Popination Concentration
a series of unhinged personal essays disguised as pub reviews. Today: Alpha Charlie’s Tap & Tavern.
Well well. Here I am, in another office park flavored bar & grill that calls itself a tavern, sipping on a cold one and considering a lunchtime side salad. Whatever big golf tournament is happening now is on one of the screens above the taps, and on the other one, some kind of sports commentary, without captions. They’re saying something about the WNBA but I can’t tell what without captions. The place is…well to be honest with you I’m a little bored. Actually now that I think about it, this place really does echo Griffin Tavern, that other office park-y place 10 minutes from my house in the opposite direction, that was boring enough that I ended up not writing about it for a Popination piece here. I wrote a Note about it over on Substack’s Notes, and explained that not only was the place itself not giving me ideas, but my life wasn’t interesting enough to write about either at that particular afternoon, nor did Griffin remind me of anything more interesting in my past. Pub review: meh. Unhinged personal essay? ehhh not really. Not feeling it.*
But what am I doing here, yawning over my Dale’s Pale Ale? Well, I knew I’d be gone all next week and my partner had booked an hour in the shooting range for a little self-soothing time, so I figured why not try a new to me ‘tavern’ near the gun club? A little lunch, a Popination, and I can have a fresh piece for you all before my week of re-posts whilst I’m out of town.
*Judging from the way less boring turn my life has taken since then, yeesh. I’ll take the boredom back, thank you very much…
Who’s Charlie?
The area where Alpha Charlie’s Tap & Tavern is located can only be described as ‘suburban,’ or as I like to call it in particular: ‘office park-y.’ It’s not a residential suburban area, in other words, but a few sprawling blocks filled with clusters of businesses and restaurants that can’t quite be called malls, but that give off a similar strip-mall vibe. I call it corporate-bar aesthetic, if you can picture what that means. Most places around here look like chains; I don’t know if Alpha Charlie’s is a chain, but no research allowed for Popinations, remember? I also don’t know why it’s called Alpha Charlie’s either. But again. I can’t be bothered to find out. But if you remember what Bennigans used to look like? Or how I described Slattery’s, except with less character? That. Beige stucco on the outside, a row of picture windows on one side with neon signs advertising various booze and beer brands, and one that indicated it was OPEN.
Inside, there was a very widespread two-part sit-down restaurant type area and a long arcing wooden bar in the center. It was pleasantly air conditioned and the bartender, though partially absent, was also pleasant. As I idled away taking pictures and notes on my phone, a few middle aged and older knots of people in business casual came in, gaggle by gaggle, for martini (or at least margarita) lunches. They were cheerful, raucous, and obviously well known by the ‘tender, which makes me think she was a bit absent when I first arrived because she was gearing up for a familiar late lunch/early happy hour rush. These customers did add busy cheer to the environment, as did the lurid gaming machines over on one wall in a neat flashing row.
That’s what I’m saying (and what I said in that Note about Griffin): it’s not like the place is bad. The food is decent pub grub, the bartender knows her way around a pint pour, and they have a large variety in their bar and their taps and cans. But it’s like…I don’t know, I felt kind of sleepy in there, like there wasn’t enough character one way or the other to perk me up. Am I just that much more of a dive bar personality? I wouldn’t think so, as the two places I frequent most around my (also very office park-y) neighborhood are sort of corporate-y too. There’s something more interesting about both those places, though, and I’m not sure I can pin down what it is. Well, at I.C. it’s obviously the people that makes the biggest difference. But I don’t know—if I were closer to Griffin or to Alpha Charlie’s, would I feel the same way about those places eventually as I do about Slattery’s? Again, it’s hard to say—that is something of a chicken and egg question, isn’t it: how often would I go to a place where I’m bored? And why wasn’t I bored at Slattery’s?
See this? This is my boom stick.
I am well aware how much my readers may not want to hear about guns right now. But. It’s a thing in my family’s life. Not really mine, except obliquely, but being a member of this household, headed by my partner whose childhood was rural and filled with the things, it really is a matter of anxiety soothing for him—I wasn’t joking above, nor was I being cute. It’s important, and, though I don’t feel the same way myself, I understand it in his case, and his mom’s case, too. And his stepdad, who was the first to teach me the 4 Rules of gun-handling, and with whom I felt safe enough for the first time a few years ago, to go up to the range in the mountains where they lived and wield one.
It’s funny—though I feel remarkably comfortable around blades, including 4-foot-long swords, I don’t feel like I could ever be easy around firearms in the same way. Now, obviously, most of this is about familiarity and practice: I’ve spent many hundreds of hours wielding swords, and very few with guns. It’s just a matter of practice. But it’s the desire for the practice, too. I remember how I felt when I was in regular training in the martial arts, awhile back. My attitude toward firearms was pretty severe: I felt that they were a coward’s weapon, a cheat. That it was so easy to seriously hurt or kill another person with one, and you didn’t even have to be close to them. You didn’t even have to necessarily be able to see the person you shoot, and fatal accidents are so so easy too. You can accidentally kill yourself cleaning a sword, but it’d be real hard to. My view back in the day was that if you’re really wanting to hurt or kill someone, you should be very aware of it, choose it consciously, have the skill to use a weapon to do it, and be close enough to them that you feel it.
My attitude is different now, now that I know (and love, and admire) real people that are gun users. My past attitude was too black and white, not nuanced at all. Now I get more of the context around the culture and the weapons themselves, and I don’t feel quite so harshly, though the central argument around my personal aversion is still basically that, just with a lot more understanding.
Know what’s funny, too? I still (though I have gotten my license at this point) have a serious aversion, if not anxiety, surrounding driving. Now, again, obviously this has mostly to do with a lack of familiarity, and a lack of practice. But I can’t help but think there’s something to be said for why I am so squeamish around deadly machines, but not deadly weapons that are analog. Like a sword.
Side note: it’s also funny, I think, that my partner who’s so good and comfortable with guns, is absolutely terrified of my swords. I’ve taught him a little about some of the techniques, for stage, with my stage safe blades, but he’s very very uncomfortable wielding them. Then again, this is mainly about practice and familiarity, still.
Beta Charlie’s
In summary, it was just fine at Alpha Charlie’s. Boring. Nice and all, just. Eh. (Not as exciting as practicing firearms skills that afternoon, I’m sure. But.) And after Musing so much above about familiarity breeding, not contempt, but comfort, I wonder if these two recent boring bars aren’t really boring at all, just unfamiliar. After all, the series of Goth/Metal/Horror themed bars I’ve Popinated to weren’t familiar themselves, but the themes were, to me. And so that’s why I felt more comfortable in those places? That doesn’t explain the dive bars though, I don’t think. Or does it? Hm. Something to contemplate on my next visit to an unfamiliar bar. I’ll let you know my conclusions.