Stay or Leave

The Title is one of my favorite songs by "Dave Mathews". And listening to it has got me thinking about a soon departing friend.

Tonight, I want nothing more than to go out and enjoy someone else's toil in the kitchen. But what does one do when the invitation to stay home on your sun kissed deck seems more appealing? Do I just order pizza in?

Truthfully, it's deeper than that. I sit here torn due to nostalgia, to the thought of actually saying a painful goodbye to an old friend.

Remember the show "Cheers"? Go where everybody knows your name. We all have those places, those dive bars with sometimes really good food, or generally some kind of snack. They are the local speakeasies, the Towney places...and tonight we were dead set to head to a place that is now changing venues within the month.

The name: "The Mexican Cafe" Is it Mexican? Nope, it's mostly the bastardization of Mexican, it's what I abhor...

However, it's like crack...more specifically, the Margaritas are like crack. Rumored to be made with grain alcohol, they are the reason people go to this little dive. In the infamous words by Dave Chappelle playing "Samuel Jackson's" character in a spoof of "Samuel Jackson's Beer"..."It'll Get You Drunk"! And that's that. It's a place where you eat a wheelbarrow's full of chips and salsa, get shit faced, and proceed to eat that fatty greasy cheesy Meximerican goodness saying, "Holy Shit, this is so good!"

The owner's lease is running out and they are now relocating to a different place in town. A place you cannot walk to...cause seriously, no one should drive from it. Case in point, I once saw a 70ish year old lady so tanked she was crying after falling off the step. Literally she sat down on the pavement, and balled her little eyes out like an overdrunk sorority girl(I know because I used to see this in college)...her family members quickly carried her to the car. I'm sure none of them were driving sober.

The new locale is not a hole in the wall adjacent to a "Duck and Dive Bar" called the "Ebb Tide"...it's in an upper scale part of town. In many ways for the business it actually might be commercially better...but it will probably no longer be that old dive, that place that was like an adult "Disneyland", or a poor man's Vegas.

I guess I just don't like change...

Yet I sit, contemplating do I even want to say hello and goodbye to this old friend one more time? Or do I just ignore that old friend and act like I was too busy to stop in...it deadens the hurt you know? But so do those Margaritas.