Things You Learned Last Weekend, But Should Have Already Known...

1) Don't get out of the cab downtown with your drink. The cops are there. I've seen it a dozen times. Cab drivers don't care that you're finishing off your little girlie concoction in the red solo cup while they drive your drunk asses downtown and charge you astronomically high fares. The cops do, however. That $15 taxi ride just turned into an $85 ride with the brand new open container citation that the cop just wrote you.

2) Don't scream in the doormans face. Please, please, please. If I've said this once, I've said this a hundred fucking times. I'm sure power hour was fun and you're thrilled to see your friends, but my hearing is just as sensitive as it was earlier this afternoon. Oh, whoops. Not anymore.

3) Don't grope random girls in a bar and then act like you're the victim when asked to leave by the staff. Making a scene on the way out like pounding on the walls or calling me "bro" doesn't help you save face. It only makes you look even more pathetic than you are. I win.

4) Don't steal the tip jar. What are you thinking when you try to grab the money out of this? You're just like a tiny baby...you see something you want and you simply can't resist the urge to try to take it for yourself. Unfortunately, we're there to stop you...and bring you to a closed off location out back where no one can hear you scream.

5) Don't....stiff the bartender, throw up in the bathroom or on the bartop, break anything in the bar, write on the walls, try to steal booze or anything that isn't nailed down, have sex anywhere in the bar, try to pass back ID's, try to get into fights with anyone, or generally try to do anything that isn't socially acceptable in any other public place. Seriously. Are you guys fucking 12?

6) Don't fight the Bouncer. We're not the police. We don't (usually) have guns or weapons. This is good for you. But we also never took an oath to uphold the law and the constitution. So conversely, we have no trouble knocking your front teeth out, choking you unconscious, and throwing you face down on the sidewalk with your pants down right in front of that hot girl you were trying to impress only moments before. This is embarrassing for you. Also, things aren't over for you quite yet. Officer Friendly is standing right outside to take it from there, and usually his attention is on your drunk ass, and not my violent tendencies. Thus your encounter with them begins...

7) Don't fight the police. This seems like a no-brainer, but I'm continually surprised at how many kids get a few drinks in them and then consider this an option. A handful of kids went to jail last night simply because they couldn't think logically enough to not fight on the sidewalk with each other and then the cops when they wandered over to investigate. There's a lot of them and they have radios to call more of their friends over and multiple tools they can use to inflict pain on you. And then when they're done kicking your ass, they get to throw you in a room and lock you up there until they feel like letting you out. Have fun explaining this to your parents the next day when you need to get bailed out.

8) Don't drive home drunk. Fine. You've made it home safely the other 50 times. Why not give it another shot? Taxis are overrated anyway, with all the rapin' and all going on these days. Well all it takes is once to get pulled over and now you're looking at roughly $10,000 in bonds, attorneys fees, court costs, fines, DUI school tuition payments, monthly probation fees, taxi money (since you'll have no license) multiple court appearances, and a permanent black mark on your record for life. Congratulations. This little money-making scheme has been raking in the county extra cash for years now, so if you want to fund your local road project or help to supplement a few government salaries to insure the downtown bike police are fully staffed every weekend, then take a few extra shots before you leave the bar and then go for a joyride down East Campus Road. Make sure to ignore the speed limit and those annoying white and yellow lines on the road trying to tell you how to drive.

9) Don't ring the victory bell. Also known as the Chapel Bell. Besides of the obvious implications this presents - i.e. UGA isn't exactly winning much of anything right now - it's beyond annoying and it goes on fucking forever. And at 2:30am, I can't think of a better way to scream PLEASE ARREST ME than this. And trust me, I can hear that shit all the fucking way across downtown. Not to mention usually the only people cutting through campus are the kids heading to the dorms, which equals underaged drinkers which equals a night in jail. You might as well send up a fucking signal flare to all bored police officers in the area.

10) Don't stay downtown past 2am or so. Fine, maybe grab a bite to eat before you head home, but there's nothing worse than getting off of work at 4 or 5am and then heading to (I hate to admit) The Grill and finding a table full of fucked up kids yelling and screaming there as well. My parents taught me nothing good happens when you stay out past midnight, so one can only imagine what ridiculousness happens past 2am in downtown Athens. Personally, I can tell you absolutely nothing good happens.

So please shut the fuck up so I can eat my grill muffin in peace.

The Dick

I wrote this one about 2 1/2 years ago. I can't remember exactly what or who this was about, but I saved the draft at about 4am, and I rarely wrote immediately after work so I must have been pissed.

Sometimes when we work and we're dealing with a shithead, we want to hurt him. We want to rear back and hit him in the face as hard as we can and then throw him on the ground and jump up and down on their stupid little fucking sarcastic head. After we finish with that, we want to point and laugh and ask him how funny it is that we just punched him and stomped on his head. We want to ask him why he isn't laughing anymore and why he won't answer us.

But we'll know why. It's because he's face down, bleeding and unconscious.

