Not To Get All Andy Rooney About It But...

     What the fuck happened to this town?  I take fourteen years away from not really being part of the scene to raise a kid and everything closed on me.

     Every storefront on the South Side is now a sports bar, dance club or a vape shop.  Central Oakland has turned into a corporate shit show owned by the University of Pittsburgh that is devoid of character so the millennials don't get homesick while they flush their parents savings down the toilet. Here, have a Starbucks instead of a locally owned place that might add some variety to their spoiled lives and add to their experience on this planet.

     I've had to start treating the South Side with vampire rules.  I won't go down there after dark because that's when the bro-down begins.  It seems like every meathead with a lot of hair product, even more Axe Body Spray and some sort of neatly trimmed facial hair descends on Carson St. as soon as the sun goes down so they can get liquored and start a fight in some bizarre attempt to get laid.  And if it's not the brainless Bros it's the khaki clad, next generation yuppies that would have sold their own mothers to get ahead and voted for Reagan if they were alive in the 80s.

     The South Side also seems to be the choice location for local athletes to come to get arrested after tying one on.  Why they would come to the land of sports bars for a night out and not expect to get into some sort of altercation with a drunk yinzer that was somehow offended by their last game is beyond me.

     Almost every record store has closed or changed hands.   Most of the late night diners are gone. The 31^st St. Pub is closed.  The Electric Banana is gone but at least now it's a really good Italian restaurant that's still owned by Johnny and Judy.  The spot where Graffiti used to be is now a showroom for cars that no one in this town can afford to buy.

     It seems like every bit of culture and uniqueness has been scrubbed clean from these neighborhoods for the sake of making everything the same like we all live in Disney Land no matter where we go.  The only good thing that seems to have come out of all this corporate skull fuckery is that the dirty Arby's on Forbes Ave. is finally gone.  If you thought your local Arby's was bad, it would deserve Michelin stars after you went to the dirty Arby's on Forbes Ave.  If every other place was closed or too crowded after a show, I would always choose to head home hungry rather than go to the dirty Arby's.  The simplest of orders would be wrong and served with a shoe print.  The tables were never cleaned and floors were worse than a movie theater after a kids movie.  It is one of the mysteries of the world how they weren't shut down by the health department.

     Most of this belly aching is just my pining for the good old days that never really were.  Expecting the world to be the same as I left it, when I'm ready to step back into it, is just plain foolishness.  But if I were still able to stay up past 9:30pm to go to a late show to see bands play, I would have no idea where to go.

     It seems that the artist colonies that used to be in Oakland and on the South Side have moved over a neighborhood or two to get away from the white washing of corporate gentrification.  East Liberty and Lawrenceville have had performance spaces and oddball restaurants popping up from the folks that fled the University of Pittsburgh's sprawling takeover.

     With Black Forge Coffee, Onion Maiden and Skull Records, Allentown, the shitty neighborhood that I grew up in, seems to be bouncing back. There are still a ton of empty storefronts and I'm sure one of them could hold a 31^st Pub type venue that would ply the crowd with PBR while a new band cuts its teeth.

      I ran into Alex from Submachine a few weeks ago and asked him where they play since everything closed.  He said that there are more places to play now than ever.  You just have to be willing to look for them.  That's my problem with change.  Now I have to do research instead of just knowing where to go.  I'm too busy googling “What's this growth on my scalp?” to try to find out where bands play these days.  The quandaries of struggling to hang on to my youth.  It's enough to make me say, “Fuck it.  I'll stay on the couch.”