Not 86’d, Just Not Here.

Hey there! Surprised you found this, but welcome!

I have no idea what to do with this tiny little site. A lot’s happened since the last post, and my writing can be found anywhere but here. With that said, I may come back to this site and gussy it up a bit, and potentially use it for other projects I’m working on. Someday.

If you came here looking for some of my writing, I’ve got you covered:

I run Two by Tour with my partner, it’s a travel and lifestyle blog with a ton of awesome pictures.

I also write for Pregame Magazine, where I talk about business, philosophy, and mindfulness.

Some essays and shorter pieces can be found on my Medium profile. 

Finally, I write a weekly column of my favorite picks from the Comic Book Shop for The Game of Nerds. I also cover other pop-culture subjects, as well as TV shows like Archer.

There’s more out there, with more on the way. Maybe some of it will land on this site in the future.

In the meantime, be well!

Living the Dream

I wrote a novel in 23 days. It’s a clean, aggressive statement of fact. It needs another two revisions, but the plot walks, talks and acts like a novel, some of the characters made me cry a few times (more than a few times), and it’s an exploration of some very real elements of the very real world made fantastic. Nine years ago, I first signed up for NaNoWriMo, at this point why or how has been lost to the quicksands of drinking through my 20s. If memory serves, I managed to log 18,000 words of a detective story. I tried again the next year, and failed. Then the next year. Failed. Then I gave up. For the next few years I would peck at the notes and sketches of unrealized literary universes like a buzzard. The daredevil scribbles that kept me afloat as I drifted out of college and into a greasy kitchen to cling like a rat from paycheck to paycheck became happy, then bittersweet memories. The time between every visit to my files and drafts grew longer, the dust thicker with every wistful exploration of the past. I had literally lost the plot.

I attempted to live what I thought the life of a creator should be, rather than focusing on the act of creating. Everything was preparation, from recording endless hours of drunken ramblings with friends to paying close attention to all the intricacies of the stranger than fiction characters that would drift in the door of the dive bar I worked at. I had managed to conflate Bukowski with the less alcoholic parts of Hemingway and a dash of Vonnegut’s starry-eyed wistful wisdom, without any of their legendary prolific output. Talking the talk over everyone else, living the privileged and spoiled dream of a cranky white boy in his mid-twenties. I felt that my careless stabs at a literary career were enough, that I was owed something. That the millstone of rejection letters would, at any point, turn into a sweet wash of vindication as I hurled them back at my oppressors. Like any other spoiled and entitled individual facing reality, I quickly scurried to safety, and worked towards personifying some sort of archetypal bartender rather than carving my own identity.

I remember reading Bukowski late at night, and feeling utterly confused. There was no playbook. No guides. No trail blazed. It was hopeless. Bukowski’s epigraph, “Don’t try.” was resonating in all of the negative ways possible. I ceased to manically claw for the pen and was happy to fill my hands with PBR tall boys. That seemed like enough of a lack of effort to please Hank. A passing train howled by in response, verifying my new religion. I set to work living a bartender’s dream, stopped going to readings, let the dust continue to collect and banged out sparse poems that would land in unpublished and unread chapbooks.

Everyone has something they want to be known for, something they might have imagined being said at their funeral. Contemporary culture is absolutely bloated with the trope of being able to witness your own funeral. I’d like to be remembered as funny, kind and hardworking, someone who has labored to harvest fruit. The notion of truly earning something is incredibly important when I set to work considering the composition of my history, especially when I closely examine my younger predecessor. Little man thought because he could string a few words together he had earned something. Well, one time I made a decent Manhattan at home, that shit didn’t make me a fully-fledged cocktail bartender. After running a gauntlet of bartending gigs for a decade, I know what I earned. If you handed me the keys to a cocktail bar, that’d be fair. If, in my mid-twenties, you had handed me some bizarre and mythic literary contract which only exists in Hollywood (which is exactly what I think I was expecting) I would have probably sucked the whole thing up my nose and, along with the dust on all my manuscripts, without ever producing a damn thing.

I was never completely guilty of putting a cart before the horse, naming a rock band before ever playing a show, but nine years ago, I had never earned what I was waiting for, I had never even put in the time to justify those demands I was putting on life. I still haven’t. The difference is that nine years later, I sat down and produced, rather than waxed ad nauseum about it. The difference is now I understand that archetypes are great for stories, but not much else. The difference is that I’ve given myself over to living a writer’s dream. It just happens to be mine.

