006: Lucky Enough

Location: 1492 Westminster Street Hours: Monday to Thursday - 5pm-1am
Friday to Sunday - 12pm-1am Date of Visit: June 17, 2024

This is Lucky Enough.

When you were unemployed, you used to have something of a ritual here. You would walk to the dog park with Saga, let her roam for an hour or so, then make your way to Lucky Enough, where, if it was warm enough, you would sit and have a beer out front on the patio. Saga would lie on the brick and pant, and you'd ask for her to be brought water. The waitstaff would ask if they could treat her, which they were of course more than welcome to. Just you and your best dog friend, having a drink and decompressing.

Today you are doing it again, only this time you have ordered a Sam Adams Just the Haze IPA, which arrives with a frosted glass much like its alcoholic counterparts might. You pour it in, you and your glass sweating in the summer heat. You haven't learned, yet, that you can't simply replace the thing and carry on behaving as though things are the same. Like people, drinks are not interchangeable. You have to learn to live a new way with the new thing. There is no decompressing with a near-beer, because it lacks to utility of alcohol, which is the poison the dulls your brain just a little. You order food, which you almost never do at Lucky Enough.

Quince and Quickly live nearby, enough that Saga will, often enough, attempt to continue walking up the sidewalk to their building, and when you leave, she'll attempt to climb the stairs to go to their apartment. When they moved in, the building Lucky Enough is in wasn't even built yet. Now it is simply yet another in the line of additions and subtractions that have been made to Westminster Street since you first started living in the West End. It's a mixed-use building, built in the nondescript style that seems to be ruling the day, which you're told is because it's a cheap way to build, commercial on the ground floor, apartments accessible around the side on the above floors. Lucky Enough has been the sole commercial tenant since the building was completed. This is how it should be, you think. A subsequent trip causes you to be seated next to a couple who are there for the first time. "We're a real neighborhood bar," the server notes. Many of the bars in the city are like this, although some of them have offices instead of housing above, which is a shame. You've always wondered what it's like to live directly over a bar.

Loud, you suppose. A sign posted urges the custom to respect the neighbors.

You order chili dogs. It's this funny thing, a combination of quintessential American junk food with a Mexican staple. You make a great deal of chili yourself (it freezes well), and it's always a struggle to add some variety to it. You mostly experiment with breads, wheat and corn, for dipping. But you almost never do chili dogs at home. When you were a child, there were few foods you appreciated (for a few years you maintained that you had an allergy to rice of all things) but hot dogs were one. Now as an adult, you've almost only had them on hand when you were taking Saga for reactive dog training. You hate that phrase because Saga's not much of a reactive dog, she'll walk by 90% of dogs without concern. There is a toothless, ancient long-haired chihuahua in the neighborhood, scarcely larger than Saga's head, who can scare her into submission. But she fixates on some, and those she will want to meet those at high speeds, which many dogs find intimidating. She's particularly obsessed with sighthounds, to the point she will howl in their direction from across the park. The trainer noted that some dogs never get over their impulses, and Saga's really only half there. Better since, but always in need of improvement. 

The trainer also said that after sessions, the dogs would be worn out from socializing and doing so much mental activity. In cars, Saga generally can't sit still, she will stand looking out the window for hours, pawing at the door to be let out at 60mph on I-195. But on the way home from the trainings, she would be wiped, circling on the car seat and falling asleep. You find this very human, to be worn out by the simple act of being around others and doing things with them. They do say dogs resemble their owners.

Your twin brother tells you, with a hint of pride in his voice, that his wife's friends and family back in Texas appreciate that he is a chili purist. He does not care for beans. The dish's name is "chili con carne," he notes. "Chili with meat." It is not supposed to have fillers in it, like corns and bell peppers and the hated beans. It's meant to be chili peppers and hunks of braised beef. You've made some like this yourself, a chili colorado recipe from chef Rick Martinez, whose video also mentions this purist's approach to chili.

