Home NEWS Local Scene The Sunday Pulsebeat: Red Flags; Blackouts; Parades And Barricaded Inebriants

The Sunday Pulsebeat: Red Flags; Blackouts; Parades And Barricaded Inebriants

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"Scoop."

Our solar panels are deployed and ready and so are we, we think, for another period without power, cuddling the dog for warmth at night and reading actual books – essentially what our forefathers called “Regular Life” back in their day.

Cooking system in place. Check. Food reserves. Check. The Latte Maker hooked up to its own battery source. Good to go. We mean, you can only take this PG&E-enforced Roughing It stuff so far, after all.

We’ve been roaming a little more these days, seeing the sights, getting a sense of what The Masked and Unmasked are up to and we can only describe this period before Our Great Getting Up Morning – aka Election Day – as, well, contentious.

We don’t know when barricading yourself in a business’ broom closet or storage cubby became a thing but it appears to be a thing these days as yet another local mendicant turned up, walking in off the street and barricading himself in a broom closet at The Auburn Lounge in Danville last night.

The nice folks at The Auburn said the unnamed partier walked up to the lounge as they were closing last night, staggered past a security guard and immediately made for the closet, apparently so deep in the arms of Bacchus that once in he was unable to unlock the door from the inside – despite calls for him to do so.

Things become things when they come in Threes so this latest aberration got real for us after a massage parlor patron and another dissatisfied bar patron retreated to an available cubby space in a sort of reverse Dog Day Afternoon recently – overworked fire and police folks called to extricate them.

Last night’s Bar Barricader makes it three instances this month so – it’s a thing. We’d just recommend you pick the right closet if you’re up for this kind of demonstration because we’d want to be locked in with the good Scotch reserves and not the Lysol and smelly mops if we’re going to be holding out until the fire department shows up to take the door off the hinges.

And in other Local Business News: Apparently the good folks at the venerable Brass Door in San Ramon are also wondering why The Business Gods are not smiling on them after a work crew hit a water main and flooded the place – “mere hours” before the establishment got the green light to reopen for the first time in six months.

The restaurant is still closed for repairs after the September 25 incident and property owner Nancy Schlesinger says that is a tough row to hoe for a business that – except for a major fire in the mid-90s – has been in continuous operation since 1955.

Nancy, whose ties to the property stretch back to when her grandfather ran it as The 8 To 5 Club (we like that name) said before that work crew came along and struck water not even the pandemic had put the Brass Door out of business.

“My tenants say they hope to reopen by December 1, come what may,” Nancy writes. “I’m just hoping indoor dining at any capacity will still be allowed by then as we go into Covid Wave #3.”

Man, isn’t that the truth? We’re hoping we can all catch a break here real soon as conditions continue to tighten. Good luck to the crew at the Brass Door. If we remember correctly they offered a mean Corned Beef and Cabbage back in the days when we were still carnivorous.

On the political front, there’s no way to ignore the Orange Elephant in the Room these days, either, as rival groups of political supporters mass to air their support or disdain for certain political figures. Things have gotten – tense – as these groups meet to cheer or protest their respective position or figure.

Locally, we’re seeing armed guards hired to “protect” protestors, with counter protestors decked out with Go Pros getting involved in face-to-face confrontations for footage aired on local TV and websites for various groups.

“Counter Protesting” these days can mean anything from blaring your favorite Trump tune at an assembly of Biden people from your passing pickup truck to hurling nuts and bolts at passing groups of people not like you. We’ll just say that the rhetoric and pepper spray is amped up and ready and that we’re a little worried as we’re not sure how either side is going to take a loss on November 3 Plus Ten.

Perhaps we’ll sort ourselves out in time. We’ll just have to see.

Until then we have this Red Flag Period and Overnight Darkness thing to get through. No Internet. No Toddlers and Tiaras or Teen Moms. What are we going to do with ourselves?

We’ll just have to reacquaint ourselves with our unfinished reading list and look for a good Scotch closet to lock ourselves into.

We do, after all, like to keep up with the times.

4 COMMENTS

  1. Overnight Darkness? It’s been more like 40 years in the wilderness after 40 days and nights raining frogs. And I thought the Bush/Cheney years were Saturnian.

  2. Windy! Not my normal coffee hour but can’t get back to sleep. Power out in Larch area in Moraga apparently? We live nearby and have power but no cable.

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