Permission Slipped

A journey is a transformative experience. One of my favorite professors noted that there are only two types of stories, going to war and coming home. While I now know that he was being mischievously reductive, especially given his dry, almost monotone delivery, the act of being itself is in constant flux. The river we stand in is both the homecoming and the march to war, and whether you are aware of the active principals of experience does not change the reality of shifting metaphysical dimensions.

To dispense with the bullshit, life doesn’t ask permission.

I knew leaving Pittsburgh, and with it, the region of the world I had known my whole life would be different, and likely confusing at times. Completely removed from the geographic context of my past life, conversations come easier, and I’m significantly less guarded. Knowing your small city well is a double-edged sword. The habitual assumptions of a slightly jaded bartender still hold- there’s always going to be cruel and small-minded morons the world over, indeed, entire leagues of them populate the United States, as my newsfeed continues to illustrate. However, the sort of laissez-faire attitude that I’ve always been envious of comes easily. There’s a never-ending kaleidoscope of new perspective coloring my vision of the world as it streams by the car window. Given the fact that we’re leaving the country, the country is not my station, not my sidework, not my fucking problem.

I thought I would be a little more distraught leaving the homeland, but thus far the only items on the list are of a gustatory nature. It’ll be a long time before I have proper BBQ, whiskey and any number of things in ready supply. The United States really is a series of undelineated countries that largely speak the same language. I have a great appreciation for the vast variety packed into a single flag. Writing this from the Left Coast, Pittsburgh, Ohio, the whole lot is eons away. What’s more, I’ll be back at least once a year, well before any imagined withdrawal symptoms set in.

I have learned, surrounded by strangers as we are, that people are generally nice, given the opportunity. The sparks of conversation have been a light when the strain of travel left me feeling remote and removed. While the trip has been incredibly relaxing by and large, it certainly has not been without trying or stressful moments. Being smack dab in the middle of the Grand Scheme of Things has helped adjust the way in which I deal with stress. It’s not something that is easily postponed on the road. Lacking my usual comfort zones, I am forced to employ all the little tricks I was too lazy to implement previously.

Perhaps the biggest revelation is, as with my stress-management, something I have always known. Writing every day has kept me feeling primed and engaged. Whether it was a journal entry, a poem or a piece for the travel blog, it’s helped me find the shape of the days as they sail by. It’s helped me find an intentionality to my being that previously came in fits and starts, sputtering out with every long shift or bender (or recovery for that matter).

I have been known to make cavalier declarations, though my tender age has brought a creeping wisdom, stubborn lichen on a slow-moving stone. That said, the decision to travel has been the soundest I have made in my life, and regardless of the challenge transplanting myself into Ecuador may be, I feel wholly prepared. Not because I am fluent in Spanish, have a back-up plan, or a job, but because knowing that I have none of these things does not frighten me in the slightest. Fortune favors the bold, and I’ve never turned down a challenge when life slams one into me. After treading water for the last several years, it’s past due to ask a little more of my life. My shoes are still a little wet, and I may slip a bit, but that’s one thing no one ever needed permission for.

Prelude to a Wagon Train

It’s been a few months since I walked away from the bar, something that defined my life for a decade. In the midst of a retirement of sorts, I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t miss the weight of a tin or a jigger as much as I thought I would. I certainly don’t miss the almost daily hangovers, and, if pressed, I wouldn’t be able to claim I missed the mounds of worldly bullshit I’ve consigned to the ash heap of my life.

I’ve been in a recuperative, chrysalis mode of being; divesting myself of my apartment, preparing for a trek across the country, and strangely, divesting myself of personal connections. While I’m certainly not above burning bridges, and have torched my fair share of them, the mere absence from the world of bartending has proved to be a weight some of the more slender threads can’t seem to bear.

There’s still a large learning curve, switching gears from a loudmouth barfly and overly committed bartender to loudmouth homebody and earnest explorer of literary pursuits. In less than a month, my wonderful partner and I are going to start a trek across the country, eventually crossing down south into Mexico, and at some point, hopping into a plane and flying to the city of Cuenca, Ecuador. I’ll have to finish out learning the curve along the way.

