Friday Night Bug Juice

CONTACT

Drop us a line!

Welcome to Friday Night Bug Juice, a Metro Detroit bar review site. We're here to give you a look into the dive bars of the Detroit area, so you can hopefully spend your cash wisely, and get a little insight into the lives of a couple of hapless irish louts.

ABOUT

Welcome to the section of our site where you can learn everything you ever wanted to know and way too much more about the gang that works hard ruining their livers to bring you all you need to know about the dive bars of the Metro Detroit area!

GAME DAY

Life may be like a box of chocolates, but I’ve always felt that the work week is like a bar of soap. On Monday, I am a fresh, out of the wrapper bar of Irish Spring. As the week goes on and I deal with one asshole after another, that bar of soap is rubbed between the fingers of life and I get smaller and smaller. By quitting time on Friday, I am the sliver of soap that constantly slips through your hands and collects in the rogue hairs around the drain of the shower.

Tony and I take different paths from quitting time to our Friday night rendezvous.

JIM: I feel like a new, albeit tired, man when I hit my house late Friday afternoon. Gone is the bullshit of the work week, the rudeness of John Q Public and the endless traffic. It is replaced with the relative quiet of home, the love of family and no decisions. My wife has a nice dinner ready and, as is our custom after most dinners, we head out onto our garden patio for games of Rack-0 and Yahtzee. Once Andrea finishes handing me my ass, we talk until 7:30 when she heads over to her dad’s house for a visit.

That is my cue to hit the couch for a nap, or attempt at a nap. My twelve year old Jackson is the X-Factor in this endeavor. As I begin to doze I feel his presence above me. I open my eyes and he asks if he can go to the park and hang. He goes and I start to doze. Fifteen minutes later I hear the side door open and he comes rushing in to take a leak (either he waits to the last second or I have forgotten what a young set of equipment sounds like, but his stream is strong). Out he goes, again I doze. Twenty minutes later, he is back to ask if the guys can hang out in the basement to mess around. One Friday night, my third wake-up came from a knock at the door and the little girl next door complaining about Jack and his friends using a Fart Bag to scare and ruin her evening (bet you didn’t know you could buy a commercial fart bag...ah technology).

At this point I give up and spend the remaining time up to 9:15 watching DVDs. Favorites are any Oasis concert, The Who in The Kids Are All Right, or Guy Ritchie films (weirdly, I get a lump in my throat during the end credits of the Who movie when they show montages of the band leaving the stage kissing and hugging; it’s Keith I guess, a tragic character in the Shakespearean tradition). At 9:15 it is time to drag my sorry ass up and get ready. I shave my head, once every four times nicking some fat ridge until blood flows like a scene from Braveheart. I then begin the daunting task of trimming my nose, ear and eyebrow hair. How these areas can get so wild in seven days is beyond me. I put a dab of Oil of Olay on my bald head, work the deodorant, and steal a touch of my wife’s cover-up for a nasty vein that sits on the left side of my nose. Done!

TONY: Of course, I am not present for Tony’s Game Day preparations, but I do know that they are much more serious and regimented than my own. I have also gleaned that Beth and my mom are to stay the fuck out of his way.

Friday night dinner is planned well in advance, nothing spicy or garlicky that could upset his delicate tummy or taint his breath. Once dinner is wolfed down, he repairs to his bedroom to watch DVDs, selections being very similar to my own (or is it mine to his?). He branches out a bit and adds Monty Python or 30 Rock to his library.

Somewhere around six, he goes to sleep and nobody messes with him until his wake-up call some three hours later. Lucky guy!

“Hey Tony, how did you sleep?”

“I went down hard and when I heard the alarm I was confused as hell and didn’t
know what was going on...I could have easily slept through the night.”

How I envy the purity of his nap, though he will never know the perils of the fart bag.

Once awake, a scalding shower and nose/ear hair primping begin his preparations (is the nose/ear thing a guy thing or an Irish/Scottish thing?). There is no head shaving for little brother as he is not bald, just balding. He does keep his head well trimmed and always has quite the dapper appearance. Finally, he bathes in cologne, a trick learned from living so close to the largest Arab population in the United States. Viola!

CONCLUSION: Essentially, we are good to go ( I will get into the evolution of our fab gear in a separate section). These routines have lead to a bit of “innocent ribbing” from our wives. They recently got together and compared notes leading them both to one big question: Why does it take longer than six seconds for us to get ready for Friday Night Bug Juice, six seconds being the time it takes for us to get ready for a night with the wives? Really, there is no dark answer. It is a comfy routine, a primping for the entire week and is not an effort to look good for any bar folk. I do want to look nice for Tony, however.
 
back to top