Dive Bars. Ugh.

PREDICTION: Within 12 months there will be bars that offer a section with paper bag beer, wherein you can buy some cardboard, make up a "I'm Homeless" sign, and sit against a wall looking gaunt with all your other "dirty" friends.  - XMASTIME

Finally, some sense about stop automatically praising "dive bars":

Metro Boston is also stuffed with hundreds of thousands of pre-affluent college students who crave the imaginary credibility that comes from sharing cheap drinks with the Busch draft riffraff that float enough dive bars to justify a book about them. Dive bars are necessary to a healthy drinking community, but we need to stop glorifying the shoddy majority of them. There are few things better than a simple, friendly, run-down tavern where any man or woman off the street can get a $3 fix in low light. But just because a bar is old, cheap, and decrepit doesn't make it venerable. There's a thick, bold line between "unrefined working-class bar" and "unrepentant shithole."

The thirst for people to appear "real" to others is always fascinating.

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We walked through the door and were immediately pounded by a décor that reeked of “Hey look, we spent $50,000 on fake Southern 1950’s crap for an authentic feel!”  There was an old gas pump sign in he corner; yes, I’m sure it was from “grandpappy’s filling station.”

“Rats!  Whas dis pace, Rats?” Chuck’s nose crinkled with judgment.

“Yeah, no kidding lil’ buddy,” I agreed as I looked around the small dining room.  “This looks like one of those places that restaurant snobs try to out-gaga each other over, yammering on and on about any hi-falutin place in the big city that serves collards and fried chicken that it’s ‘real’ Southern, right?”

“Whyyou say dat Rats?”

“’Ooooh, so authentic!’ ‘Greasy like down South!’ ‘The real thing!’’’, I answered, shaking my head.  “As if they’ve ever set foot off Manhattan Island at any time other than their seven years at Bard College, right?”

“Rats!”  Chuck laughed, pointing around in a circle to nowhere in particular.  I loved that shit.

“You said it, lil’ buddy.  They sound like them twenty-three year-old girls that come across the bridge on Friday nights to The Dell, all giddy to their friends about being at a ‘kitschy dive bar!’”

“Dibar Rats!”

“Yeah, right?  Keeping it ‘real,’ are we girls?  Ha!”

We both fell into laughing like a couple of loons, slapping each other five.

“Rats I wan up Rats,” Chuck was pointing at a barstool.

“Yeah, let’s sit down,” I tapped Chuck on the back of the head to nudge him towards the bar.  “I guess we’re supposed to think the stuff was cooked on a pot belly stove by Loretta Lynn while rasslin’ coons in the backyard, right lil’ buddy?  ‘Real!’”

Chuck didn’t look very pissed as I helped him up and onto the bar stool, but he definitely could feel what I was saying.

“Drives me freaking crazy,” I went on, “just like blathering on and on about ‘real lumps’ in their mashed potatoes, right?  Idiots.  Forget them.”

“Forget them Rats!”

“You got that right, lil’ buddy.  Makes hipsters more, how would they say it, ‘rustic and down-homey,’ right?  No no, of course, they’d call it real.”

He screamed with laughter upon finding out the stool spun around in circles, so I gave it an extra hard spin to thank him for agreeing with my sarcasm.

“And I’m telling you, lil’ buddy: the richer they are, the more they just have to make sure you heard them, that they just have to have their precious lumps in their ‘mashed taters.’”

I shut up just long enough to order a Diet Coke, which the bartender delivered with a disapproving look.  Chuck finally stopped spinning and clung to the arms of the stool, dazed and panting.

“Rich man's guilt, that’s what it is.  ‘Daddy bought me another car, so I'd better not get mashed potatoes that are creamy.  I’d lose my street cred!’  For chrissake, they're just potatoes - popping a hamstring jumping up to announce your love of lumps in ‘em don’t make you a working class hero.  Right, lil buddy?”