We’ve been practicing Spanish every day, cooking for ourselves, talking to our cat and going for long walks through downtown Pittsburgh. This is the longest vacation either of us have had in many years over, and it’s turned two service industry refugees back into real people that can sleep through the night. We have the headspace for something more than slogging through to the next day off when we can finally catch up on all of the things restaurant workers tend to sacrifice and let slip while they’re bolting on smiles, weathering harassment or just generally being brave.

Being brave is still a lot of work, it probably will always be, and I would never bite down too hard on the hand that fed for so long, but once your physical tolerance for the life starts to show signs of wear, you’re pretty much left with passion and sanity, and even for mutants like restaurant workers, those are not bottomless fonts of energy. My partner and I weren’t good to ourselves for a long period of time, and simple fixes like a handful of vitamins and few decent home-cooked meals makes us both feel like strangers in our own bodies at times.

The migration away from the best and longest party I’ve been to yet was tectonic in its arrival. At first, I rightly believed I had stretched myself too thin, one more trip on top of all the trips and panic attacks in a hotel room. Then a friend had a book of her poetry published. Then another announced she was going back to school. Still another moved into brand work, a venture assuredly more forgiving than the grind of a service well. Like stars winking awake in the dusk, friends and colleagues were taking control. While there have been slow but definite glimmers of concern for social, mental and physical health in our industry, a think piece is decidedly different reading than seeing a friend actively fighting against the constant tide of addiction, hurt and death we hide behind those precisely machined smiles of ours.

It’s obviously not all bad, and there was no one holding a gun to my head to keep going, to keep pushing, unless it was me, which was often the case. Though many, if not most, of my social connections seem tenuous, there’s been no black ball, no crashing gavel condemning me to never speak to these people again. The life I have heretofore led has yielded wealth that defies mere explanation. I have had more than my share of fun in this life, and I have no intent of stopping; my preference for method of ingestion has simply changed.

I’m an incredibly stubborn individual, and it took a lot of negotiating with myself to re-align the lens. This is the last time you’ll apply for this, the last for that. One last trip to San Antonio, one less trip out to the bar after work. After a year and change of negotiation, I was comfortable with the idea of not just leaving my post, but leaving a city I had known as home for thirteen years. The realities of restaurant life-spans and economics made the exit from said post a little quicker, and it’s truly heartbreaking that a place that gave me so much wasn’t something I could pass on to another bartender.

In less than a month, being brave will continue to be that much easier, despite the safety restraints of habit. I always wanted to be a bartender- they always have the best stories, whether they’re re-distilled into the rasp of a 19th century tavern keeper or it’s the soft-spoken yarn, interspersed with chuckles, from the tender down the street. I can only hope to succeed in that belief, as it’s a hat I’ll never throw away, though I’m not sure if I’ll ever wear it again. In less than a month, we’ll step out of retirement and into what can only be termed as on-the-job training.

I’m incredibly excited about wrangling the experience into words along with wrangling my self into some semblance of discipline. Mostly, I’m excited to get gone. These quiet and introspective days are beautiful; summer is the only time it’s appropriate to live in Pittsburgh. The farmer’s markets are a bounty, the river front trail at dusk is a magical place for a run or a stroll and my thirteen years here have left me with some amazing friends to spend these last days with. That said, it doesn’t exactly make for gripping reading, which is something I always strive to create.

The Merit of a Badge

So, the news of defeat is generally something that briefly lingers on the front lines before spilling back and over supply lines, wreaking havoc upon the works. There’s not usually a great deal of warning, as we’re given to believe to in all the fancy book-learning, all the movies and words we’ve digested.

As the saying goes, history is written by the victors, Bad Guys-0, Good Guys-1, which, while decidedly accurate for much of history, is a simplistic and decidedly pedestrian oculus from which to view the expanse of human effort.

All of the stories and maps and battles I’ve studied in my life lend themselves to the belief that defeat was not only imminent, but something that was, generally speaking, invisible to those that command force. Obviously, history is by definition a glossary of terms, with an emphasis on that first of three syllables. A fine sheen of quantifiable understanding placed on a morass of existence, a snapshot, a test question. There’s not a lot of high scores.

Speaking from the grounds of a grievous defeat, I can say with great confidence, that it’s decidedly a morass, it’s something defined by ego, denial and a sort of zealotry.

