First, a caveat: bars were never my thing. Outside of a couple of piano bars and one particularly memorable stripper bar in Montreal, I usually feel excruciatingly out of place, mostly because I don't drink.
(Sidenote: I recently learned of a term dedicated to people like me: teetotaler. That was quite a discovery, as it is nice to know that there is a name for me besides goody-two-shoes, party pooper, and lame ass.)
With that said, Sam and I, as per our usual routine nowadays, took Grr to a new park yesterday, a small enclosed doggy play area nestled inside the Castro. To get there, we had to drive past several bars and restaurants just spilling over with patrons because of the nice weather on a Friday afternoon. Boys were dressed in their best "displaywear" (i.e., revealing v-necks, asphyxiating jeans), holding hands with each other and walking down the street. I saw a couple making out at a sidewalk cafe, just dropped everything and batted each other's tonsils around on the corner of Sanchez and 18th.
Their evening had barely begun.
We drove right past those two, the bars, the restaurants, parked the car in a quiet residential stretch and walked Grr to the playground. He was surprisingly amenable to this task, considering his agoraphobia, or ligyrophobia, or motorphobia (all of these are real), or whatever it is that prevents him from venturing out to the sidewalk by our house. He shrugged them all off and trotted along like the brave boy I know he can be.
And to prove just how brave he was, he marched right into the park and found a smaller dog to bully. Atta boy. The little chihuahua mix wasn't taking any of it though, and before any of us knew it, over an hour had gone by, and Grr had barely paid neither Sam nor I any attention. To see him adjust so well to a new environment was heartening, to say the least. There is hope yet that we will one day stop carrying him downstairs to the garage, lay down puppy pads, and pray that no loud cars drive by in the meantime.
By the time we left the park, I was starving, and I knew Grr would have been too if he weren't preoccupied with playing. So we walked over to Firewood Grill and picked up some takeout tortellinis. While waiting for our orders, we sat outside and people-watched, all three of us.
On some level, I was jealous of all those people we saw. Two months ago, had you asked me what I wanted to do on a Friday night, I would have invariably said, "Oh, nothing. We can stay in and relax." Now, all I want to do is stand around awkwardly, blanketed by loud music and holding a drink I have no interest in while nobody comes and talks to me. Seeing all those people entering and exiting various bars made me see that the world of fun had once been at our fingertips, orbited around us, just across the street, waiting to welcome us like long-lost lovers when and should we choose to welcome it in return.
Now, we don't, even if we wanted to, which we still don't, which puts me in this weird space. Grr is not the reason why we don't "go out" in the bacchanalian sense. He just gives us a convenient reason not to, which is no different than how we were before he came along, yet he now makes me want to more than ever. Like I said, it's a weird space, to feel like my definition of a good time is in limbo, floating around in committee, waiting for a decision.
We got home, all three of us now single-mindedly in need of food. When we sat down, Sam said, in his usual summarizing way, "Well, Grr got some more street exposure, we found a park he likes, and now we get yummy tortellinis. What a good day, huh?"
Grr did make me very proud today, and the tortellinis were delicious. I nodded.
The committee had adjourned with a decision.
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