Las Vegas Day Drinking

Sometimes you just gotta get out of town.  I know I guy who owes a lot of money to a loan shark.  It seems to me that would be a good time to get out of town.  These are the sorts of things I never was able to say before I moved to Vegas.  I kinda thought that loan sharks only existed in the movies before I moved here.  I was wrong.  Recurring theme. 

Anyway, I don’t owe money to a loan shark, but I did need to get out of town.  So I hightailed it to an ashram in San Diego.  And while I was looking forward to posting a story about smuggling hard alcohol onto the ashram premises, that’s not what happened. 

What happened was that I had a very nice lunch in Del Mar with my mother, who has become a bit of a cartoon character.  In a good way.  She’s called the Dowager.  She never leaves the house without a silver tipped cane, her oversized glasses and either a cape (not to be mistaken for a horse blanket, though it does bear an uncanny resemblance to one) or a secondhand fur jacket.  Not a fur coat, mind you, not all Cruella de Ville or Snoop Dogg style, but a half jacket, like you might see a little lady wandering the Upper East Side or Fifth Avenue wearing. 

Anyway, the two of us went to Americana, where in honor of the DayDrinker, my mother split a beer with me, her first beer in over twenty years.  Way to go Mum. 

And I must admit, the Dowager kinda schooled me on the bitter ales.  I had to wuss out and go back to my New York Egg Cream, which the waiter said was the first one anyone had ever ordered.  Come on now people, try something new, will ya?  Contrary to popular belief, it does not actually contain a raw egg.  Tragically.  That’s okay, I got my raw egg quota eating coffee cake batter, but that’s a different story.

Now, here’s the thing: I love politics, and all politics is local and I admire people who care enough to run for local politics.  I’m not sure how I feel about them campaigning while they are also my waiter. 

Patrick, our waiter, is also running for La Mesa town council.  He seems a delightful chap, enamored of urban gardening and pushing a sidewalk widening agenda.  All fine and dandy, I suppose.  Though, here’s a free tip for you Patrick, I’m not sure you are going to win over the voters of San Diego county by telling them they need to be more like Cuba. 

I kid you not.

As someone who grew up in Southern Florida and watched Cubans literally float in on cardboard boxes to make a better life for themselves here in the States, I am pretty sure there’s some more than suspect shit going down there.  Like I said, sometimes you just gotta get out of town. 

But he’s not wrong.  Yes, let’s urban garden- I have some lovely heads of lettuce popping up in my backyard that intend to eat upon my Vegas return.  And it’s very hard to argue against sidewalk expansion. 

But, I gotta say once my food came, I really wanted him to go away so I could enjoy my grass fed, if not local beef and imported gorgonzola cheese burger.  I made myself feel slightly better knowing that I had chosen Stone brewery’s Arrogant Bastard Ale, which was a local brew.  Today, I am a locabev, if not a locavore.  See, this is why you gotta get out of town- to eat and drink new stuff without compromising your ideals.