Interesting and/or amusing short stories written by yours truly can be found here

False Interior Roof

4/15/2018

I like any bar with a false interior roof and Double Barrel's is no exception. It's an artificially time-worn A-frame slatted roof that hovers over a horseshoe bar, giving the space the look of a wild west saloon on-display inside of a contemporary hipster pseudo dive. I like a false interior roof not just for it's whimsical redundancy, but because of its effect on any conversation being held beneath it. Atempts at righteous indignation come off as petty or inappropriate. Political tirades read the way a drunk dad going on a class-war rant at a Disney world might- inappropriate for the venue. Surly bartenders come off as either failing to see the ridiculousness of the situation, or simply playing the role to a tee... Meanwhile honest attempts at positive emotions such as affection, earnestly, joviality are accentuated by the kitch of being in what is essentially a themed-bar. The point being, it's hard to take yourself too seriously when your sitting in a bar designed to look like something from an era relegated to history through the filter of cultural touchstones like Marty's stand off with Mad Dog Tannen in Back to The Future III.

Beyond the roof what Double Barrel actually is, is a neighborhood bar. It sits on the cradle of an area know as Seven Corners in lower SE Division. Due to the massive transformation this neighborhood has undergone in the last few years the aptly named “Division” area is like if one of your coolest friends from your twenties just returned to your life wealthy after they quit playing in bands and moved directly to San Francisco with the singular goal of making money an a tech related start-up. Now you're sort-of simultaneously proud-of and disgusted by them.

The crowd at Double Barrel is like a gut-rot cocktail of 2 parts Dead Moon patched denim clad "old Portland" fixtures, 1 part indie band people, 1 part new Portland transplants with desky jobs who revel in things like wearing shorts, discussing IPA's, and mixing tank tops, beer-guts, hats from whatever their home team is*, and gold watches like some kind of weird Rube Goldberg compensation machine, and 1/4 part old timers who went to the bar that was in its place before it shut down after someone committed suicide via shotgun near where the pool tables used to be (creating what is probably a mostly overlooked dark irony in the new title). It's sort of a microcosm of the plight of new Portland but unlike the rest of Portland tearing itself apart over their differences, misguided squabbling, and the cavelcade of self righteous social media call-outs, Double Barrel seems Largely peaceful with it's mixture. Maybe what keeps the peace is the passive aggressive culture we live in, where some one would rather spend their night writing an rewriting an eight paragraph lecture on Yelp than confront a waitstaff. But I think it's the roof. ☐

*Some people may view this is too favorable. I almost the entirety of my early twenties on SE division from 2002-2010 and this reflects my experience. When I moved in there wasn't even a new seasons yet. There was a beaten down Red Apple Market and few young people in the neighborhood. In the first couple years before it got cool I worried constantly that I should've moved to New York because lower Division was so sleepy.

*The Golden State Warriors

The other day I noticed a billboard for a northwest diner chain called Shari's perched awkwardly in someone's front yard- the lights of the billboard pouring over the home's I assume permanantly shuttered blinds. The ad features a tasty looking slice of pumpkin cheesecake drizzled in caramel with the words "Piece on Earth" nestled beside it. I continued on my way but found that something about the ad was nagging me, like a forgotten takeout box, or a missed joke opportunity.

1.
The American diner, before it was seized by the nighthawk, dive bar, and transient class, as well as the and actual American middle class was a symbol of prosperity in a wincingly-white Norman Rockwellian era of business and manufacturing. (See: "The Runaway") Typical for a west coast version, Shari's tend to be bigger, bulkier and more catered to the family. It's not ideal cramming a mom, dad, and 2.5 children into a repurposed railcar nowadays unless you're a Mexican drug lord or a desperate Syrian refugee. The diner in this sense harkens back to a quainter time and the ad Shari's choose is intended to reflect that society perhaps more that the one it currently exists in. Subsequently there seems to be a thin layer of bitter irony that is born of the difference between that time and now.
Sometime in the last century a company like Shari's could have gotten away with an ad featuring a family dinner special plated in front of a family, the mom chatting technique with a waitress alongside a text that reads "Womans Liberation". Of course this level of disrespect and misogyny is not only completely fucked up but would be immediately shredded in today's hashtag culture. And that's because the general public (arguably) is aware of something now that they didn't know then: women and men are equals. However, just as we know now something our shitty predecessors didn't, perhaps they felt they knew something that has since been lost on us: To them world peace may have actually seemed like an achievable goal.

2.
If you went out asking people on today's street if they thought world peace was achieveable you'd probably get a lot of sideways looks, scoffing laughs, and maybe some spare change. But perhaps in The Runaway's day a billboard with a perfect looking slice of cheesecake and the words "Piece on Earth" could simply have been read as a pleasant tounge-in-cheek complement to the struggle toward actual peace that they as a people were all striving toward. Of course now peace on Earth is a naive idea reserved for one-dimensional child movie characters or school Christmas sing-alongs. Even then actually considering the concept holds just about as much weight as the existence of Santa Claus Lane.
Yes unfortunately we live in an era where instead of savoring a chorus of children singing holiday classics a school's principle might find it necessary to stop its rendition of "Up on The Rooftop" to explain that if anyone actually hears any sort of "click, click, click" near their home they need "shelter in place" and call the police... Unless they're black. In which case there seems to be no advice they can give that works every time.

3.
And that's essentially the key. The bitter layer in this cheesecake is made of self awareness. It's not just that Shari's is saying a slice of delicious pumpkin cheescake is a version of peace on Earth. It's that a decadent slice of pumpkin cheesecake is THE ONLY peace on Earth that man is likely to see.
Maybe through it's attempt to stay locked into the era it was created Shari's came to understand something we don't about this world. Not just a peddler of delicious pathways to diabetes, but also a sadistic entity hell-bent on reminding man of his failures. Maybe the next billboard will feature a family coming from the bitter cold into a warm Shari's dining room beside a text that reads "Climate Change". Or maybe the next campaign will feature oyster shots in clamato near a waitess gleefully shouting, "Active Shooter Here!"

Admittedly, we live in a nuanced time, occupied by brains like mine tourturously conditioned by social media to see double meanings, winky-faced emojis, and akronyms in everything so maybe I'm overthinking the Shari's thing (definitely). But regardless, either through tone-deafness or intention, the Shari's cheesecake ad in this specific context serves up an uncomfortable before and after comparison that looks more like a Faces of Meth than a self improvement story.

It's only fair to assume that just as we look down on the bigoted morons of our past, future generations will consider this age with the same sort of (ahem) hindsight. Maybe in the future when Shari's (yes there's still Shari's for some reason) dusts off the old holiday campaign there'll be another layer of context added to the slice. People will see it not drizzled in the context of ignorance, greed, intolerance, brutality, racism, and extremism that defines this era but topped with healthy dollops of acceptance, willingness, empathy, and reason. They'll remember America at the time when no one believed in peace and the journey from then, marked by steady progress in civility and wonder. And they'll be reminded that they should treat themselves because they're a part of the world. And they're all in it together. Just like us.