Some Bars

Light illuminates the page. Some mornings are made for savoring, and some evenings are made for bars.

Some bars are timeless. The Townhouse is one such bar. It's been in our community for over 100 years, and it stayed open as a speakeasy during the prohibition era. If the walls could talk. You could settle into a leather booth with shadows cast by candlelight and splurge on a generous pour of Pappy van 15-year. Don't go on a weekend though.

Some bars remind you of simpler times, places where men would go after work to socialize, talk politics, or catch the game. The patina is a mix of spilled drinks, vomit from over-served patrons, and that slight sweet-mold smell of a bar rag that should’ve been tossed years ago.

Some bars never go out of style, and others very much do. They have a predictable life cycle: exclusive, frequented by celebrities and models, then the artsy creative crowd, then the hedge fund managers and finance/pre-IPO bros, and finally the gen-pop, bridge-and-tunnel crowd.

Some bars help you remember that spirit inside you, and some bars enable you to forget that spirit.

Some bars are for crying. Some bars are for celebrating. I've always found some bars to be romantic in that dirty East Village Patti Smith Just Kids kind of way.

We all swear off alcohol at some point in our lives — "POISON," a drink for numbing out and taking the edge off, Boomer technology — but I find it hard to swear off the endless possibility found within the walls of some bars.