Home Sweet Tulsa I recently had the opportunity to visit lovely Tulsa Oklahoma with my girlfriend. More specifically, downtown Tulsa. Or as it must be truly known - Nowhere. The first thing one notices about downtown Tulsa is that it has been wiped clean by some sort of apocalyptic plage, or perhaps was the test ground for a secret government weapon which destroys all organic life, but leaves the buildings intact. At four in the afternoon in what is supposed to be the heart of a city there was - Nothing. And I mean nothing. No cars driving down busy boulevards. No open shops, or even people moving about in a bustle of activity. This was the environ into which P. and I stepped into when we decided to walk about and see if things were really as bad as they seemed. They were. We walked through the decimated piazza for some time before deciding it was time to call it quits and head back to the hotel. We looped around a corner to make what was essentially a circuit when I noticed a sign. A telltale sign which indicated a bar. Not just any bar mind you, it was the kind of sign which is the sure portent of a nasty dive bar. Me? I’ve got a thing for nasty dive bars. They aren’t always places I want to be, but when I see them I must go in, at least for a look. We stoked the fires of our courage and plunged through the doors. As soon as we walked in it was as though we had stepped into a movie scene. Every single person in the place stopped what they were doing and turned to look at us. Every single person in the place was in their forties or older. Most of them were missing a tooth. One might think that I am now making authorial embellishments. I am not. We made our way to the bar and I decided that a quick drink was most in order. I tried to get a Makers for P. but as it turned out the bartender had never heard of Makers. So Jack for all it was! She offered us doubles for only one dollar more, but I decided it was wise to decline. Almost immediately we began to look about. To the left of us were two men drinking their own pitchers of beer. One with a straw in. To our right a woman in her best thrift store finery sidled up to the bar an ordered an MGD tall-boy. A man a few stools down asked her what she had been up to all day (clearly they knew each other) and she replied that she had been sitting around the house all day and had finally decided she should get out and “do something”. There is probably a moral to this story, but I have yet to find the internal resources to try and figure it out.
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