The royal We knew of this end, We saw it coming from several financial quarters away, but We believed We could stave it off, staunch the flow, maybe We could even stop it.

The bar I have called my home for the better part of four years will be gone in a matter of weeks, the program I ran for nearly a year, with varying degrees of success, will die with it.

This comes in tandem with the epiphany that the life of a bartender is no longer something that fuels my exclusively. I spent several hours last night talking at my partner, lamenting the loss of identity, the merit badge of a tattooed barspoon I proudly sought out no less than two years prior, the lack of definition my life seems perched to plunge into, all because I no longer believe bartending will save the world, if I ever did, nor will it save me.

A decade ago, I went to war, tattooed it on my left wrist and owned the belief that I am a writer. I struggled a bit, did a lot of drugs, did more drinking, and collected rejection letters. I fucked around a lot, to be fair. I worked down the street at a dive bar. It was a glossy cover to a slightly tangled morass of existence. Being behind the bar made more sense. The money spoke, the lure of the bar howled, and the opportunity grabbed me by the dick and swung me like a cat, and I smacked every target I could within that tiny orbit.

Years down the road, the royal We wanted to hand the keys off, not lock a door. While I know in the academic sense that there’s nothing left in the locker room, I feel like the field is still a little barren, but that may have more to do with being called in for the 4^th quarter. My drift away from a life that kept the fires lit happened alongside the hypothetical conversations about all of it tumbling down, and, as it all slowly turned soft, saggy and sunk back into creation, I felt cold. I feel cold. Like a photo, scuffed and de-contextualized blowing up and down the street in a Pittsburgh February. A snapshot.

At the end of it all, the loss of one bar is barely a single skin cell’s worth of loss in the grand cosmic body of existence, and one that by definition, has to be shed.

We would posit that history is written not by the victors, but the owners. We are of the belief that owning history deprives those that have willfully hurt, slighted, abused or betrayed.

In this case I have been hurt, but it makes me no less the owner of a series of snapshots, lessons and test questions. While places and people may be shed, the history remains for those who keep score.

For a game to be played, there must be the risk of defeat. If there’s a risk of defeat, there’s a way to win.

If there’s a way to win, there’s a reason to keep score.

I’ll Tell You What I Want (What I Really, Really Want)

This is how it always goes; best intentions, holidays and pre-scheduled turmoil, you ignore a nagging ding or thirty from Siri telling you it’s time to sit down and disgorge your dome-piece, and, none the wiser, you find yourself three months away from the last entry.

That’s exactly what’s plucking the strings of the drum-beater, for me, right now.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory had that wonderful ending, where Gene Wilder tells Charlie that he’s going to live happily ever after. He got everything he ever wanted. His elementary-school ass imagined as much as it could of the universe, he got it, and that was it. I mean, they’re not getting into Oompa-Loompa labor issues, the utilities and property tax issues with a massive factory, let alone, ::shudder:: nut allergies and gluten, but you won the game, kid.

A few years ago I read Nick Offerman’s book, Paddle Your Own Canoe, and he lays out this beautiful scene, where he had married the lady of his dreams, scored a house in the Hollywood Hills, and was bumming around in his pool, smoking a J and drinking, I will assume, Lagavulin. The end of that story is that he got bored immediately.

Well before I moved to Pittsburgh, I wanted to be a bartender. Then I moved here, and eventually became one. I tried out all of the bartending identities literature gave me, then I tried out the shinier ones in magazines. There was a (thankfully brief) period where I was the insufferable whelp toting a copy of Embury around, who’d get cranky about vodka. I traveled, I went to seminars, I took notes, I made friends with people across the country, then partied mightily with them. I told myself I would either get the job I knew I could do, or I would skip town and try again. I’m still here. I’ve been wearing the bartender identity for nearly a decade.

The best way to motivate me is to tell me I can’t do something, which explains my current position.

“Hey, hey you. I did that thing. And you’re still a fuck. Really, I’m just talking to myself, but it’s important that if we were to ever meet again, you’d know that you are a fuck immediately, as my success is so fucking bright it will sear the fuck right off of you. Which makes you nothing. You fuck.”

