A couple of weeks back a guy came in with a friend of his from back home in Ireland. As they sipped on their beers, the guy from the neighborhood taps his buddy on the shoulder and says, "Luuk at this place. It's sooch a dive! An this is newthun! It gets even warse!" I refrained, barely, from reaching across the bar and knocking the lucky charms out of him. It was the third time over the last week I heard some palooka insult my bar right under my nose and it was beginning to piss me off. Of course he left a lousy tip although when he's with his girl he leaves a nice one. I've seen this often, the ole' tipping better when the chicks are around. It's common among dickheads. But I'll get to that some other time. We're talking dives, and I'm aiming to get to the bottom of it.

I know what you're thinking. When you say dive, you don't mean it as bad, and you love dives. This is because, especially with the twenty and thirty somethingers, it doesn't carry the same connotation as it did when the term was derived. It has much more to do with using it as a comparative term in light of the other types of bars in the city. You can go out and take some ecstasy and dance with the dudes in diapers and cowboy boots at the clubs, or to a cocktail lounge in the hopes of spying Parker Posey. But if you're not in the mood, you don't feel like emptying your bankroll, or you just want to go and relax in a place without pretension, you want a neighborhood bar. And if this place has been around for fifty or sixty years, it gets referred to as a dive. In this sense, a dive is what you want. A place like O'Connors that just is, carved out of time and unable to be duplicated.

Even I made this undersight before I started working at O'Connors. People asked me what it was like when I got the job and I used "a classy dive" to describe it. But two things happened that made me swear it off. The first was when a friend of mine from Two Boots walked in and declared, "Wow, this place is a shithole! I love it!" Obviously I know what he meant, but all the same the whole thing reeked too closely of a dump. And we all know, O'Connors aint no dump. The second instance was a bit more direct. I walked in for my shift and Pat asked me if I had seen the latest write up of the bar. I hadn't, so I asked how it was. "It's a little funky. They say some nice things about the place, but they referred to it as a dive." I tried to explain to him that for the younger generation, dive doesn't mean what it used to. But Pat wasn't buying it. He has a clear definition of what a dive is and that isn't changing. In fact, he's got a pretty clear definition of a lot of things in his head and none of it's changing ever. But the situation stuck out not only because Pat used the word funky, but also because I could tell it was a sore spot for him.

So like a good English 101 student I went and looked it up and what I found shed some light. A dictionary published in 1936- very close to prohibition, and consequently the opening of O'Connors- describes a dive as a disreputable den. Sounds kind of like a house of ill repute, doesn't it? But besides being linked to the red light district, there's a suggestion that being an owner of a bar that's a dive is to make an underhanded living. Not only is it a dump, but it's a shady one as well. It calls into question his integrity and legitamacy. And I think that's the dig that gets under Pat's skin, because he's the guy who comes in and sweeps and mops the floors every day. He's the guy who posts the booze prices, misspellings and all, out where you can see them to keep it honest. Pat takes a lot of pride in what he is, as Merle Haggard might say, and he should. The only reason we can enjoy O'Connors today is because he bucked up for twenty years when the neighborhood went to piss.

I won't preach any more about the subject. As I said before, words change meanings over time and I understand that. Just do me a favor. Don't call O'Connors a dive within earshot of me and most certainly Pat. And for Christ's sake don't print it. See ya on the other side!