The Oxford itself hasn't changed all that much. As I ate a huge burger with fries ($5) in there last night at the cafe counter, two young guys a few stools down discussed what seemed to be a play they're writing.

 

"We have to have him tell the truth here."
"You sure?"
"Oh, yeah."

I heard only a bit of their conversation, but that seemed to be what they were talking about. And they're not the first group of playwrights to ply their craft over coffee and cigarettes (still allowed) in the place. It's  a classic greasy-spoon cafe/bar. This one has the cafe counter on the back side of the long room and the bar on the front. A poker table is now placed before the front plate-glass window.

Last night -- as I'm pretty sure happens every night -- it was the one part of the place that was fully occupied.

The Ox hasn't changed. A sign above the deep fryer proclaims, "As of 1978, we have sold 170,171 JJ's Chicken Fried Steaks" It's a chicken-fried steak kinda place. There used to be plenty of places like this in Seattle. Rick Anderson has written a few reams on them. The cafe at Fisherman's Terminal in Ballard is in a new building, but still maintains some of the spirit of the Ox. And it still serves a great chicken-fried steak, but mostly those places have gone away in Seattle.

One reason for that is obvious even here in Missoula: Across the street from The Ox is a new building that contains a Starbucks.

And I write this now (mid-morning) in that Starbucks, because as familiar as The Ox still seems to me, the Starbucks seems even more familiar (and, besides, I have a Starbucks card that still has a few bucks on it).

But still -- even though the coffee at The Ox might have that same old nasty acidic bite -- the presence of ashtrays along with the coffee beckons me. And besides, I figured it would be a good idea to eat something, and this huge plate of breakfast before me now cost only $6 even. (Everything is even in Montana. No sales tax.)

---

 

Back from eating the big breakfast and helping Dwayne who was sitting across from me with a computer issue. The poker table at 1 pm is empty, but the bar is full as it has been since I came in here a bit before noon. It will probably remain full until early evening. This is prime time for the bar at the Ox. That, like the chicken fried steaks, is part of the nature of the place.

 

Last night, I steeled up my will and actually went over to Missoula's gay bar. I'm old and not all that pretty, so I didn't expect a friendly reaction in that bar -- just as I wouldn't expect a friendly reaction in most Seattle gay bars.

At about 9:30 pm last night, on a Sunday at the end of a long break for the college, downtown was pretty much deserted. There were a couple of sorority girls outside the Stockmans -- just as there have been for generations. It's the place where drunken frat boys go to hook up with drunken sorority girls.

There are some unfamiliar names among the bars in Missoula's small tightly packed bars strip, but not many. Most of them were here three decades ago when I went to school here.

The AmVets didn't have that name, but the space was a popular bar back then, called Monk's Cave. It's in the basement of a building just across from the Missoula County Courthouse, down a steep set of steps cut out of the sidewalk.

Remarkably, the space inside AmVets is virtually unchanged from what it was 30-plus years ago when I went in there on my first night being legal to drink. (It wasn't my birthday. It was July 1 when a changed law allowed 18-year-olds to drink legally.)

The space still has its stalactite-style posts. They seem to have painted the popcorn-spackle ceiling a few times since then, but not much else. Last night was a karaoke night. There were about a dozen folks in there, mostly a group of dyke friends, but several others arrived. All that came into the bar seemed to know each other.

Most ignored the old guy with the cane over in the corner -- most, that is, except for the severe-looking guy who insisted that I leave the area of the seats where his friends might sometime come back to sit. (They never did during the half-hour that I was there.)

I'd call the general reception hostile if I weren't trying to be kind.

Just before going in there, I'd been mocked by a group of three kids coming toward me on the street as I attempted to negotiate around a block of ice on the street. "Watch out for the ice there, fiddlesticks," said the leader of the pack as the three of them tittered with laughter.

(And yes, I recognized then that with just a few more beers they might have found it funnier to try to trip up the old guy with the cane who did not, after all, belong in this, their space -- a space for vibrant youth.)

And that was the problem also in AmVets. Whether it was my age or my cane, I did not belong to that space. I wasn't one of them.

I didn't belong at AmVets. That was clear.

But here at The Ox, I'm just as welcome as anyone else. Welcome to drink their coffee and smoke cigs all afternoon if I so choose. Welcome, that is, as long as I observe the exhortation posted throughout the place, "Pleas Pay When Served. No Checks. No Exceptions." I'm welcome here to use their free wi-fi and type this entry for some of the same reasons I wasn't welcome last night at AmVets. I'm old. Crippled. Not rich. Not pretty.

And, frankly, all of that welcoming and not welcoming is part of why the activists will have to talk this evening in Missoula and tomorrow night in Seattle.