I’m Charlie, I get to run my own factory of delights, and my Oompa-Loompas are generally agreeable. Winning is fucking amazing. It’s humbling, beautiful and instructive. Failure follows right on the heels of victory, whether it’s missing an ordering deadline or running out of product or just bombing when you’re supposed to be the example, let alone the leadership.

My roommate relayed some wisdom to me from one of the denizens of the dive down the street, being that I am in what is delicately termed as a “Velvet Slump”. Everything is perfect in its entropy.

I originally got into this racket to provide fuel for the fire of writing. I enjoy making music, jewelry, sculpture, paintings, but most of all, writing. Nothing gets me off so completely as slaying a page or two. The closest I get to any of that is the odd email where I need more than a handful of sentences; I haven’t given birth to things the way I know I want to, not in a very, very long time. My partner and I were discussing the nature of cooking and bartending and the lassitude we both find ourselves in, coming to an agreement that while both are admirable and at times, high-minded crafts, they simply are not art. Like, big A, mission statement, precious, turtle-necked Art.

I do have friends that manage to tow a line, and I admire them for their tenacity and ability to have their cake as well as scarf it down between shifts. I’ve never had that much discipline, and I’m resigned to not shortchanging the act of creation on account of my vocation. Not to say my friends and colleagues do, but that I certainly can’t walk and chew gum at the same time.

So here’s Charlie, living happily ever after, but knowing that he’s gonna need dentures before the year’s out. This change in role has been frighteningly instructive, and has certainly yielded a lot of personal confrontation with uncomfortable truths. The most terrifying part is that while I thought this was the next step, the beginning of the next chapter in a very cool tale of bootstraps and bars, it turned out to be, at least for the time being, a bridge too far.

I’m looking forward to the future, and I’m looking forward to tacking that last merit badge on my sash when I hit 1 year as captain, but the thought of more fruit withered on the vine is just too much beyond that. It’ll be well past time for a new game, a new board and new rules.

In the meantime, there’s all types of merit badges to win, and minding my craft in the highest sense possible.

No Worse for Wear

Summer is slipping back under its own curtain call like smoke. The Indian Summer is over, the clocks have fallen back, it’s 5:12pm and the sky will be the color of a glass of Fernet within the hour. The change in the seasons means I’ve made it through a season, did the thing, made the drinks, just to end up at the head of the line again to get on the same ride. Time to change the menu, so we can be in a position to change the menu.

It feels significantly more like I’m not borrowing someone else’s clothes when I’m at work these days. I’ve developed my own rapport with our purveyors, and managed to get my margins better than anything the restaurant has ever seen. Having several months’ worth of data and concrete changes in your corner when the owner thinks the numbers are too good to be true is probably one of the proudest professional accomplishments I have notched to date.

I’ve been able to give my staff everything they want and need, and it feels great doing the exact opposite of my predecessor and living up to most of my erstwhile big talk as the outside guy looking in. I will admit to missing my role as an agitator and the squeaky wheel; it was something that seemed to fall on me naturally, and it was vocation I took a lot of pride in. That same pride definitely held me back, however, and a lot of it metastasized into some really foul cancerous shit I’m still finding at the bottom of the well I pull from every time I wake up.

How fortunate are the ones who are able to head into work with the expressed intent of improving someone’s quality of life, to see the smiles and softening of a world and society that seems to naturally sway towards cold and brittle. I have nothing to be resentful of, not anymore. My partner rightly pointed out a few months ago that even if I did fill out all the check boxes and did all the things that I have done, that didn’t entitle me to anything.

At the time, that really hurt, and not just because it was true. It hurt because I knew it was true, and having that placed on the table in front of me made me realize just how much all that resentment had spoiled my appetite. Here I was, with the job I set out as a five year plan less than three years ago. Ahead of schedule, dream bar, bells and whistles, the whole nine, and I’m squawking off Downtown (in one of my favorite parks, no less) ruining an otherwise perfect evening with complaints about shit that’s over a year gone cold, at the least.

That’s certainly not to say I have since ceased my caterwauling on the iniquities of the past, not entirely. Some legitimately fucked things happened to me along the way (in no small part because I am an agitator at heart and have never been able to suffer fools, especially not easily), and I definitely have sympathy for little angry J. circa 2010-15. He was right, and history has borne this out.

