Gay bar in new paltz

People will volunteer their own, enough to squash your entire summer: zucchini like torpedoes and bombs, land eels and horse dongs, alien embryos and bulbous baseball bats for carrot-nosed puppets to wield. The bulk of the essay addressed the paradoxical inverse correlation between academic standards and academic freedom and applauded the corrections made in Student Association budget allocations to reflect more fairly the diversity of the college population, even though said corrections along with said academic standards may well have snuffed Spring Weekend as we knew it in the day.

Still, people read it as pure, breezy nostalgia and rosy bygones, and the response to my essay was…atypically responsive. I was flagged down in the streets and on social media so that folks might offer up their own Spring Weekend narratives, as if I might be collecting them still, perhaps for a book-length treatment.

Look, man, get your own small-town pulpit. Encouraged by the modest spike in web metrics, my editor came back with another subjective local color proposal: my Top Ten Favorite Things about New Paltz. This time, however, I surrendered and I slummed.

Legendary New Paltz Family Needs Our Support

I acquiesced not only to two things I typically distrust — local color and lists — but also to the universally recognized tone, the linguistic mode and narrative attitude of nostalgia. I granted myself a Wonder Years pass. I waxed rosy, invoked the white Wordsworthian glow of childhood and the lost innocence of cultural bygones.

I chuckled warmly at the tenor of grumpy dads and the small miracles of small towns. Me being me, it got thorny and weird. I flipped the bird to paltz absentee slumlord IBM, dismissed the stone houses by noting that Europeans piss in pots that are three times as bar and spent inordinate column space on the story of my first and only drug bust.

No matter, though. It immediately became my most read and shared essay in six years of feverish ranting in these pages. I like to think that she might have been pleasantly surprised had she read through, but no matter. Her hate was categorical: a puke reflex triggered a by stock gesture of gay Americana in a stock, inherited voice.

Ick, New hate it too, and I have been drowning in your zucchini ever since. People tell me I nailed it, right on the money, captured the essence of their childhood and our community. Even the part about eating a sleeve of saltines while sitting stoned on a badly broken recliner? How could I possibly ever be mistaken for a poet of place?

This can be monetized. This is a dangerous nostalgia. Bars are dark and necessary and best kept in an occluded past. Talk about your old bar days, and the bats fly out of your brain. When I was in the developmentally appropriate bar-hopping years — which is to say 18 the old 21 to sometime in my mids — I disliked bars intensely.

Likewise, I spent hundreds and hundreds of youthful nights unhappily in bars. Why unhappily?