal, sane people, I had put high school behind me. The worst years of our lives, really, no matter how much you try to sugarcoat it. When the 20th reunion party planners contacted me, I was a little bit alarmed that (a) 20 years had passed and (b) those fucking assholes found me. My first reaction was the same kind of shock and horror I felt when they dumped pigs blood on me at the prom and… No, wait. That wasn’t me. But, still. I sympathized with Carrie in those moments. You get them, girl. You get them for all of us!
Continue reading ‘Reunion’
I’ve spent the past few years bemoaning the gentrification of Silver Spring. How the town has lost her charm, her spice. How our dive bars have died. How we’ve been colonized by hipsters, transplants, neo-yuppies, armchair liberals, and the saccharine, mindless masses of salary serfs and condo owners. How we must endure the herpes-like sores of places like Firestation One and 8407.
Continue reading ‘The Golden Flame’
I set out to review The Nest, a slightly off the beaten path yuppie hangout in Bethesda, MD, but then I found myself with the same problem as when I tried to review Fire Station One in Silver Spring. The Nest, while obviously a great date spot if you’re into that noisy herd of transplants thing, is, essentially, boring. Yet another overpriced and soulless watering hole.
Continue reading ‘The Nest’
I have a dream. I’m going to move to New Orleans and open up a DC-themed bar. I’m going to call it “In Session” and set it up somewhere posh where we can pick up tourists and commuters. For all the expats, it’ll be a true home away from home.
The first thing I’ll do is raze any historic buildings that are in my way and then build a faux-French Quarter style building that is, somehow, cold, brutalist, and unwelcoming.
“Okay,” I told James as he flooded the engine of his Triumph Spitfire which, despite years of neglect, was in remarkably reliable condition. Somewhat. He beat his head on the steering wheel and screamed. I continued. “We do have a purpose today.”
“What purpose?” he muttered, head against the wheel, hands on the cracked dashboard.
“We have to mention that I have an Amazon Wishlist to everyone we meet, and tell them my pitiful sob story so they’ll buy me stuff.”
“Oh my god.”
I pulled out a wax bag, because I inherited 5000 boxes from my grandmother, and handed him one of the cards I had inside. “I had cards made up with the link to the wishlist on one side, and the link to my sob story on the other.”
It’s time to answer the question that, I’m sure, is foremost in everyone’s mind: Where can I get a beer in Union Station at 8:30am?
And I don’t mean buying one at the liquor store, or getting one down at the weird pizza joint in the gladiator pit food court and drinking in a corner like one of the bums. Fingerless gloves, covered in ash from sweeping chimneys, drinking from a plastic cup and staring at the deaf girls from Gallaudet. That’s what I do every morning!
No, it’s time for A Touch of Class. I want to sit at a bar like a normal yuppie and be served a beer by a bartender. And I don’t want to have to cajole the bartender into doing so, or be given a judgmental stare like I just sat down and screamed, “I CAVORT WITH SATAN!” I want someone to serve me a beer at 8:30am like they do it all the time.
You’d think that, at a cosmopolitan railway station, and here at the Capitol of the Empire, bartenders would serve you in the early AM without hesitation. “Hiya Floyd, I just signed a bill that’ll murder millions. Can I have a beer?” Or, maybe, “Hiya Floyd, my motherfucking MARC train was just delayed for 17 hours because of a flash flood warning 1500 miles away in Louisiana. How about a beer? And some heroin?”
The plan: I leave home early, hit Union Station at 8:30 or earlier, find an open bar, and gauge reactions and quality of service. I’ll drink like a fish, scribble insane notes in my little reporter’s notebook, then totter to work and pretend like everything’s normal as I throw up on my supervisor’s shoes and then feverishly masturbate in the bathroom stall to mental images of the deaf girls from Gallaudet.
I have a rare free weekend coming up and, as Monday dawns harsh and merciless, I find that I’m irrationally excited about the idea that, come Friday, I’ll be able to come home, take off my pants, go nowhere, do nothing, and not utter a single word for 60 hours.
Continue reading ‘Social Animals’
I can’t explain why, but I religiously follow the Bethesda Actually blog. Maybe it’s because I lived on Battery Lane for several years in the 90’s. That was before Bethesda turned into… I don’t know. Little Dubai.
I don’t mean that in a racist way. I just mean to say that it’s full of huge, glittering shit that doesn’t make any sense. Let’s rip down all the old, quaint stuff and build giant condos in 32.8 minutes that only have a 25% occupancy rate! Yay! Because that’s how humans like to live. If…they’re planning to emulate Charles Whitman at some point.
Continue reading ‘Actually, Bethesda…’
After nine years, I’m sad to report that the so-called “NoMa” section of Capitol Hill really sucks when it comes to drinking. I’m talking about the Mass Ave stretch…and beyond! NoMa being the wholly imaginary neighborhood “North of Mass Ave” which is Union Station and the dismal former-ghetto rolling down past the bus station to New York Avenue.
Any news item – a new bar, a closure – is exciting, and so I latch onto it in the hopes that something will break up my sad workaday life.
I hate working, see? I want to be a drifter like David Banner. Isn’t that what that show was about? Angry drunk drifter who befriends small boys?
That’s what every show in the 70’s was about, I think. Highway to Heaven! That was the 80’s, right? But that’s even worse. Two homosexuals, one big and simple and the other with a predatory intellect, travel the country in a windowless panel van taking advantage of the weak and the needy.
Sick, man.
Continue reading ‘Capitol Hill Drinking: The Cap City Rumor’
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