Show me the way to the next whiskey bar - Part 1.

Not quite this good, but damned near.

This comes is two parts. For the second part, a snapshot of a last good night at a great, good place.

For Part One...

...business took me into the heart of the Loop yesterday.

Lunch at a local Irish-y pub with a adequate smoked beer-can chicken and passable iced tea. My fleshy but artfully-proportioned server came and went with hearts tatted above her elbows; "Valor" emblazoned across one and "Grace" across t'other.

The sleek shouters for the Board of Trade were there, accoutered in their Batman Supervillian Primary-Colored Jackets. They come for a breath and a bite and a shot of Jameson if they're above a certain age, and three shots of Jaggermeister if they're not.

The fucking “Pina Colada” song was playing, then in flipped to Bob Seger.

Golf on the tube.

A guy-place, but sterile and contrived. Generic. No soul, but busy -- sidewalk and inside -- and one old woman clamped for dear life to her barstool and nursing something watery.

A place to have a bite on the run, steep in amped-up, carefully market-tested testosterone-chic, but no place to hang and enjoy. Like a brand-new meerschaum pipe, it has built up no patina of character. Efficient, but not joyful.

Long, looong hours later after missing dinner to hand-stitching together a real hellspawn of a project, I repair to what has become one of my favorite bars. A real place -- just lousy with patina and character -- only to find that it’s closing.

Tomorrow.

WTF?

OK, Jebus, cut it the fuck out. Seriously, I'm tired of it. Tired of the things I love being taken away.

This old wreck of a place with the funky, weirdly-proportioned murals and oddball, never-heard-of-it Scotches will change hands within 48 hours. And given the breakneck speed with which buildings are whammed down into dust around these parts, the last wino will barely have clambered out of his cups before he'll be impaled on the first rays of dawn blasting in though the absence where the copper-coffered ceiling used to be.

The last night of a dying bar.

Well, the eve of the Last Night. A place that had really only been kept upright and walking by the will and whim of the owner, who finally got an offer that was too good to pass up. And like the melanomic sprawl of suburban and exurban enclaves seals over fine, fertile farmland with mini-malls and playground, so too will this lovely place vanish into history. And myth, if I have anything to say about it.

So in honor of the old girl, and the pretty lass who will be tugging her last tap at this public house soon, how about a few words on the being and the getting of the high. Not stupid/ shitfaced/ vicious/ hammered -- and obviously not if you are an alcoholic who simply can’t indulge without tragic consequence -- but having a drink or two in good company.

And of course the same caveats apply to this subject as to fucking, voting and praying to God; your experience and dogma ain't mine and vice versa.

This is (and as of next week, “will have been”) a jolly merry place, and the some of best stories about a jolly, merry place are the Callahan stories penned by Spider Robinson. The early ones. The ones before he started spinning out whole novels to punch-line a joke.

I spent a lot of time looking for my Callahan’s.

I loved Spider's writing, and see it as one of the high-water-marks of a gentle, insightful, funny and deeply humane brand of science fiction that all but disappeared under the waves when the cinderblock of Cyberpunk was lobbed into the kiddie pool of speculative fiction.

Now I love Bill Gibson and Neal Stephenson et al....but I miss the humorous, sad, spiritual and scientifically-hard-as-nails vision of a hopeful future in the state of Harmony, protected by benevolent techies, time-hopping Buddha bartenders, aliens who came to kill us all and stayed for the good company. Full of dancers and joy and, of course, hot hot sex.

A couple of people have asked me now and then about my influences, writing and otherwise, and it occurs to me now that I gave Spider short shrift. There was a time when I inhaled Mr. Robinson. He was once the "new Robert Heinlein". Years ago, between Harlan Ellison's terawatt-laser political rage and social commentary, and Hunter Thompson's high-focus, top-shelf, caffinated-absinthe-holy-madness there was, for a time, Spider.

