When God Closes A Door.....

It started as a simple proposition. Monique had asked if T-bone and I wanted to join her and some other people friday evening at the Lakewood Landing to watch the Presidential debate over a hamburger and some cheap beer. Sounds like a pleasant evening, no? I mean combining alcohol with your civic duty is a win-win situation, leading me to wonder how much higher voter participation would be if you got a voucher for a free 6-pack every time you voted, but I digress.

So friday night arrives, I call up some other people, and we decided to make an evening out of it. Start there, watch the debate, and see where the night takes us. There's just one problem....the Landing? Well, they said no dice to watching the debate there. Seems someone forgot to, you know, ask the bar first. So there we are, all planning to meet up but with nowhere to go. At which point, we begin going down the list of alternate bars.

Amsterdam Bar? They usually show it, but they don't want the, ahem, less than enlightened folks attending the State Fair to stop in and create a less than pleasant situation. Besides, the State Fair is a block away and who wants to fight through that traffic? Which also rules out the Meridian Room. Having spent the weekend before (and too much money) at Cosmos, we rule it out and call The Tipp. No dice, they're not showing it. Likewise for the Libertine, and we even called a hail mary and called the Cock & Bull. You getting the theme here? What seemed like a simple task has become nearly impossible....we can't find a bar that will show the debate. Eventually we end up just going to the Dubliner and they graciously allow us to watch it. And serve a really lousy french dip sandwich.

And for my liver's sake the evening probably should have ended there. But it didn't, Nick and Austin talked me into going to the Old Monk which it turns out was having it's Oktoberfest. Which means high alcohol beer served in gigantic 1L glass mugs (which would make as good a weapon as a drinking receptacle, these things weighed like 10lbs). Funny thing about drinking beer in 1L servings, you don't realize how much you're drinking. And while I had a great time (somehow running into a co-worker and three people I hadn't seen in years), it completely ruined my weekend as I spent the entirety of Saturday lamenting my age and inability to drink like I once did.