TDL’s Sports, Wrestling, & Otherwise

Every single night
The same arrangement
I go out and fight the fight

Still I always feel
This strange estrangement
Nothing here is real
Nothing here is right

[...]

Will I stay this way forever?
Sleepwalk through my life’s endeavor?

I don’t want to be
Going through the motions
Losing all my drive
I can’t even see if this is really me
And I just want to be alive

—-

Joss Whedon… expressing it better than me.. Stupid work.

I’m sitting in the new apartment… spring hit about two days ago. Spring in New York is very strange. On Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday I walked out the front door to go to work and I needed a winter jacket. There was still a bite in the air and I could still see my breath. I got home from work on Wednesday and it was still cold.

Thursday morning, I left for work with my winter jacket on and it was spring. There was still a chill in the air but it was muted. Kinda like there was a little taste of it left in the breeze because it wasn’t quite ready to let go yet. When I got home from work, lilacs had started to bloom and it was spring. It happens that quickly.

Tonight, I’m sitting here and a thunderstorm came in off the river. It’s the first heavy thunderstorm since we moved to the new place. In the old place, we could watch thunderstorms come up the river. I miss that. I’m a thunderstorm nut. My parents have an enclosed front porch where I used to sit out and watch and listen to thunderstorms. I love everything about them: the noise, the creepy strobe light effect of a crash of lightning, watching lightning rods strike things far away. There’s even a smell. There is a type of breeze that you only get during a thunderstorm… it’s a gentle wind that is thisclose to being strong and violent, but it isn’t. There’s a smell of nature that rides in on a storm. When I lived in the old apartment, I was able to watch gigantic, unobstructed bolts of lightning strike the water. I could crack the window and get the breeze fresh off the river. This apartment barely gets the breeze because of it’s layout… and I can’t see anything but my neighbor’s apartment.

This apartment sucks.

Back in days of yore when I was in college, we had something called the Twenty Dollar Supernight on Fridays. Back before New York State decided that residents needed protection from ourselves and banned all-you-can-drink Happy Hours, we had something called “Drinkin with Lincoln”. Bars would have a $5 cover charge followed by penny pitchers (both Lincoln… get it?) for a set amount of time. The cab from Siena to the Bar X (name with held to protect under-age drinking) would cost $2/head. Bar X charged $5 for free beer from 4-7 pm. At 7pm, we would then hike the six blocks from Bar X to the Lamp Post. On the way to the Post, we’d buy a slice of pizza ($1) and eventually get to the post for $5 all you could drink from 8pm - 11pm. After that, slice of pizza number 2 would be purchased ($1) and a $2/head cab ride home. A few bucks here and there for tipping to encourage the bartenders to fill your pitcher first and you came in just around $20 for all the Natty Light, Red Dog, and High Life you’d ever care to drink…….. weekly.

Anyway, the Post was split up into two bars. The upstairs was generally a pretty crappy bar with picnic tables and free popcorn and a jukebox full of drinking songs. The downstairs was called “The Oasis” and was widely known as the I-was-jail-bait-as-recently-as-last-week meat market. You got yourself a bar full of free beer, a bunch of Albany kids with nothing to do for the 11 months a year it’s cold, and… well… you have The Post/Oasis.

I stopped going there in about 1999. The time I went there after I legitimately turned 21, I went to the Post like every other Friday. The bouncer looked at my ID and started to give me crap about the ID not being mine. Mind you, I had been going to the Post approximately every Friday night for three years and giving the guys IDs that ranged from “bad chalk job” to “not mine” to “dated February 30th”. This night, I actually handed him my ID, I was really 21, and I was getting shit. It was a few weeks after that I determined that I had officially become “too old for the Post” but stuck it out until I wasn’t the only person who was 21.

About five years ago, I saw the bar’s name had changed. Someone must have eventually stopped paying bribe money to the cops and it got shut down. A few years after that, it became “Professor M Barley’s” which is what it is today. During the football playoffs, a few of my friends went there to watch the Giant games. After a bit of resistance (it is the Post, after all) they went and discovered that the inside had been completely overhauled, repainted, and made into a decently nice sports bar.

So, when we were trying to decide on somewhere to watch the Siena game, we figured it would be wholly appropriate to watch the game at The Post. After the game (we’d been talking a bit to either the manager or the owner… could go either way) my old Siena roommate and I went into the small lobby that the Post/Oasis used to share and discovered that the Oasis was still open… now named The Coliseum… and is, in fact, still the underage meat market of Quail and Madison. This made me feel, for a moment, that all was right in the world again.

Since there wasn’t anyone there yet (what self-respecting kid is drinking at only 8pm) they let us walk downstairs and look around. Disturbingly enough, 10 years later and the downstairs has not changed a bit. It still has the crappy mirrored walls, the weird little DJ booth, and the hanging stench of stale beer, sweat, and desperation. The two bars down there are still in exactly the same spot. Random couches (used for polite conversation) are lined along the side. Your feet still somehow stick to the floor even though it’s carpeted. There is still a random phone booth that does not have a phone… but says “Phone Booth” in neon lights. It was a trip.

