A Local Bar is a Good Place to Be

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ran a splendid ode to local bars last week. Two people, neither from Pittsburgh, recommended it to me.

It’s the type of thing that could only be written by someone with a Catholic conscience, perhaps in the vein of GK Chesterton or, better, Hilaire Belloc, and their Distributist sentiments. It’d also have to be a guy with great prose style, a nerd of sorts, a guy with fond memories of Merry Ol’ England because maybe he spent some time at Oxford, the kind of guy who doesn’t mind whipping out his laptop while at a dive bar (which his favorite watering hole, Marroni’s, appears to be . . . I mean no offense; I’m highly partial to dive bars).

It could be a guy like David Mills, one of the finest stylists to grace Touchstone’s pages. He lives in the Pittsburgh area (last I knew) and had a big white beard (last I knew). I never thought of him as a big drinker, and I never really thought of him as a guy to hang out in dive bars, but his name is at the top article. His is a relatively common name, of course, but it’s gotta be the same guy I knew a score of years ago. It’s good to see him “still at it” (the writing game).

I highly recommend it.

“Marroni’s is a bar, all right, but also what the English call a public house. It’s like a community center with beer taps. And smoking. I don’t know…