This week the City Weekly had a special edition about local music and there wasn't room for my column, so nothing new for you today. However, something happened here in corporate america that I didn't quite get.
They have this thing at my job called "Giving Roses." This means that before a departmental meeting you send in a "rose" to the Admin assistant and then they hand out the rose to your coworker during the meeting.
Get this, though. The rose isn't a rose which by any other name is generally considered to be a rose. No. In this case the rose is words.
For instance, the guy conducting the meeting said, "Let's give a bunch of roses to Martha. Martha is always cheerful and easy to work with. She has a positive spirit and rarely farts in her cubicle. Let's all give roses to Martha."
And then we're supposed to clap. I felt like giving roses to my friend who works here because she was smart enough not to show up to the meeting.
See you next week: The Photo Goes with the next story.
Quitting my job is in the cards. I’ve come up with a plan to end the grind of the 9-to-5 by becoming a professional gambler.
Like all good plans this one was conceived, incubated and hatched over four pitchers of beer at the Piper Down two Tuesday nights ago.
While any time of the day or night at the Piper Down is worth quitting your job over, on Tuesdays there is a friendly game of Texas Hold’Em poker that takes place starting at 8:30 p.m. The reason this is a “friendly” game of poker is because no money exchanges hands between the players and Miller Lite is $6 a pitcher.
On this night, 38 fools showed up to play cards and when the final deal was done there were 37 losers and one winner. Just after midnight at the Piper Down, I walked away from the table only when the dealing was done. Right after, I won.
The next day at work, bleary-eyed, full of piss and vinegar and seven Advils, I told my co-worker Kristen that I was going to give my two weeks’ notice to become a professional gambler.
“Last night I beat 37 players in a game of cards.”
“How much did you win?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
“How much did you have to pay to play?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“So,” she said as though she were a human calculator summing up my life, “You’re going to quit your job over ‘nothing’?”
This concerned co-worker, who I figured would be throwing a going-away party for me in two weeks, said she had a friend who reads tarot cards. Since I knew quitting my job was in the cards, I promised Kristen I wouldn’t give my notice until, from the tarot cards, I got a second opinion.
The night of the tarot card reading, we ordered Chinese food and plowed through fortune cookies and General Tso’s chicken (Thought: Does General Tso outrank Colonel Sanders?).
My cookies came with lottery numbers and proverbs and promises of more money and raises at work. With each new cookie, I began to pen my exit strategy: “Dear Employer, once a week you let me come into work, unshaven, wearing Levis and a golf shirt (untucked). This bone you toss called ‘Casual Friday’ is no match for what I am going to call ‘My Casual Life.’ If you need to reach me, call Piper Down.”
Then came my reading and the second opinion was terminal. First off, when the tarot card reader, Jasmine, asked me to shuffle the tarot cards, I thought she’d see I was a gambling-card-playing-natural, possibly even sponsoring my entrance fee into the World Series of Poker.
Not only did this woman not mention anything about my poker-playing prowess, she said, “The cards speak to seek stability in your job.”
“Maybe you’re reading those things upside down,” I said. “Could they possibly be saying, ‘Quit your job?’”
I decided to pit the deck of tarot cards against a deck of poker cards.
The next Tuesday night at Piper Down, I walked into this spacious bar, past all of the TV sets and people sitting in their booths, back into the room where the cards where going to be dealt and the chips were going to fall.
Two hands later, I was walking out of the card room and back into the bar with a free T-shirt—or as they call it in the card-playing world, The Booby Prize. Out of 53 card players, I was the first one to lose all of my stake and pride.
Now I have to keep my job. But that’s OK, because you’d be hard-pressed to call me a loser while I’m sitting at the Piper Down drinking $6 pitchers of beer in my NASCAR Rusty Wallace Miller Lite T-shirt.
Here's this week's column from the City Weekly:
I don’t have the kind of hair that made Carrot Top goofy. Or the carefully coifed look of Randall Carlisle. No. Think Bruce Willis. The kind of hair your stylist spends more time shampooing and collecting than cutting.
In reality, Drano down the shower drain probably cuts up and through my hair more often than Memorie, the only person who has cut my hair for four years. Still, once a month, I pay $19 to Salon Valentina to have less of my hair cut than the month before.
By happenstance and circumstance, I was in Florida last week and needed a haircut. The mileage meant I couldn’t get my haircut at Salon Valentina. This was the first mistake. Mistake No. 2: The woman (?) who cut my hair only had one eye. I’m not certain, but I think she lost her eye to a pair of scissors in hair-cutting school, the day after she learned how to cut mullets.
A problem bigger than a one-eyed barber and a receding-hair mullet, the “3 is a magic number” mistake: After that haircut and returning to Utah, I went for a few drinks at the Mynt Lounge.
The night I planned to take Ruth to the Mynt, my neighbor Zak said, “I hear it’s run by someone from Lunatic Fringe.”
“This means nothing to me.”
“Lunatic Fringe doesn’t cut hair,” Zak said. “They style it.”
After talking to Zak, I went up to the apartment and told Ruth what I’d heard. I couldn’t remember the name of the salon supposedly connected with the Mynt, so I said, “I hear the Mynt is operated by some people who own a fancy barbershop.”
Ruth said, “Do you mean Fantastic Sam’s or Supercuts?” Ruth cuts her own hair. I’ve always considered this a “positive.”
Before going to the Mynt, we ate dinner at Takashi. I only mention this because on our way out the door, Ted Scheffler (food critic for this very newspaper) entered the sushi restaurant.
Just because you freelance for the same newspaper doesn’t mean you run in the same circles as your co-writing friends, so I said, “Ruth, I’d like you to meet Ted. He’s the food reviewer for City Weekly.”