But fuck me if I would put up with the little shit head’s antics and histrionics now, and I’m occasionally a little embarrassed at the things I still won’t fully own. I still don’t know what other challenges this dream job has for me, but bridging the gap of resentful rage and this pseudo-zen state of bewilderment is definitely the next one. I can’t walk back my entire personality. I have to let it grow, and hopefully I have the foresight to prune the right branches. You get left with some mighty unsightly bits if you cling to the unhealthy and dark parts. Those are the uncomfortable moments you eventually have to own.

It can’t all be now-mythic yarns about the dive bar days; it’s apologizing and owning up after being a giant turd on social media. It’s making sure you mean what you say and then actually do it, because there’s always a squeaky wheel. It’s definitely passing on what I’ve learned, and it might even be encouraging wheels to be a little more unruly, within reason. Certainly, it’s not a prescription for everyone, but it’s worked for me.

The Fall and Winter cocktails are upon us, along with a season that begs quiet contemplation. The former is just another day at the office, and the latter, that’s actual fucking work.

Here’s to it.

Round One

Part of this exercise is compiling a list of things I’ll never fucking do again, ever.

At the tippy-top is changing out and adding new drinks for a grand total of 14 new recipes. That’s more than twice the size of most restaurants’ entire lists. The hours bartending rather than tending to the business of the bar were an added bonus, to be sure. Having a fully-trained staff is generally considered advantageous when changing leadership.

But, it’s almost done; the floor has largely been swept of the leavings of the previous staff, some crummier than others. One more re-print and the menu will be a creature of mine own fashioning. One more week and the To Do lists of today that held such ceremony will continue to sublimate with increasing rapidity into the blur of this vocation.

None of this was graceful. Logistics were barely in place, recipes were absorbed a la minute, and I broke the printer. But we got it all out, and I was still able to take a vacation. Which I will be adding to the list of things I’ll never do again, but shit, it was a wedding, and it was on the books way before the entire former staff flew the coop and left me holding the chicken-wire.

Today my predecessor brought in the last of their basement’s riches, some 40 bottles of a vodka I’m going to be staring at balefully for the next six months. The week before I received from them a key to the liquor room. The week before that, a key to the office. Watching someone slowly absolve themselves of ownership is a big part of this industry. We can see it in the mirror when we are trudging out our two weeks. We can see it on the face of the sad/angry/relieved soul the day before they NCNS. We can see it in the flour-caked/cava-soaked/drunken smile of someone who has put in their time, and has finally gotten a shot at something better, moving on amidst a celebration on their last day.

This has been a unique transition. There is no celebration of any kind, just a quiet transfer of a world’s weight.

To be sure, I’m privately celebrating. Playing Tetris with several thousand dollars’ worth of inventory on the back bar, tearing through dead inventory and turning it into money, picking up the first new addition to the inventory and planning a frozen blender drink for a bar many in town still perceive as a bit of a snobatorium, yeah. There are a few a reasons to celebrate.

This last month has been characterized by erasure; removing circles and systems that really, at the end of the day, served themselves, and not a bar that so desperately deserves to thrive and be counted as proof that those whom tend bar deserve to be well-paid, well-respected and well-supported. The more whitespace you have on the page or the canvas, the heavier the promises you have to make as you fill those spaces.

I can’t promise we’ll thrive, I can’t promise we’re a shining example.

I can promise that I will fight like hell to make both of those notions a reality.

Here’s to the blur.

The Novitiate

Very recently, after years of pining away (in perhaps the most melodramatic, teenaged, clove-smoking, Smiths-listening sense) for my own bar program, my precious little dreams came true. If you had told me it would be at the helm of the best cocktail program in a city in the midst of a major food and beverage renaissance, I’d probably order another boilermaker and tell you to piss off.

But here we are, armed with a red sharpie and my a-grindin’ axe, and due to a series of events both unfortunate and/or purely eventful, the team now in place is 100% new to the bar.

There is possibly such a thing as too much wish fulfillment happening here, but I’m frankly too occupied to contemplate the whole karmic cycle thing right now.

The menu is drenched in red, festooned with arrows and my percussive, all-caps shorthand. Some problems are magically fixed just by a change of hands, some cocktails revived and brought to proper execution by the disappearance of managerial resistance (aka, I’m wearing the daddy pants now).