And more than once -- more than twice -- Spider wrote long and well about intoxication.

We have come to a semi-colon in the culture when it seems all "we can talk about when we talk about buzzed" (due respectful props to the late master, Raymond Carver) is either a severe and priggish temperance or sloppy, mental obliteration.

We have built ourselves a horror house where pleasure in all its forms is Pariah. The very idea of pleasure for pleasure's own sake seems to be evaporating...nearly gone.

In its place we have the Ned Fladerization of every delight. A sticky, sickly Christopathic pall of “No!” cast over everything that simply makes us feel good about being alive and human and in the company of other lively humans. Or a 60-hour work week, balanced out by the return of mind-numbing popskullery as a maudlin or violent anesthetic for a life poorly lived.

The simple pleasure of a simple dram, or a joint (not that I’d ever advocate law-breaking) or a fine, friendly democratic roll in the rack seems to have been hijacked in favor of loud, coarse and empty pleasures. Fucking “No Writers Need Apply” Bug Eating contests as prime time fare. All White-Chick, All The Time “News”. Rage Radio. Angel and Purpose-Driven How-To-Live-Your-Life books. And, by my estimation, the only criminals that teevee cops chase any more are Serial Killin’ Mensans, which apparently exist in their millions and live in every Middlesex village and farm.

It’s well and good be furious at the Right for what they are doing to our country, and it’s entirely fit and proper for all of us to keep rhetorically howitzering away at them with everything in our arsenal. But it’s also needful – at least for me – to make my battles with a smile. That I be one the Happy Warriors.

Sometimes I get so spittin’ mad that I need to remind myself that we’re not waging a culture war (and that is exactly what we are doing) for mere dogma or a ten-point program, but for a way of life. A way of living that values tolerance and maximum individual freedom of motion and choice.

That values privacy and peace.

That does not wish for the Slavery by Committee of Communism OR the Global-race-to-the-bottom Wage Slavery of Crony-Laissez-Faire Capitalism.

That knows that we’re all in this together, and we’d better damned well figure out a way to live together or the extremists who pit us against each other for their own, sick agendas will ruin the world using us as their proxy armies.

That believes that Extremism in Defense of Liberty is fucking well a vice, because in the end we know that those bearing that banner have always used view a crisis as just another a chance to use Extremism to extinguish Liberty and replace it with a permanent Feudalism.

That believes that those who, in the face of a genuine threat, reliably leap up and immediately rush pell-mell to destroy Democracy on the pretext of saving it need to be chased back into the political desert.

That wants to drive out the criminals who are selling us into vassalage.

That want an end to Whored Media; the obliteration of this slagged-out skank "news" smeared with enough corpse make-up to look from a distance like real reportage.

That opposed the institutionalization of a Kangaroo Konservative Kourt system of the ideologically pure -- answerable only to Jesus and his Prophet, Tom DeLay -- whose sole purpose will be to weld a Theocratic State into place, piece-by-piece under the color of law.

And like the murders and molesters with whom they cohabitate in the same moral Universe, first they must gain your trust. They have to lure you into the basement with promises of swift, bloodless wars, jobs, cheap gas and a secure future, and all you have to do is come with them down the dark stairs.

All you have to do is consent just a little bit: that’s when you hear the door slam and dead-bolts snapping shut behind you.

"Liberty”, “Freedom”, “Democracy”... to the men that run our country these are not sacred concepts. They are simply rhetorical devices. Like genuine fear and honest patriotism, these are nothing more than levers to be yanked and buttons to be mashed; unsheathed nerves to be played like the string of a violin for despicable, partisan gain.

This is what we stand against, and I’m guess I’m just feeling a little blue that one more little outpost of delight – a clean if not-so-well-lighted place -- is slated for demolition.

Anyway, that’s Part One.

Part Two (if I can finish it): just a quick, pointillistic adieu to a great, good place, mostly for my memory book, but you’re welcome to read it too.