Star Bar

Another casuality of the modern tourist facade, this bar use to be home to the resident street creatures for its ultra affordable selection of alcohol and Philipino women. The place has become nothing more than a highlight for travel guides and upper middle class wanna bees who have no problem standing in line for an hour in order to get the opportunity to rub shoulders with the remaining crop of neighborhood crack addicts, pimps, and prostitutes who to me appear nothing more than out of work actors making a few bucks pretending to be living furniture in a setting that has since departed from these once rundown streets. This past weekend was a real eye opener, not the typical west coast techno hip hop mash up renovated shooting galleries that have grown to seismic epic proportions in a plague like growth around the San Diego downtown area, no that is just opportunistic endeavor of the mentality, "if I do not do it, someone else will" maybe the great tyrannists of history felt the same way, plow everyone under, it is nature acting out in due course. However, witnessing a waiting line in front of the Star Bar took me by surprize. This was a place I use to sneak into as an 18 year old after heading down to Tijuana early Saturday and Sunday morning to make my college and pro football bets. The San Diego trolley ran right down to the border and a few of the sports books happpen to be conveniently located near the border gates, within a half hour I was back on the trolley looking to catch the early games with a bloody mary in my hand. The bartenders and the cocktail waitresses always gave me some money for bets, so by 11am on a Sunday there was quiet a focused crew hip deep in drinking and wagering side bets eagerly taking any action on any game, regardless of winning or losing streak. Never had to pay for booze, being young allowed the older women at the bar to treat me like their little boy toy, one on each side of me during the game depending on how busy the bar happen to be at the time, as the female staff waited for commercials to help the small built up crowd of football fans waiting to be served.


Gambling paid the bills back then, but I really never had too many back then which afforded me the ability to work at my leisure inbetween surf sessions at the beach, after high school I still had an entire summer to waste before creeping back into the reality of education, college was a distant and uncharted territory at the time I never truly embraced, blanketed by a lack of understanding on how high the bar would be raised in comparison from the rather laid back nature and generally uninteresting quality of learning experienced in the previous four years. Television and peers showed me how partying, sex, and a general disdain for focusing on achievement could lead to a life of unlimited cool, social success, and carnal satisfaction, what the above two things did not bother to tell me was that by following the fast track to frat league activity would transform all motives, actions, and mindsets into feeding those three needs over the next twenty years consequentially stunning my growth as a human being, an artist, and contributor to something larger than getting wasted, one night stands, and a total commitment to compulsive consumerism debilitating any sort of possibility of making a stand in working toward my real dreams of writing, film, and music. Those things have really never been know as money makers, but more like hobbies for the masses who drowned under the illusion that they have this hidden talent waiting to blossom into a Hollywood success story with all the trimmings of self destructive behavior, multiple sex partners, and a never ending supply of narcotic substances falling from the sky in a Willie Wonka factory dream breaking like a tidal wave of onto the delicate unmolested sanctified conscious of empty results, reality breaking critism, and utter lack of commitment.


Watching such people around me initally scared off the desire to do anything creative, it felt like anything realated to the current circle of musicans, artists, and other street freaks at one point or another needed a massive contract of financial wealth to give it any sort of sense of validity, bands back in the late 80's in San Diego were being given lots of money with nothing more than demo tapes in their possession, showcase concerts and opening gigs with national touring bands only fueled the already Hades like flames engulfing the San Diego music scene, of course the hype eventually moved on elsewhere taking the entire scene and all its sycophants along with it which was no big loss to me, resulting in the closing down of almost every irrelevant nightclub in town. A few still remain today not much different than they were twenty years ago with the same old worn down crusties in their fourties and fifties, with rockabilly tattoos and attitudes looking to get in the ring one more time if only for nostalgic reasons to induce a fix that has no cure, no escape, no eventual withdrawl, reborn by all the heros of real music, regardless of style from Jelly Roll Morton to Wilco, classical to dubstep, and reggae to reggaeton, possession is complete and final.