I always told myself, with every manager, good or bad, that I was going to remember exactly what it was like in those crystal moments, not just the horror stories:

The encouragement of my elders, and the mantra I learned in New Orleans as an Apprentice at Tales of the Cocktail, the world’s largest convocation of all things alcoholic-“Don’t be a hero, be a legend.”

The annoyed shrug of a manager when I had the audacity to claim, among other such outrageous statements, that a seasoned, professional server should know the difference between a Stout and an IPA.

Experiencing another bartender tank, scramble and mutilate the method, facts and history behind a spirit or drink, and having to swallow that shit sandwich.

All of the expectations of the chrysalis have been bequeathed to a shivering hatchling, who is destined to make at least a few of the same mistakes- something that horrifies me. I love the opportunity that making mistakes allows, it’s the only way you can grow as a person.

As a student of history, however, the certainty that I will invariably play a part in someone else’s crystal moment is terrifying, and preventing history from repeating itself is just one of the plates I’ll be spinning.

The first menu reprint is the beginning of what I sincerely hope is a (generally) happy blur.

Here we go.

86 Salt

Yo, real talk.

The first moment I ever felt inspired to make my drinks dance more than a Wisconsin Old Fashioned, more than a shaken dirty “Vokka” Martini, it was magic. I believe a lot of the troops in this game will have similar stories.

This week Pittsburgh is losing a gem of some weird and bizarre dimension. NACL, aka Salt of the Earth, aka, SALT, aka Kevin Sousa’s lovechild, aka focal point of the talk in this small-ass town for the last five years, for better or worse. We’re worse off.

My feelings on Sousa, who opened the restaurant, are on record, but the emotions he dredged up and put into bronze with Salt are also on record. Despite the fact he’s been removed from the 412 proper for a minute, his presence still looms. It’s deserved.

Circa 2011, I unno, maybe 2010, I was bartending at Sonny’s Tavern. I was ruhl fixed into the role of a snarky, rough, chain-smoking bartender. I had even had a Hunter S. Thompson inspired cigarette holder; I was working a role, writing poetry on all types of amphetamines, playing pool in my basement on all types of endorphins, legal and otherwise.

My dart team, Team USA (because anyone else is an auto bad dude), just won a season. It was the first of a few. I miss darts, it’s an honest, drunken sport for the unathletic. In any case, My teammate, a reputable business owner and purveyor of fine pizza always recommended Salt. He had been hitting the employees up with subs and pizza for a minute, and was always treated as such at Salt. It was a place cats like us, running around places like Sonny’s, could be treated like ballers. To paraphrase, my boy said, “Roll in as is. They don’t care. They will take care of you.”

My dart team came into a gorgeous spot rolling deep in its prime, and as a bartender, I was eye-glued to Maggie Meskey and Summer Voelker straight killing it. I was witness to a lot of magic before I went upstairs, and I sampled the fruits of both bar and kitchen. It was an amazing evening.

I saw these amazing tenders killing it, and at the time, I was begging my way into the game on the inspiration of Sean Enright (to paraphrase, “this didn’t become a career until I treated it like a career”), and that evening kept me on a bender of asking for anything my cup could hold. I saw Rosemary lit on fire. I saw both Chartreuse colors thrown into some of the most evocative and wonderful cocktails I’ve had.

Ever.

That was the day I wanted more.

My good friend Jeremy has carried a lonely torch in a city now filled with explosions. He kept up the tradition that I rolled into, as some half-cocked, blue-collar captain of a certain side of the tracks. I have been attending a wonderful environment for learning, drinking and community since.

It’s with a heavy heart I say farewell to a place I was lucky enough to stage in for a night. Pittsburgh changes. Faster than I think I lot of us who weren’t born here are interested in. At the end of the day, however, we’re always going to be here. We change with this beautiful city, softly, violently, passionately.

This is a thank you, to those that walked it before me, that taught me, that made it okay to expect some decent fucking sashimi and an old fashioned, let alone leapfrogging this town’s cuisine for years.

I wouldn’t be here without Salt. The people that worked there, that drank there, that taught me, this hurts.

We’ll keep on. We’re Pittsburgh. We breed steel wills.

There will never be another Salt, all the baggage aside, we’re worse for it.

We’ll keep on. We are Pittsburgh.

This town is pure steel.