I stopped in here to say hello to George and to celebrate the sale of the Warriors. I ordered a tall one and a short one and sat down at the bar in the usual prematurely aging barfly posture. The place is pretty standard dive but they get extra points for the aqua marine color of the paint below the bar. I looked around to see if anyone else was celebrating the change in ownship but I forgot that under article 11-a of the hipster code you are allowed to either wear thin cloth short-sleeved shirts and have a mustache or show enthusiasm for sports. Never both. Clean shaven as I was, I didn’t make any Warrior fans.

I finished my drinks, the cool amber chasing the charred oak, put down 12 on 8 and walked outside. Free.

A member of the tiki lounge resistance movement, Kona Club split the head of the Kings X and opened a couple years ago. I held off going for a while out of respect for the fallen king, but the other day I stepped in after drinking a 40 at the Mountain View Cemetery for old times’ sake.

Tiki lounges are funny—noone really likes them but noone really objects to them either. Who doesn’t like those saccharine drinks under those saccharine lights once a year? Throw in some fake palm plants while we’re at it and we have an evening.

Do I like this place better than the Kings X? Of course not. And that was a stupid question. But I’ll see you a year from tonight.

Well, boys, I’ve found the bottom. I’ve been in dive bars all over this great expanse and this one is officially, undeniably, almost unbelievably, the lowest.

What hits you first is the smell. You don’t see it coming. You step inside from the half artisinal, half Disney confines of Jack London Square and you’re hit with a ringing kidney shot. Now you’re a boxer with no legs.

You walk up to the long bar manned by a brawny woman in her 30′s (only one bartender is needed here) and you order a drink. You order a Budweiser because you feel uncomfortable. The other three people in the bar stare at you with no expression on their rainy faces. They are neither unhappy nor happy to see you. Are they surprised?

You look to your right at the cutoff hallway that leads the bathroom. It’s dark. You will not go there. No, not you.

You get your beer and give the bartender $4. You walk around the corner of the bar and into an adjacent room with a pool table and a pinball machine. The ceiling is forty feet high. The floor is an unnatural grayish blue. There are boxes on the floor. There are no seats or tables. Why would there be? The pinball machine eats your quarter. You want to play pool but you don’t want to ask the bartender for change. You drink half your beer.

You used to think that all dive bars were on some level a joke. They were pretending to be worse than they were. They were high school girls smoking cigarettes. Now you know that this is not true. There are some enclosures that are simply foul and you can pay to get drunk there.

You finish your beer and leave.

I only look back once.

I ducked my head in here the other night for the first time in a while for a tall one and a short one. I still can’t get confirmation one way or another on the rumor that was going around a few years ago that it’s a gay bar, but that don’t bother me. I only drink in shitholes so there’s only guys in the places I go either way.

They have Pabst on tap here and if you feel like poking irony’s corpse feel free to get one. I ordered a shot of Jameson and a Fat Tire and sat down at the far end of the half-moon bar, next to the fake brick lining the back wall and next to the free popcorn and Sriracha (both a nice touch.)

There were only guys inside, of course, 5 o’clock drunks and worse, and I settled in easily. The jukebox is pretty boring here, mostly traditional bar rock and r&b selections so I decided to drink by myself in peace, just the way I like it, until some guy put on a series of increasingly average Queens of the Stone Age songs.

I stayed for about 30 minutes and watched people move in and out pretty regularly. This place has always been more crowded that you think it’s going to be. The bartender was attentive but not annoying.

All in all, a good bar. I’ll be back soon. Earlier the next time, always earlier.