The owner let us walk around a bit and overheard us discussing the random shot-girl shots that we used to buy there for a dollar (culminating with me actually seeing one of the shot girls in a mall one day and hitting on her… which still rates in my top two random pick-ups: “Are you a shot girl at the Post?” “Yes.” “I love your work and wish I could see more.”) and poured one for us for old time sake. My roommate and I did the shot and laughed. I was happy to see the place still there and even though it actually kinda caused physical pain when the guy asked us when the last time we were down there was… and I actually had to say, out loud, about 10 years… I was glad to see it again.

Upstairs, everything is nice, sterile, and overhauled. The crappy old bar is gone with a brand new wooden one placed on the entire opposite side. The green felt pool table, covered with stains of puke and beer has been replaced with a nice red one. Where the old bar was is elevated and they put in tables and a big-screen TV. You wouldn’t even recognize it as the same place. But when you go in the bathroom, something’s a little bit out of place. There’s a little machine on the wall. For a quarter, it’ll give you a spray of Drakkar, Armani, or Polo cologne. Back in the day, there used to be a condom dispenser right next to it. It isn’t something you’d normally see in a sports bar, but it is something you’d see in the kind of place it used to be. It’s still there now, and it’s a little wink-and-nudge reminder of the shenanigans that used to go on. If you’d never spent a day in the Post before it changed over, you’d probably never even notice it.

And that made me smile.

Pearl Jam fights a constant battle with Live for my favorite band of all time. Sometimes, depending on my mood, one overtakes the other. When a new album comes out from Live, they usually conquer the top spot for some amount of time… but Ten always manages to find its way back into Favorite Album I Own. I once lent it to Ms. L when we were first dating and legitimately was concerned for its safety while it was out of my possession. It’s the one album I have that, regardless of the day, time, or mood I can always put in and listen to from cover to cover. Vs. is the same way. I can always listen to Vs.

Of my top ten Pearl Jam songs, Elderly Woman probably comes in someplace in the top five. If you forced me to name a top five in some random order it would be Elderly Woman, Rearviewmirror, Breath, Black, and Corduroy with State of Love and Trust, Jeremy, Yellow Ledbetter, and Once having an occasional cup of coffee in the top five. When I hear a cover of one of these songs (or a Guitar Hero 3 version) it can quickly rocket to the top spot. This happened recently with Elderly Woman. About a year ago, I discovered Charlotte Martin. She’s a Tori Amos-y kind of singer. I’d never heard her before, but I knew Ms. L was a big fan. I found out she was playing at a bookstore in New York City right around Ms. L’s birthday, so I bought a couple tickets and went with her more to see a concert at a bookstore than for the music.

As it turned out, I was a big fan. She released an iTunes only album of covers called Reproductions which includes a cover of Elderly Woman. Faced with a new version of a favorite song I found myself playing it a ton this weekend (at the expense of the rest of the album… purchased during a drunken buying spree on iTunes).

As I’ve listened to it over and over for a few days, I started to think of the different ways the song could be interpreted. It’s one of those cool songs that could very easily mean different things depending on the person who listens to it and drastically changes when the song’s voice changes. You could take it (as I did for years) about a guy coming back to a small town and finding he has moved into a new phase while the town has stayed exactly the same (think Garden State fifteen years before Garden State was made). You could use the Eddie Vedder is a Vampire explanation… which sees him watching lifetimes go on around him while he doesn’t change at all.

(Aside: I read the “Eddie Vedder is a Vampire” website back in college… it was a website which posited that Eddie Vedder was a Vampire and outlined hidden messages buried in Pearl Jam lyrics to prove this. I thought it was funny. I made reference to it here in hopes to link to the page and give people a giggle. I then Googled “Eddie Vedder is a Vampire”… which now links to a significant number of websites that sell ESSAYS AND TERM PAPERS!!! In the last ten years this has gone from a joke website to a legitimate theory people have written papers about… enough papers for there to be a market for them? Really? Even though you can see he’s gone from angsty twentysomething to soccer dad?)

Having listened to Charlotte Martin sing it over the last few days, from the female voice, it seems even more depressing… a woman that sees someone from her life come into her store/restaurant/diner/whatever who doesn’t even recognize her.

Oddly enough, having found this song at a time when I’m planning on being upstate for a week or so, I’ve found another meaning for it… looking into the mirror and saying it to yourself when you come home again and find that you’re going to be 30 in a few weeks. There’s a few pages in a Stephen King novel somewhere that talks about it a bit. That time you look in mirror and wonder just when the f*ck someone replaced you with a guy with gray hair, a bunch of extra pounds, and a retirement fund. The guy in the mirror has just found himself at the end of an X-year holding pattern, kinda recognizes himself, but not really. The last time he looked in the mirror… really looked… he was someone else entirely. He hasn’t changed at all.

Anyway, that revelation struck me as I was sitting in my car driving to nowhere. At some point on Wednesday afternoon I decided to turn the XM on and drive north until I felt like stopping. I think I stopped in Whitehall because I didn’t feel like going to Vermont… something about the Giants playing New England this weekend made me feel like a traitor.

Elderly Woman Behind The Counter In A Small Town
Vedder, McCreader, Gossard, Ament, Abbruzzese - 1993

I seem to recognize your face
Haunting, familiar, yet I can’t seem to place it
Cannot find the candle of thought to light your name
Lifetimes are catching up with me

Hearts and thoughts they fade…away
Hearts and thoughts they fade…away