Author Archive: jsomers

Apparently, I love and want to marry every video the band OK GO makes:

OK Go – This Too Shall Pass from OK Go on Vimeo.

Yay.

Hey gang: This is a little essay that appeared in my local newspaper a few years ago. I wrote a number of these for the fun of it back in the day, so I thought I’d just repost a few.

When you live in Hoboken, you either live there in spite of the ubiquitous bars, or you live there because of the bars. And there are a lot of bars, that’s for sure—wherever you live in Hoboken, you are within three blocks of a tavern of some sort. So you’re either sitting up late at nights with a shotgun across your knees, gritting your teeth in rage because of all the noisy drunkards screaming in the street, or you’re one of the screaming drunkards. Or, like me, you once were one of the screaming drunkards and look back on that time fondly, vomit and all.

Living here, therefore, you learn pretty quickly how to navigate the bars. It’s a survival skill. And the first thing you learn is that there are, fundamentally, two types of bars. There may be infinite sub-categories within, but every bar can be boiled down to one of these: Old Man Bars, and everything else.

The Old Man Bar is a phenomenon that crosses borders, cultures, and, apparently, time. Sometimes referred to with the misleading term ‘neighborhood bar’, the Old Man Bar is a simple concept: It’s that bar you walk into and stop three steps in because staring back at you, blank-faced with disdain, are men uniformly over the age of fifty (with a couple of possible exceptions). Instantly, you know you’re not supposed to be in this bar, and you get the heck out of it as quickly as you possibly can.

Of course, there are plenty of men over fifty who don’t spend their days in Old Man Bars, and plenty of people over fifty who quite happily hang out at bars you wouldn’t term “Old Man Bars”. It’s not that all old men go to Old Man Bars, it’s that, invariably, Old Man Bars are peopled exclusively by old men. There’s nothing wrong with this, either, of course—live and let live, I say—but the fact is that if you aren’t already spending your time in an Old Man Bar, I know two things about you without having met you: One, you don’t want to be in an Old Man Bar, and two, the old men don’t want you in their bar either.

Aside from the unfriendly glares from the old men, you can tell an Old Man Bar from the uncannily consistent features it will sport:

1. It will be populated, but never crowded. There will be plenty of elbow room, and a sprinkling of patrons, most men over fifty—however, there may be one or two women, also over fifty, and even one or two of those old-before-their time younger men who have decided to get it over with and begin the serious business of drinking.

2. There will be a single pool table, much abused.

3. The jukebox will be playing something from 1973 when you walk in, and there won’t be an album more recent than 1980 on it.

4. There will be, at most, two beers on tap. It’s possible one of the taps won’t even work.

The best thing to do when you arrive inadvertently at an Old Man Bars to just back out silently and never return. Any instinct to be polite will not be appreciated, and will be uniformly painful for both sides. Besides, the bartenders in Old Man bars are usually bartenders by avocation, and any cocktail more complex than a Boilermaker will require a quick glance through a bartender’s handbook, not to mention a disdainfully raised eyebrow, so any request for a Cosmopolitan or a Dirty Martini will probably go unanswered.

No one knows, I don’t think, why this phenomenon is so common. Certainly a time comes when you’re too old for the crowded, loud, singles-oriented scene that most of Hoboken’s bars offer, but maybe you still want to meet friends for a drink once in a while, or every day, or just spend your time sopping up as much alcohol as possible before cirrhosis takes its toll. We all probably have an Old Man Bar in our future at some point, when the music gets too loud, the air too smoky, and the crowd too young. We’ll wander onto the dimly-lit side streets of Hoboken, croaking out our mating call, eventually hearing an old song from our youth on the warm air. And when we trace it to its source, we’ll find the Old Man Bar of our future, sparsely populated by people who know the same trivia as we do, and there’ll be plenty of room at the bar, and no screaming kids ordering sweet mixed drinks, and the occasional entertainment of watching a group of youngsters stumble in, stop dead, and quietly back out with wide eyes and trembling lips.

Hey gang: This is a little essay that appeared in my local newspaper a few years ago. I wrote a number of these for the fun of it back in the day, so I thought I’d just repost a few.

THERE are few indignities associated with city living more consistently aggravating than the laundromat experience. Dragging your soiled linens to the laundromat is sort of like adult acne: Something you were promised you wouldn’t have to deal with once you graduated school and grew up a little, but which persists in afflicting you well into your middle age. The salt in the wounds in the New York City area, of course, is that we’re all paying ridiculous amounts of money for our tiny, cramped dwellings, and still must carry our weighty sacks of laundry to the coin-op laundry. I have, in the past, attempted to register my protest of such conditions by refusing to do laundry at all, but this proved unpopular with my coworkers, friends, and wife, and I was forced to relent.

