The Title

out of the twelve reviews on yelp, this dive bar averaged 2.5 out of 5 stars which is the same as saying fifty percent; a fairly strong F. from the sounds of it, it's a dive bar to the very definition of dive: stiff, inexpensive drinks, and character-driven experiences. the location alone-- the heart of the tenderloin-- should be a better warning than anything you'll find on yelp.

when you walk into a closet-sized bar on ellis street (ellis and anything), you should expect a few trannies, crackheads, and diseased penises to float by you and your cheap wild turkey n' coke. that's just how it is. i dare say that's why you go in the first place.

but based on the following review-- and the fact they're hiring inexperienced bartenders-- i am making a solid effort to work at this seedy establishment.

yes, it is in the middle of the ghetto, and you're gonna know it. but you should have been able to tell that much by it's address, and if you couldn't, then you have no business being there.

my girlfriends and i went there because it was the closest bar to our host's apartment. but we definitely got the "are you lost?" look. the men were doing karaoke in vietnamese, and the bartenders didn't know how to make cocktails that don't list the ingredients in their name. but nonetheless we were having a good time drinking kind of "chef surprise" concoctions. we got sick of the off-key crooning, so we took over with some of our own. they might have been making fun of us, or they might have been genuinely entertained, but the guys were cheering us on, and asking for more. we really did have an awesome time. but the night abruptly came to an end when a man sat down at the bar next to us, whipped it out, started touching himself, and no one else in the bar was freaked out.

solid. gold.

every job i've ever taken has been mostly for the experience of it all. heck, i was even a video-game tester for atari once. it's the rush of entering a scene in which i do not belong and studying the ways of those who do until i can mimic them entirely and convince them i'm just the same.

i think i've always been secretly training to become a con-artist.

but i'm also a firm believer of every interaction helping at some point down the line. when i worked as a tour guide i could not believe how blessed i was to have already worked as a camera salesman. the ability to look into an audience and know their cameras and what their cameras said about them was priceless. i knew how to talk to the nikon people and how to talk to the canons because i was the one who sold them the camera in the first place.

there are those who say they can talk to anyone, but they pick who "anyone" is. they're afraid of street people and if they ever tried to buy drugs it would be assumed they were a narc. there are also the hustlers who are great at slanging and backed fifty-fold with street-cred, but they'd be arrested if they even walked into a bank.

i want to be able to talk to anyone-- rich, poor, classy, ghetto, tranny, supermodel, hyperglycemic, hypoglycemic, and the whole lot.

i've worked at a liquor store which was hardly seedy-- though we did get held up at gunpoint once-- and in some ways i've found i learn more about humankind when i get to see the raw action rather than the performed characters. when you go into a camera store, or hop on a tour bus, or call your credit card concierge, you act a certain way. we both act a certain way. but in a liquor store, on the streets, in a t.l. dive bar... it's an entirely different game.

and besides, it guarantees good stories.

if not the dive bar, maybe i'll go the other route and just become an awesomeness reminder.