But we can't do that. Most of the time, we can brush off the bullshit comments that we get. We get those comments hour after hour, night after night; & as I outline on here, post after post.

But occasionally some of them really get my blood boiling. I mean, really boiling. Sometimes we have to noticeably hold ourselves back from hurting someone because of their attitude. I've sent many a doorman inside because he was so pissed off.

We're an angry bunch, admittedly.

And so I ran into one of those guys recently. Tonight, actually.

After our encounter, I looked at our videotapes from earlier in the evening before our encounter, and saw him antagonizing nearly every random guy that he came across, simply pushing the barrier to see how far he could go. Hitting on girls that were obviously with guys, mocking the guys after they got annoyed with him hitting on their girlfriends, and just generally being a dick to every stranger within arms reach of him.

When we kicked him out, he mocked us from the start. He mocked us from the back of the bar all the way out to the front door. He mocked us from the sidewalk. He mocked us every time we walked out. But his mocking wasn't the usual mocking. He got under all of our skin, and we found ourselves trying to plan a way to tempt him into physically challenging us so we could justify beating him to a pulp. Sadly, we never went through with our evil plan.

He was one of those guys that you would see and think, wow...somebody really needs to kick his ass. I wish I could have obliged, but being the level-headed, neutral party that I'm paid to be nightly, I couldn't. I wanted to. I could have. But I didn't.

Son of a bitch.

A Look Back

I've been having more than my fair share of trouble coming up with something to write lately, so I've gone through some old entries I never posted for public consumption and decided to post a few. More to come. This one is from August of 2007...

There's a fairly common belief that the best bouncers use their mouths and brains more than they use their muscles. I've heard it a million times. It's even in this documentary that I recently watched called "Bounce: Behind the Velvet Rope" which documents big city bouncers in mega clubs from around the country, primarily from New York City.

The odd thing is that most of the bouncers in this documentary were big dudes and loved to fight. There were plenty of fights shown throughout the DVD. On a similar note, most door guys and bouncers in bars and clubs are bigger than average. Much bigger, actually.

So armed with this little tidbit of information, a reasonable person might ask...if the best bouncers can talk their way out of a fight, then whats the purpose for hiring a big guy to work the door? Might as well hire a bunch of 140 pound guys to work the door and floor who can run their mouths like a motherfucker, right?

The simple answer is that most people who attract the attention of the bar staff and are on the receiving end of this so-called talent of "talking someone out the door" in order to avoid a fight are normally the ones who end up deserving to get the dog shit kicked out of them on the way out. They're intoxicated and they're not rational in the least, and people who are intoxicated and aren't rational don't tend to listen to any logical explanation as to why they're being ejected. So an alternative method of ejecting a drunk customer is employed. Namely, dragging them out kicking and screaming.

Granted, talking works...sometimes. I've talked many a customer out without having ever laid a hand on him. The drawback to this, however, is that it's very time consuming and I have to bite my tongue and grit my teeth throughout our encounter. Giving them more time gives them the opportunity to rile themselves up and, on occasion, find the guts to take a swing. Drunk people can't stay on subject, they want to argue and throw around insults, and occasionally want to challenge me to a fight, but often lack the testicular fortitude to make the first move.

So I say that it's bullshit. The best bouncers know how to talk, be nice and use words and kindness to their advantage, but also have the ability to force an unwilling customer out the door should the need arise.

But they're not all like that. Most bouncers can only do one or the other well. Unfortunately, it's usually the one that involves choking the shit out of some poor drunk kid. And I can't blame them in the least. A lot of drunk kids around here deserve to have the wrath of a bar employee let loose on them while being forced out the door, screaming for their mommy and daddy.

Oh, and of course screaming for their lawyer, too because they're all going to sue this place, get it shut down, and get me fired.

I always love that one.

R.I.P. Top Dawg

Top Dawg is no more. I hope no one can honestly say they're surprised. That spot has been a disaster since it was renovated a few years back and turned into a nightclub.

Too many liquor license violations had the authorities coming by last weekend to post a nice little notice on their door that they had been shut down. Word on the street is that they've had 4 violations. It could be less, or it could be more. Who really cares?

This place is a great example of awful management. If you let every damn person in the world inside, and don't train your staff to spot fake ID's, then your life as a bar will be very short.

Word has it that the place has been available for purchase for quite some time, but surprisingly after Clarke County shut it down, the price dropped dramatically. That tells me they probably knew it was coming. But going along with what I already suspect about that place, they promptly sent out an email last week which was forwarded to me blaming the government and everyone else for Top Dawg's demise.

Here it is, in all its un-edited glory:

Angila Ocker Harvey September 11 at 11:21pm Reply
Keep an eye out for our next move, we're done with Clarke County though, so it'll be somewhere close enough to come to our big events. We are going to miss you all so much, you truley made TOP DAWG the Top Dawg in the ATH, madd love and respect to all those who supported us. Athens isn't ready for us yet so we'll have to take another rout but we'll see ya'll at the TOP for sure!!!! You see any of us TOP DAWGS on the street holla at us we're real and what you saw and got was real so as the saying goes REAL recognize REAL and fuck the madd hatters I mean HATERSSSSSSS!!!!!

