Typical Day In SF

So this day was crazy as hell, and way drunker than I thought it would be. Mr. Carl Morse and I head out to the game against the hated Dodgers. I’ve got a sign that says 11,435 miles, 30 stadiums, 1 place called home!!! We start out at Java house right behind the ballpark for PBR’s and hotdogs at 11in the morning. It’s $8 for that special. Not the greatest but its some substance and cheap beers. If you ever get there early go to Delancey Street, cheap and good food. We pound back a couple beers and I still have some vodka left over from Chicago and my flask is filled with Makers. Not a great combo but its Giants/Dodgers!!! We buy the cheapest tickets which are to damn expensive but this premium pricing makes all good games cost a shit ton. We are gonna sit in the bleachers anyway. We sit down and keep getting moved from seat to seat. For some reason the usher keeps seeing us move but doesn’t seem to care. We buy some soda to help with the shitty vodka and Makers. The damn soda is almost as expensive as the beers here. We start pounding back booze by the 2nd inning. Grabbing $8 beers and mixing it with booze is working for the buzz but not for the Smurfs (Dodger or Dodger fans) around us. I was figuring there would be a lot more but Giants fans are holding it down today. We start getting our ass kicked and Carl and I would rather walk around the stadium smoking and yelling at Smurfs. We post up in the Arcade and I hold my sign up. Every Smurf who passes us by, adult, elderly, kid or child in a stroller I roll up my sign and BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. Most took it well. They know they are in our stadium and them winning wasn’t helping my case. But we get some help from people walking by and they stand with us. A couple Smurfs end up taking it well and stand next to us to boo us. But being as fucked up as we are and booing kids in strollers, them talking doesn’t really mean much now does it? The game ends we lose like 8 – 1 or something, I stopped caring after the flask was gone. We head to the bathroom and run into this big fucking dodger fan. Not like he likes them a whole lot, which I’m sure he did but this guy is probably about 6’6 400 and we start yelling at him in the bathroom. Nice friendly banter. We tell everyone in there he is buying drinks at Momo’s, he didn’t like that to much or follow through with it. LOL I run into Kyle the hostess from works bf, and he is about as drunk and happy as we are. I know a guy at Momo’s so we decide to meet there, cause we haven’t had enough to kill the pain of the sweep. I didn’t think that my bad luck watching the Giants would go against us today. I thought I had statistics and my home winning percentage on my side. But my bad luck prevails. I have now seen them lose 5 times in 4 cities. Let’s go drown our sorrows. We head over to Momo’s and I see the guy I know. Beers and shots of Fernet. Blah!!!! Fucking Fernet. The worst liquor ever. What is the fascination?? It’s never made my stomach feel better after drinking it. We stick around a little and have more shots and beer and one more shot and beers. The day has to be over right?? NO!!! My sorrows are still around. To Tres Agave it is. We meet Amanda and Kyle there. Clarissa, Carl’s fiancé arrives and pitchers of tequila and shots of margarita’s flow. Well that’s how it felt. I stopped remembering most of this place as soon as we got our first pitcher of Margarita’s I was filled in by Amanda a couple days later about, shots?, breaking glass?, some girl I was talking to, who was a bitch? And wearing a Panda hat. After the refresher course it all started to come back. Pictures didn’t hurt either. Well they did cause WOW!!! They were some ugly pictures. It’s looked like they were taken out of a bad drunken movie. These are ridiculous. Apparently after the pitcher or glass or whatever broke we left. But finished?? I think not. We jump on reliable MUNI to get closer to home. It breaks down somewhere downtown and I have the great idea to go with my thoughts on the rest of the trip…”We were supposed to get off here and go to Gitane.” Of course, why not go to a really nice restaurant dressed in Giants gear, liquored up from 10 hours of drinking. I had to ask the owner a week later if we were ok. Apparently we were, ok. Not bad but not good, he could tell it had been a long day. We at least had the presence of mind to eat a little, since all we had had all day was chips from Tres. A beer later and we get the fuck out of there and head home!!! I show up at the parents house and it’s like being in high school. I can’t talk and I need food bad. My mom cooks me up something, I truly can’t remember. Thank God for good parents. I think I hit my pillow at like 12. Crazy ass day and night. But this is mostly a typical drinking day in SF with my friends and I. Damn I missed it. I love SF more than anything. Nobody can ever tell me there is a better city than this, at least not in this country. We have it all, and most of it is good. I have my qualms with the politics and some of the people here but everyone has their dislikes in their town. But I live in the best city in the world and I beg you to try and convince me otherwise. I have one more stop, and that is to go back to Detroit to go see the game I was rained out of, on my way to Canton to go see Jerry Rice get enshrined into the Football Hall of Fame.

Joke Land

There is a reason I don’t go across the bay all that often. Cause it is horrible. But at least I’m a short drive away from home and I don’t have to stay in this God awful town. I call up Steve and plan on getting over there and having some drinks and then tailgating before the game. We drive up and try to give the guy some money for parking, he says hell no man it’s free parking Tuesday. Well awesome!!! At least something is going well in Oakland so far. We park in all of our Giants gear for the A’s, Reds game. And as we get out the first thing we hear is “Hey did you guys make a wrong turn??” HAHA so hilarious. We crack open some beers and listen to the Giants games at full blast as A’s fans pass us by. We have some degenerate crack-head asshole come up and sell us tickets we pay $15 for 2 tickets. We get in their and walk around trying to pick out perfect $7.50 tickets. We have some Coors Light in our pockets and are ready for a shitty ass A’s game. We sit around booing the A’s as much as we can. I think they can hear us on the field since there are about 22 people in the stadium. We take a walk around and find a place upstairs that has $5 beers. We get a round and at this point we’ve spent more money on the 12 pack than we have at and for the game. People don’t much like us but fuck them they are Oakland fans. They of course ruin my home field win percentage. And all in all a wasted day as I knew it was going to be. This is almost as bad as Detroit but I didn’t have to stay in Detroit this long. We head back to the house and then back home. Was pretty fun doing a little tailgating and hanging out drink but I hate Oakland. This is probably the shortest blog I’ve written.