The summer presents an odd time for you—you want to go kayaking, but you don't own a car to take you to the various bodies of water that hold a kayak, especially the ocean. You have a kayak, made of upscale chloroplast, that folds into a bulky 20 pound box that will fit in a car's trunk, but you still lack the car. And at 12 feet long, it's not long enough to be seaworthy for the ocean, which is what you really want to do. It should be 14, or bet yet, 16, to handle ocean waves. Your apartment can't sustain a 16 foot hard shell boat, you couldn't even get it through the door from the hall. There is another folding kayak, a 16 footer with an aluminum frame and a skin that stretches over it, put together almost like a tent. With the pull of a pneumatic handle, the keel of the boat changes, so that either the front and back curve up, for maneuverability, or lower, for speed. It and the gear necessary for it would set you back a few thousand dollars you certainly can't spare. You can't justify it to yourself, even though there is a deal where you can go on a multi-day kayaking trip in Italy, the price of the kayak included, then bring it back home with you in its travel bag. An aspiration for when you have an unlimited source of wealth you are sure is coming any day now.

The skin-on-frame style kayak is an old one, perhaps the oldest, it's what the Inuit, Yup'ik and Aleut developed, perhaps 4,000 years ago. They use seal skins stitched together, stretched over frames made of what rare wood could be found, or of whale bone. The Greenlanders also use a narrower paddle, where the ends are more like a cricket bat. Supposedly, this design minimizes wasted effort, trading some speed for the paddler's endurance.

There's something hungry in your soul for this, probably the same thing that drives your brother's (and Texas') chili puritanism. That there is a "right" way to do things. That as you go deeper down the rabbit hole, you unlock access to the true, proper way things are done.

It's nonsense, of course. Progress is progress. A hard shell kayak has greater durability than skin-on-frame. Even your coveted multi-grand skin-on-frame dispatches with the whale bone and the seal skins for more current materials. It's a fusion, a mix of modern and past, the purity of the old ways with the inventions of the new, a syncretism not entirely unlike the chili dog, which marries the old recipe of chili with the synthetic meat of the hot dog.

Recently, you've been feeling a restless pressure building inside you. You used to sit out in front of Lucky Enough and relax with the beer, crisp on a warm day. Alcohol's a depressant, it's what it does. But now without it, you don't get that relief. You feel just as sedentary sitting alone with your dog out in front of the building as you do at home. More so, in some ways, because everyone else there seems to be drinking. 

You have the misleading feeling that something ought to be about to happen, something that would move your life along. Winning the lottery. Meeting the love of your life. Somehow becoming a movie star even though the most acting you've ever done was when you were 16, and even then, the role was largely sitting on stage while people acted in front of you, waiting for your cues. All these little ego trips colliding like the Big Bang. You want the board to flip itself over, or the heavens to open up and for an angelic messenger to appear, your purpose, bright and awe-inspiring, in its outstretched hands. It makes you feel restless, insane, and then dissatisfied with yourself. Because it's not just that it ought to happen, you feel like it must be about to happen, that all you need to do is wait for it to arrive, and then you'll be out on the Mediterranean, in your wildly over-engineered kayak, living the dream. 

But it is a dream.

In fact, it's a lie, and you know it. The chances of these things just happening are remote. You'd need an unholy amount of luck. These are just premonitions not based in anything. A conjuring trick perpetrated by a mind ill at ease with the place where you are. You want to be out on that kayak, out on the ocean. You want to learn how to roll the kayak, so that if you are knocked over by a wave, you can simply flip yourself back the right way round again. You've been reading about it, and the most common opinion is that people struggle with it until one day it just clicks into place. The mechanics are simple enough: more or less, your hips snap, and the kayak goes with them, and then you go with the kayak. But obviously learning to do that is another thing. It's easy enough to capsize your kayak with you in it. And it's easy enough to know what you're supposed to do in that situation. It's doing them at the same time that's the hard part. When you hit the water, the cold so sharp it drives the air out of your lungs. It's something you must practice at, again and again and again until you stop remembering that it's difficult. It's just something you do.

A remote chance is not no chance, you know, and something might could be about to happen. But if it is, it will not arrive any faster if you wait for it. In fact, if it is going to happen, waiting will only delay it. If it is going to happen then you're doing it. You're in the process of doing it. But you will have to keep working at it, like a river working to carve the path shorter and rid itself of its oxbow. The world won't deliver you anything you aren't willing to go get.

This is Lucky Enough.