If laundromats were glorious, sunny places you could enjoy going to, it wouldn’t be so bad, but let’s face it, laundromats—at least the ones around me—are sort of hygiene gulags, tiny, drab, and crowded. Also, often damp. Every laundromat I’ve ever been in has been uniformly depressing: Grey and featureless, with leaking machines, crowds of angry people, and sad, minimalist vending machines. When you arrive, sweaty and wearing your emergency underwear (sometimes, wearing only your emergency underwear, if it’s a real emergency), the scene that greets you is not exactly inspiring. Neither are the people you rub elbows with while trying to scrub the shame out of your clothing.

Societal breakdown is never far away in cities; too many people plus not enough space equals simmering tempers and revenge fantasies. In the laundromats you have an ill-advised further concentration, crowding people into a small, resource-starved space—it isn’t long before a Lord of the Flies scenario erupts over the possession and use of the washers and dryers. Under such stresses, the true nature of people is revealed. Some writers would hesitate to boldly categorize the entire human race into a handful of generalizations, but not me: There are five types of people you meet in the laundromat. Not six, not four, but five:

The Brood Leader: Invariably there will be people who, for one reason or another, must bring their entire family with them to the laundromat. Nothing wrong with this, of course, and many people have no other choice—the laundry’s got to be done, and the kids can’t be allowed to burn the house down while you’re out doing it. Aside from the cloud of children swarming around them, you can identify these poor souls by the flat look in their eyes that hints that a lost child or two wouldn’t bother them too much.

Single Guy:We all know this guy. Heck, I was this guy. Charmingly clueless, he arrives with laundry in a plastic garbage bag, recklessly purchases soap and bleach from the ancient vending machine in the corner, mixes whites and colors, and overstuffs the washer so it explodes into suds and water that covers the floor in a pinkish, slippery film. Inexplicably, he never returns to claim his clothing.

The Relativity Theorist: The worst part of spending time in a laundromat is spending time there, of course, and this brainy customer isn’t afraid to bend the laws of physics to their will in a bid to reduce their sentence. Noting that lots of laundry crammed into one or two dryers will take a few quarter-driven cycles to completely dry, they spread their laundry out amongst as many dryers as possible—the ultimate goal being one article of clothing per dryer—in hopes of getting out of there after a single twenty-minute cycle. And more power to them.

Angry Angry Territorialist: Ever walked into a laundromat and found every washer or dryer occupied—a large number of which have stopped? After waiting a polite period of time, you start investigating, seeking to claim one of these units for your own use. The exact length of that “polite period of time” is a subjective matter, of course, but no matter how long you wait, at some point you will place your hands on the washer or dryer containing the clothing of The Territorialist, who will appear as if out of thin air and demand to know what you think you’re doing. No matter how long they’ve let their laundry languish, it is their firm belief that while their laundry resides inside a washer or dryer, they in some sense own that washer or dryer, and heaven help you if you trespass on their property.

The Quiet Professional: Once in a great while it is the honor of every laundromat refugee to witness an awe-inspiring display of laundry-management that puts the rest of us to shame. Someone will come in and so competently manage the washers and dryers that they’re preparing to exit from the laundromat while you’re still trying to remember which washer actually contains your clothing. They crisply smooth, fold, and hang their clothes on some sort of semi-professional laundry-transportation device that makes your college-era duffel bag look foolish in comparison, and march out of the building with a confident, no-nonsense stride that says “I am going home to starch and iron, fools!”

It’s enough to make you contemplate slinking home and doing your wash in the kitchen sink. Which I would not recommend, by the way, unless you really are down to your emergency underwear and nothing else.

Like everyone else, I greet every arbitrarily-chosen day that indicates a new calendar year with rage, skepticism, and vows to never ever drink something handed to me by a stranger on the street. I also vow to develop my own calendars and system of time, enabling me to claim August 5th as New Year’s Day and January 1st as New Year’s Day (observed).

But as usual: I digress.

Since the wizards and alien astronauts who invented the world decided more or less at random that January 1st is the New Year, it’s a natural time for folks to make resolutions, and I am no different from anyone else. Or, yes, I am extremely different from everyone else due to my flagrant lack of pants and my unusual, Dick-Van-Dyke-in-Mary-Poppins inspired system of hygiene, but in this respect I stand with my brothers and sisters and declare the following things will happen in 2010 (or, in my own personal calendar system, Fred):

1. Develop Super Powers: It’s about damn time. I’m tired of not being able to fly, or shoot bolts of energy from my hands.

failing that:

2. Develop Super Weapons: If I can’t fly or shoot energy bolts, I’ll at least create the world’s largest slingshot and hold cities hostage for trillions of dollars.

That’s it. I figure if I succeed in either one of these resolutions, all sorts of exciting things will be very easily achieved, so why put more effort into it than necessary?