Oregon Tavern Age: Ryder Cup

My local OTA joint in Coos Bay. A Friday afternoon. The Ryder Cup golf event played silently on screens. Trump showed up at the course to do his El Duce shtick.

Zero protest from the Ryder Cup American side. Craven and pathetic servility instead.

What did I expect from American professional golfers anyway?

The days of Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown, Curt Flood, Arthur Ashe, Tommy Carlos are long, long gone. They never existed in professional golf. Remember how long it took for August National to admit blacks and women as members? Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus never said a word.

The joint was dead.

I was drinking an ale and trying to comprehend the image of morbidly obese woman walking out the grocery store with a chihuahua down her cleavage that I seen on the drive over.

Two OTAs at the bar and the female OTA bartender complained profanely about the local homeless woman who was addled and insane and a general menace to the neighborhood. The bartender said if the woman poked her head inside the joint again trying to mooch smokes or use the restroom, she was going to fuck her up.

I believed her and I didn’t want to see it.

You can feel the tolerance for the homeless oozing ways across Oregon and elsewhere. At times, I am feeling it myself.

An OTA man walked into the joint assisted by his OTA wife. He was somewhere beyond obese and used a walker. There was no way any chair or stool would hold him up.

He sat down and I prepared myself for the crash.

The chair held.

It was yet more proof that I was living in a community suffering from the greatest public health disaster I’d ever observed.

And it will never improve in my lifetime.