To assure you all that neither myself nor the blog is not dead, also to assure you that am I am a zombie (although that is the latest craze), I thought I would update the blog.

I also realized that with my last post, I am that guy. I am the guy who not only leaves his Christmas lights up year round, but can’t seem to haul his brown and dried Christmas tree carcass to the curb. It is there in his yard everyday, like a Charlie Brown Christmas, and somedays it even seems to make progress toward the curb, but it never actually gets to the trash for pickup (yet one day in the following October the tree is gone and I am sure that is a story for another blog).

But again, I digress. This blog is a series of digressions—literally and figuratively.

I write to give updates. I write to spread the word that is not yet on the street. I write because all these words are always before me and I see no other use for them.

To get down to the brass tax of the pressing matters, the bar will now be the focus of the rest of my words.

We move forward. We do not strut, but we do not hang our head either. I, the author of this blog, the father of this diatribe, am a cook once again. I am still a bartender and a bar owner, but I am in the kitchen as well. The food that sets upon your tongue when you eat here had my hand in it somewhere. I hope you trust my hand, and where it has been. I do.

I am no chef. But I am competent. The person I had originally hired for my current position was not. I would like to think that it was not that he didn’t have the ability, but it is that he didn’t care. Because if he cared and created the mess he did, he is going to have a difficult life and/or cause a lot of people some grief. I put him in the same category as the contractor I fired.

Oh, and I am still bartending. In that field I feel more secure in my abilities than that of a chef.

Anyway, that is my badmouthing for the fiscal quarter.

A friend of mine has made the comment that this bar should be called the bar, “If anything wrong can happen, it has.” I would like to point out that while many things have gone wrong, I know for a fact that not everything that can go wrong has. Many more things can go wrong and I fear them. I am not cowering or living in feat of them. I just fear them, like a cat fears a dog or a marshmallow fears fire.

My goodmouthing (odd how goodmouthing is not a word and badmouthing is) is that by the skin of our teeth, we broke even in July. We actually made money… kind of. We made between $ .50 and $3.00 in February. That is a feat. It does not matter that I paid myself $ .02 an hour nor does it matter that bills were late. I have never paid bills late in my life and I don’t take it lightly. But those bills are being paid.

My manager is now my partner. She is the best at what she does and she has proven her mettle time and time again.

Speaking of time and time again, I am changing my menu. Once, a long time ago in another bar and another life, the most talented chef I have known gave me these words, “We’re a bar, dammit!”

We are not a restaurant, we are not trying to be the next Wolfgang Puck. We can, if fact, say our food has more integrity than what became of Mr. Puck’s product, however. We still sell real food. No preservatives. No hormones. No corn syrup. No bullshit.

And I can take pride in that. Right now, I am losing money because of that, but there are some things worth doing.

Wieners.

We’ll leave it at that.

A bar, and a damned good one at that.