Mental Health Day Drinking

There’s any number of ways to day drink. For most of the world, it either involves brunch, sports or a music festival. But for New Orleanians ... well, hell, we’re known the world over for drinking before the sun is over the yardarm.

Your kid is turning 8 months and two weeks? Let’s day drink!

It’s Sunday? Well, then we’re second lining and drinking. A storm is coming, and everybody called out? Let’s get into it!

And if there’s a pot and some sort of seafood, well, we’re boiling ... and drinking!

But like most everything else we do here, there’s often another level to how we day drink. Because unlike everywhere else, New Orleanians understand the trick to staying happy and semi-sane is that sometimes, you just got to take a day to sit on a nice barstool, tip a couple few drinks and take a moment.

A self-care day of drinking can take any number of forms. It can mean decamping to your local in the early afternoon and wiling away the daylight hours with your favorite bartender and a regular or two.

There’s the classic “catch up with an old friend” day drink. Thanks to the addictive nature of our city on anybody who visits, there's a seemingly endless parade of chances for a reconnect, whether it's an old college friend, a childhood friend who moved off, a once estranged ex — or even the still estranged ex of that once estranged ex.

Sometimes a good day drink means meeting up with a homie or two, watching whatever TV show or old-time movie plays in the background while you talk shit, laugh and silently reaffirm the familial bonds that brought you together in the first place.

A good day drink with a couple of pals is somehow different than a normal night at the bar. Maybe it's just the broader culture’s disapproval of stepping away from work on a non-designated holiday. Or the differences in the light — even a dark barroom — that come with sitting down for a beer or three when the sun’s still up.

Whatever it is, it always feels good to do nothing much at all with your friends to simply be in their presence.

Then, there’s the solo day drink. Puritans may look down their sour noses at the idea that it's OK to go to a bar and sit with nothing but yourself, a drink and the endless possibilities of who or what might walk through the door. They’ll say its lazy, or worse, a sign of a drinking “problem.” That's a sad way to go through life because you can learn a lot sitting in a bar by yourself during the day. Plus, jokes on them since you don’t need to drink booze to enjoy some quality day-drinking time.

For years I traveled a lot for work, and over time I got into the habit of arriving a day or two early, especially if I’d never been there before. That way I could spend some time sitting in bars and getting to know new cities.

The same goes for here at home. Sitting in the window at Harry’s Corner in the French Quarter is great not only for general people watching, but to get a sense of what’s happening in the neighborhood. You can literally feel the rhythms as the street goes from the quiet domain of locals to the playground of happy, boisterous tourists.

From the stools at Bud Rip’s and BJ’s you could literally watch the Bywater transform over the last decade and a half: as old timer daytime bartenders like the late, great Bob Smith gave way to a younger, hipper generation of bar hands, and dayside crowds once filled with plumbers, electricians and certifiable weirdos thinned and were slowly replaced, first by hipsters and metalheads and now Airbnb tourists looking for “authentic Nawlins.”

A solo day at the bar can also be a great way to clear the mind or beat back those persistent demons and self-doubt.

I love a good solitary daytime drink. Sometimes it's almost meditative, a simple matter of sitting quietly at the bar, sorting through whatever thoughts and hangups are preoccupying me and letting them fall away. Other times I find myself listening to a stranger’s tales of joy or sorrow, celebrating and commiserating in turn. And sometimes, I learn a thing or two about myself.

The first time I went day drinking by myself I was in my early 20s, maybe a year or two of age. I was staying in Missoula, Montana, working and going to college. I was driving home from somewhere one afternoon and stopped for gas.

Earlier that day I’d gotten into it with the woman I was with at the time, and being a proper Gen X manchild, was in my feelings, so after I gassed up, I decided to hit what looked to be a bar nearby.

It turned out to technically be a bar, but more to the point, it was a strip club. Though at 2 in the afternoon on a weekday, there wasn’t much stripping or clubbing going on. Instead, I found three young women sitting at the bar, smoking Marlboro Light 100s, sipping beers and chatting with the older woman behind the bar.

I froze in the doorway. I’d never actually been in a strip club at this point in my life and hadn’t at least consciously been fixing to that day. After an excruciatingly long pause, the clearly amused bartender greeted me, explained the entertainment wouldn’t start for a few hours but the bar was open if I wanted a drink.

I sat down, ordered a beer and a shot and tried my best to make it seem like I belonged there. It didn’t take long before the bartender turned her attention to me, and even less for me to volunteer what was almost certainly far too much information about my life, my relationship and whatever dumb thing I’d done that had caused the fight with my girl earlier in the day.

The women listened patiently as I talked my way out of whatever emo hole I’d dug for myself. They sympathetically laughed over just how earth shatteringly serious it all seemed, at least to me. They commiserated a bit, offered up the perhaps cliched but still sage advice to stop taking things so seriously and that everything would work itself out if I’d just get out of my own head.

They were, of course, right, and after a few hours of chatting about life, work and nothing in particular, I left feeling a lot less like whatever crisis of youth I was dealing with would end the world as I knew it.

In short, I ended up in what would be the first of a lifelong series of therapy sessions in a bar.

With the world in a near constant state of chaos and stress, finding space and time away from it all — from your domestic squabbles, from your boss, from the existential threat of creeping fascism — is more important now than ever before. And a barstool can be a perfect spot to find it on a Tuesday afternoon.