[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

There’s a bar near me that goes all out for the Masters. It’s a corner place with a small walkway it annexed from the development by subtle encroachment; a table here, now two, now six tables and outdoor TVs on the wall. I don’t think they own the “patio,” but it’s theirs now.

A few years ago, sections of the windowed front were replaced by glass garage doors. In good weather, weather like today, they open up the place and it’s all one big breezy space. All of it, the interior and the squatters-rights walkway, are covered in sod for the Masters. Not rolled out astroturf. They bring in real grass. I wouldn’t think it’d look good – ripped up in seconds by beer and wine guzzler feet I assumed – but it somehow does. They have drink specials, bands at night, and always one of the best hamburgers and bowls of chili in town.

My wife and I want to head out for a bit this afternoon and hang out. We hate golf. And crowds. This stinks.

Anyway, Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Duck out of work asap and get the weekend started. The Masters is on. If you’re in Birmingham, try Otey’s in Crestline, but don’t expect a seat this weekend. Damn golf.

First, a little verse.

***

“Twelve years ago Oliver Gogarty was captured by his enemies, imprisoned in a deserted house on the edge of the Liffey with every prospect of death. Pleading a natural necessity he got into the garden, plunged under a shower of revolver bullets and as he swam the ice-cold December stream promised it, should it land him in safety, two swans. I was present when he fulfilled that vow. His poetry fits the incident, a gay, stoical—no, I will not withhold the word—heroic song. Irish by tradition and many ancestors, I love, though I have nothing to offer but the philosophy they deride, swashbucklers, horsemen, swift indifferent men; yet I do not think that is the sole reason, good reason though it is, why I gave him considerable space, and think him one of the great lyric poets of our age.”
– W. B. Yeats, from the Introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892-1935

Oliver St. John Gogarty was a dear friend of Archie Griffith and with him, a founding member of Sinn Fein. He variously carted around Irish Republican Army members as surreptitiously as allowed by the canary yellow Rolls Royce he drove, volunteered his house as a safe house, and otherwise behaved anti-Englishly. He sided with Griffith in supporting a treaty despite internal opposition to peace within the revolutionary movement, and sat as a Free State Senator, a designation considered by many in the IRA such as Liam Lynch, as traitorous capitulation to the crown. Lynch ordered the IRA to shoot the office holders and that led to Gogarty pretending diarrhea and the escape Yeats refers to above.

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