NYCBP Blog

I am back to updating New York City Bartenders & Patrons on a more regular basis. After taking about a year to not do very much at all with the site, I’m going to give it another whirl.

I spent quite awhile changing templates and pages around, deleting a lot of old content. I added hundreds of photos (thanks to Erik Madden) for them. I tried to make the site easier to navigate and get around.

Right now I’m having some problems with the message boards, but they should be fixed in a day or so. I am upgrading them and moving it to a new server; I am preserving all the old messages.

So what happened? As some of you know, I wrote a book. It is doing well and about to go into a second printing. It was a lot more work than I ever imagined. Now that it is in stores I am working on the new one. I also started a new job this year. Those that think that nycbp.com suffered since I got married are sure wrong about that one…

So what happened? How come I came back suddenly? A few things lately:

I think a big part was seeing Erik and Captain America at Yogi’s recently. Erik had his camera out, taking a few photos here and there. Captain was – once again – telling me that he gave up drinking for Lent. That must be the hardest 40 days in the city. But I must say I genuinely missed the old routine of Erik giving me some CDs or prints for nycbp.com’s camera club. We were standing at the bar, Teri and Claire were working, and I really wanted to update the site!

At the end of the night, Erik handed me a single photo. It was of Rachel, late of Red Rock and now at Yogi’s. She looked fantastic. And I really wanted to put that photo on the site!

Another jolt: I was also startled to see a certain fat ass cretin who loved to be a pain in my ass on nybcp.com. It had been a few years since I’d laid eyes on this big piece of crap. But seeing him – and knowing that he was still out there – really made me miss the old days of stirring up shit on the message boards. It made me miss my message boards (and I hope they are fixed tomorrow).

I also have to give some credit to Jaime, who is a sexy bartender at The Library. What is pathetic about the sad state of nycbp.com is that the bar has lost all its bartenders who were on the site. Poor Jaime has been working there for 2 years! I can’t believe I didn’t have her on the site. She’s been emailing me, begging me to update the site. So I finally FINALLY went down to The Library. I have not been there in ages. I had a few beers with her and Judy, the only woman from Scotland I know, and she is always super cool. It made me miss nycbp.com to have two great bartenders and not have them on the site.

I also have to give credit to Myspace. See my page here. About six months ago I was working for an ad agency and I needed to create a Myspace page because we were doing advertising with them. I admit I hated it at first. But then I found some of my old bar pals. That made it fun, and I now check it every day. So part of it was that Myspace can suck, and I missed the freedom one gets on their own site.

One of the reasons I lost interest in working on the site is that so many of my old friends got out of bartending. They have gone onto bigger and better careers, of course. But so many quit that I used to love drinking with and taking photos of. I miss, in no particular order: Tracy, Tamela, Myriam, Val, Timmy, Chaundra, Liani, Amy… and about 25 others. I also watched Who’s on First and the Village Idiot close; I practically lived at those places.

However, what really got me back were you guys. Just talking to friends like Bass Ale Man, Paulkatcher.com, Clay Waters, Clay Enos, Gator, Eddie… it made me want to come back and kick the tires again. I had a couple of false starts in the past year, but hopefully I can work on the site for a couple hours a week.

If you want to post messages on the blog, please do, because I want to be a better blogger from now on.

Thanks for reading. And for sticking with me and nycbp.com!