Message for the County Government and all the closeminded fools in Athens:
((((((((EQUALITY for all, it's already happened so get with it or get out of our way)))))))

---------------------------You aint seen the last of us-----------------------------

Truly, an example of a successful business where the owners and management take responsibility for the ups and downs of the downtown Athens bar business they have chosen to be in. I was under the impression they were shut down against their will, however, the email seems to indicate that Top Dawg was done with them.

Based on their email, I guess that they didn't like their downstairs neighbor very much. I happen to like the guy who owns that place. He's been around for a long time, and has worked at nearly every bar downtown, it seems.

So to Top Dawg, I say this: Look who's open and look who isn't. Take your shitty inbred thug party out to Oconee County and drink your moonshine in an empty, shit-filled cow field somewhere, far away from the likes of the rest of us. Nobody wants that shit in Athens, as you can see.

Obviously, I can't say I give two shits about them being gone. The only negative thing that means is that there are 300 plus more thugs roaming around downtown without a place to go that will eventually find themselves face to face with me at some point, wanting to go inside.

Fucking awesome.

Cops Downtown

Robbery Downtown

This is nothing new. People get robbed downtown all the time. I've been robbed at gunpoint downtown. Nobody wants it to happen, but it does.

The discussion, at least according to the comments at the end of these stories, seems to always focus on the fact that there are plenty of police officers downtown, but all they focus on are underaged arrests and open containers.

This, in my experience, is fairly accurate. We often judge how busy we are compared to other bars partially by where the cops are hanging out on a given night. 3 to 5 officers will congregate outside the busiest bars throughout the night, and we'll know that if we're the bar the police are spending most of their night watching, then we're on the right track. That means we're the busiest. And while they're standing there watching the crowds on the sidewalk and the traffic going into and out of the bars, they'll snatch a few kids here and there out of the crowd and write them up for open containers and/or slap some handcuffs on the one's who are underaged.

This, as far as I can tell, shows to their superior officers that they're being productive at work and generating revenue for the city by writing citations.

The problem is, the shit that they're doing is hardly public safety. It's easy to find a drunk college kid stumble out of a bar with a half finished beer and write him a ticket that nets the city a quick $70. What about patrolling the mostly empty streets surrounding downtown, and dispersing the groups of thugs that hang around those areas just waiting for the lone intoxicated college kid to stagger by at 2:30am? It's a little more difficult to prove you prevented X number of robberies on a given night to your Sergeant or Lieutenant by patrolling dark side streets while simultaneously writing few to no citations versus the officer that camped out in front of Flannagan's and Firehouse from 12am to 2am and wrote a dozen open container citations and hauled 4 underaged drunk kids to jail.

But who's really being more productive and protecting the public?

So do we need officers downtown? Absolutely.

In my opinion, we should require the bars that are bunched together to hire a few off-duty officers on weekend nights to stand on the sidewalk and keep the peace among the college kids. That's more than enough to insure that young, underaged and drunk masses stay in line. For the rest of the uniformed patrol that are on bikes and are being paid by taxpayer money, get the drunk drivers off the roads, keep the drugs out of the bars and off the street corners, and make sure that students, visitors and the like aren't robbed at gunpoint when they try to head home at the end of the night.

But that's just my opinion.

Hilarious

27b/6

Check These Out...

I've updated my links to the right. I removed a few websites that haven't been updated or that have removed my link from their site, and added a few new ones.

These guys below have been nice enough to link my blog, which is basically a collection of meaningless, bullshit stories, so the very least I can do for them is plug their internet offering on here.

Anarchy in Athens

This is a new blog. If he keeps it up, it could be good. He's got a focus on nightlife in Athens, GA from the perspective of a 5th year college student with nothing to lose in his last year of school. Barely a hint of a conscience shows through in his writing, as he seems to only be interested in figuring out how to get laid regardless of where he is or what he's doing (usually it involves getting shitfaced downtown or at a party somewhere). It will be nice to hear the perspective of the experienced downtown college student on his way out. While there's a few things in there that make me raise an eyebrow, for the most part I like his dry sarcasm and pessimistic humor.

I'll be reading.

Dawgs Nightlife

This guy is someone who's been around downtown for awhile, and he's started up a photography business & website that focuses on Athens nightlife; primarily places to go when you're out, specials, hours of operation, etc. And pictures. Lots of them.

I've seen him walking around with his camera, so if you're in one of the bars he frequents to take photographs in, you might find a yourself on the opposite end of his lens. Nothing helps a hangover the morning after a wild night downtown than to log on to Facebook & find a professional photo of yourself in a bar you don't remember going into, raising your arms in the air with a lazy eye and a Jager stained shirt for the entire world to see.

Join his Facebook group, too: Dawgs Nightlife on Facebook