Ted said, “You mean the real food reviewer.”
This probably wasn’t meant as a “dig,” but a few years ago I wrote a column for City Weekly called Grain of Salt. This was a food review column that wasn’t about the food. Ted’s column is always about goose gizzards and the finer points of dining. I’d write about my grandma’s car, lawsuits and my McDonald’s-loving family.
Picture this: What if this bar column were about food instead of alcohol, and instead of writing about the Mynt, I wrote about, let’s say, “a haircut?” Can you then see why I wasn’t the real food reviewer?
It’s not like I couldn’t have been a real food reviewer. It’s just that for me a food review was either “Yes, I’ll eat there again” or “No, I won’t.”
For instance, if this were Real Bar Review, it would read like this:
The Mynt, located between Main Street and West Temple on 100 South, is a luscious place. The couches are like living, white amoebic pieces of furniture seemingly growing out of the walls. The floor, bar, tables and chairs are all white. If such a place existed, it would be like finding a hip bar in the Celestial Room of the Salt Lake Temple. And the people who fill this white space are beautiful. Their hair is definitely not cut at home or by a one-eyed barber.
Ordering from the “Myntalicous” drink menu may not put you on the right hand of God, but the concoctions are heavenly and, at $8 a cocktail, they will take you to a higher place—even if it is up to your eyes in debt.
After two Blood Mojitos (crushed mint and fresh berries), one Sexy Alligator (featuring Jager, melon, sour and chambord) and a bar tab of $58 with tip, Ruth and I walked/wobbled our bikes home.
Would I go to the Mynt again? Yes, but only after visiting Memorie.
It seems as though the only people visiting this very dormant site are spammers looking to enlarge my penis, gambling sites hoping to take my money playing cards or porn sites. While they all send a lot of “fan” mail (and sometimes good advice), I’m hoping there are still a few people clicking thinking this site will once again be about Antarctica.
To those, welcome to my life, but I'm sorry to disappoint you--I got a job in Utah.
My main place of employment I won't tell you about, but my side job is to be a columnist (again) for the Salt Lake City Weekly. I'll be reviewing bars and Private Clubs (as they are called in Utah).
This was my first assignment. But first I must add that the last time I was a columnist for the City Weekly the story length was around one thousand words, this story was written at that length and then had 300 words chopped out to fit the space. In the future I hope the story isn't, well, so choppy.
That being said, here's the first story:
Go RepublicanWay back in the early ’00s, Phil Jacobsen wrote a sorta-restaurant column for City Weekly called Grain of Salt. Now, after several tours of Antarctica (no, really), Phil is back and turning his stylized (ahem) reviewer’s attention to Salt Lake City’s nightclubs and bars. His first assignment: The Republican.
The Republican is a nondescript bar on State Street and, like a voting booth on Election Day, it’s the kind of place many people might not enter unless properly educated. This is how I got schooled:
Ruth and I moved into our place on F Street last month. Tonight was the first time Ruth’s mother, Betty, came over to see where her daughter was living.
Unfortunately the apartment couldn’t pass the proverbial white glove test, because the only white glove I’d had on today was my very soft, white, leather golfing glove.
My cat, Mr. Evans, sheds and the carpet hadn’t been vacuumed this week. Plus, Mr. Evans has Giardia—absolutely explosive diarrhea.
A great invention for cat owners is the litter that clumps around the presents by your feline friend. The downside to this clumping invention is a cat with Giar-diarrhea. Small balls of hardened chocolate kisses attach themselves to Mr. Evans’ paws and are now hidden around the apartment.
As Betty began to notice those weren’t brown tulips we were tiptoeing around, I waltzed her down the stairs, out the door and to a movie, one which begged the question, “What would you do if you found $1 million?” Help a charity? Donate to the poor? Take your cat to the vet for a checkup?
After we dropped off her mother, Ruth asked me the what-would-you-do-with-a-million-dollars question. “Time travel,” I said. “I would go back in time and relive this day.”
“Would you remember to clean the apartment on your excellent adventure?”
Even though I only wanted to travel back in time so I could use my 3-iron instead of my driver on hole No. 4 to lay up for a sweet shot onto the green versus ending up in the water hazard, I said, “I want to invent a time machine for the sole purpose of cleaning our apartment for your mother.”
I am a liar and I know it. I wouldn’t use the million dollars to better mankind. Not for school kids, education or welfare. I want the money for myself for purely selfish reasons. I want one million dollars to improve my golf game.
And, as long as I was denying pretend money to those who could really use it, I decided to continue my education by rubbing starch-pressed shoulders with fellow right-wingers at The Republican. I’d never been there so I figured at The Republican I could toss one back down the Orrin Hatch, then go home and get Tom Delay’d in our messy apartment.
Turns out The Republican isn’t a bar for, well, Republicans. This is an Irish pub with a heavy emphasis on “BAR.” The most striking thing about The Republican is the 70-foot wooden bar lined with so many stools you’d think my cat stopped by and had the run of the joint. A temporary membership isn’t required to enter The Republican, because they only serve beer. While they have Killian’s, Pabst, Cutthroat and Miller Lite on tap, the reason The Republican gets my vote is the creamy Tetley’s Pub Ale.
In 1911, Houdini tried to escape from a cask full of Tetley’s beer. He nearly died and failed in this trick for the same reason you’ll be unable to escape from The Republican. Once you step inside these doors and immerse yourself in a pint of Tetley’s Pub Ale ($5) you won’t want to leave.
If you belly up to the 70-foot bar on a Monday night, a group of Irish musicians will lull you back in time. And while this may not improve your last golf game or clean your apartment, with a belly full of Tetley’s you’ll leave The Republican feeling like a million bucks.