Delia's Gone, One More Round, Delia's Gone

While you await us putting an end to this period of Holiday-time vacation we’ve taken from updating our Quest (we finished, by the way…posts forthcoming), I’ll just write some random reflections on one of the most interesting resolutions I’ve ever managed to keep for an entire year.

• Over the holiday I told many people that “I’m tired of going to bars.” That’s not entirely true. I’m tired of going to bars that I’m *required* to attend. Several of the last places we visited were venues we held off on going to simply because we didn’t actually want to go there. Our last weekend of bar hopping has been dubbed “The Garbage Weekend” due to the general strangeness of most places we had a drink.
• Our 2010 plans for the Empty Blog of Nothing will be “officially” announced soon. They’re not nearly as ambitious as we were in 2009. Honestly, our 2009 goal at times seemed like one of the worst ideas I’ve ever tried to carry out.
• As proof that I haven’t tired of going to bars…I’ve been to 4 already in 2010. Yikes.
• We will, however, try to keep posting semi-regularly, and hopefully about things that you readers will find interesting. Like, we’re both running the Boston Marathon in April, so maybe there will be training updates. We both go to a lot of concerts (I saw 87 bands in ’09), so maybe we’ll check in from time to time on what we’re listening to. We’ll still write about evenings (or entire days) spent on the bar scene, but not so much that every post reads “We went here, here, and here. They were all terrible.” Basically, there will probably be more variety in these parts than in 2009. Maybe Rick will be nice enough to give us a recap of the shenanigans surrounding the IL Senate Race prior to the primary election on February 2nd.
• We’ve turned into the “go-to” people for determining destinations in our neighborhood. About every Thursday and Friday I get at least one email from someone listing the requirements of the nightspot they want to attend in my neighborhood, hoping I have the perfect buffet list of places for them to visit. I’m not gonna lie…usually I do.
• More so than the specific “place” of drinking, however, this year we discovered (well, not so much “discovered” as “reinforced”) that the most important ingredient to having a good time while carousing through Chicago is the people you surround yourself with. Our friends, new & old, embraced our 2009 mission and offered all kinds of encouragement. We thank you. Everyone from Internet Celebrity Baumer, to the former members of the 907, to our runner friends more dedicated to sport than to drink, and to the girls that I think show up just to laugh at us dancing…Thank You. Your attendance during our year of drinking locally made terrible bars bearable. It made great bars places that show up repeatedly on the lists I produce for the previous bullet point. Thank You, Thank You, Thank You.


Lastly, since we’re both voracious consumers of all things internet, maybe we’ll try to post more links to things that people should be reading. Here’s a few, and one of my favorites from this past year:
• FiveThirtyEight.com offers up Onion-worthy satire: Ben Nelson Trails Jesus in Latest Election Polling
• Here’s a great post from Chicago Justice about the local media’s inability to understand or even bother using and reporting on anything other than the yearly homicide rates. Here
• And finally… the Eternal Moonwalk…still Moonwalking (well yeah, it’s Eternal), and most people are still terrible at it. Like playing golf…the great shot from time to time is worth dealing with the terrible ones.

Thanks for reading. Final Bar recaps coming soon. Really! I promise. As soon as I get around to them.

(re: post title. There's a lot of bullets. Using the Smashing Pumpkins song was too easy)