Sleepless in Seattle (Well Close)

What a great little big city they have here. It wasn’t anything amazingly fun packed like the rest of the trip but a good part of the trip nonetheless. Pops and I flew in on a Friday and we stayed outside of the city near the airport in a podunk ass town pretty much like South City here. The flight up was quite cool. The pilot got the OK to take the scenic tour out of town. We went all around the bay being able to see The City with a birds eye view. Would have gotten some better pics but the windows were disgusting. I did get some decent ones though. They also gave us a complimentary beer on the flight to our transfer in Portland. I thought that only happened on your way to Europe. We got up to Seattle and jumped right back into trip mode. Going to the hotel bar and grabbing a quick bite and drink, before we go get ready and go head out to see the town and get some good food. The city was about 15 min out but not too bad of a drive in. A little traffic and apparently getting worse by the year from what the locals say. We went to a steak house in downtown Seattle named Metropolitan. The Lakers – Celtics game 7 was on so it was pretty well packed. Apparently Bostonians aren’t only in SF they are in Seattle also. Why don’t they just stay in Boston??!! We of course had some good steak and drinks. The bartender was helpful, telling us which places I had picked out were good to go to. So we headed around town. Unfortunately it is quite hard to get my dad’s walker around in this town. There are a lot of steps and no elevator and not much room in these places to put his gear. So I had a chauffer for the night. We first headed to a place called Zig-Zag Café. They had some really cool drinks in there and it was more like a restaurant than a speakeasy where you would expect to find really nice drinks. The only problem with that is that more people are around and more people want drinks, which means that 10 min cocktail turns into a 20 min cocktail. This wasn’t as bad as that, but I kinda get scared walking into places like that, but just assume you are gonna have to wait a while for a drink. I had a few drinks, mixing it up between Bourbon and Tequila. The bartender bought me the drinks cause he is coming into SF soon and was hoping for some places to go. I dropped a 20 which is cheaper than 2 drinks and a tip. I’m gonna take this time to instruct people… If a bartender buys you a drink it’s not cuase he doesn’t want a tip. Well for the ladies he might want to give you a tip, but as a good rule whatever the drink would have cost you drop him half maybe 40%. $10 drink means $4 or $5. I jumped in the car feeling very good. We headed to the Bathtub Gin and Co. This is a 2 level spot but still only holds like 40 people. Nice little place very good drinks but not a huge drink list. I go with whatever the bartender wants to make in situations I find I don’t really like the drinks on the list. At this point I’m sloshed, hammered, fucked up. I have to get out of here. Jump in the car and pops drives us back to the hotel. I’m barely able to move. Its nice having someone there with you, you can kinda relax even more.
The next day is a rough one. I need water, water, water!!!! We head to the ballpark to get tickets and we see people already sitting in front of the stadium for a 7:05 game. We find out its Ken Griffey Jr. and Ichiro bobble head day, so the game is almost sold out. The Pyramid Brewery which is right across the street from the stadium with parking looks like a good stop for lunch and to wait for the game to start. I need Pepsi and can’t think about having a beer just yet. Sugar seems to help in this situation. I’m chugging water and soda. Finally I get the courage to have a beer and things start to get normal. Pretty decent food and the beer is the same as it is everywhere else I’ve had it. The smell of brewery isn’t the best for someone very hung over. About 5 hours before the game the line is getting very long and I figure I’m this close I might as well stand in line and get the bobble head. But I find out I didn’t need to. With my dad have his little walker we go straight to the front of the line. But then it’s 3 hours of sitting in the stadium with not much to do and still not feeling that much better. The game looks to be a good one. We get to see Cliff Lee in one of his last starts as a Mariner. And it was a doosey. He pitched very well, a complete game shutout. Very cool to see. It takes us a while to get out of the stadium, and we get to the car and we got a ticket for not paying enough for the parking spot. But we paid what was marked and apparently at some point they changed the sign to $40 instead of $10. Small problem so we get moving and go check out the Space Needle, take a couple pics and then head to the Knee High Stocking Co. It is a really cool spot that you wouldn’t know it was anymore than a broken down house. But you ring the bell and they take your name and number. They don’t allow people to stand at the bar, so they give us a call when they are ready for us. We walk in and it’s a 20 seat place with 6 at the bar. A huge dink menu and a small food menu. The drinks are off the chart, the food on the other hand needs a lot of help. More Mac and Cheese, that needs a lot of help to be even close to below avg. They also have a cheese platter that has cheddar and blue on it and just not well put together at all and not very tasty. Very hard to do with a cheese platter. But it’s about booze there not food. We find out the reason why the place is called Knee High. Apparently the owners went to Asia and one of the bars that they went to was run by people who were knee high (midgets), and I think that place was also called Knee High. They liked it so much they called it that in homage. We finish up close to 2 and head to bed. We head home in the morning. I’ve never ran into the same guy working at the airport before but the bartender coming in was the same as going out. Very small airport in Portland.
Very cool city and would go back. It gave me a lot of business ideas for my next bar. And a lot of ideas for drinks now and later. Very clean city as well. I do have to go down to Pikes place and see all the seafood stuff happen next time though.