I Blame Ryan Gosling
Hanging with my parents in Ybor City, Tampa.
Crazy, Stupid, Love
The difficulty I can see with writing a blog that might potentially continue to highlight restaurants and bars is that, well, I’ll spend all of my time eating and drinking booze. At some point recently (probably not so recently) I must admit to myself that I’ve become a fairly conformist adult with a high aesthetic standard. I used to be fine with meager accommodations and minimalism. And now, I’ve been staying at boutique hotels, dining and boozing in high end restaurants and bars. What happened to the dive bars I used to frequent and hole in the wall spots I would seek out? I blame Ryan Gosling.
I watched Crazy, Stupid, Love again recently after my fly fishing trip at Horseshoe Bend in Arizona. It became clear after watching the movie that a wardrobe update was in order. I had been wearing the same ratty clothes for nearly three years. The thing with Ryan Gosling is that the bastard just looks so damn good in everything. Strange though because every girl who I talk to about this topic is puzzled at my love for the Gos. They don’t think he’s the cat’s pajamas. I do.
Ryan Gosling's best scenes in Crazy Stupid Love.
Before leaving New Orleans, I dropped an assload of money at Banana Republic (probably not where his character Jacob or the Gos himself would shop). It was the closest store to me at the Ace Hotel in New Orleans (see the hangover post and my unwillingness to venture very far). When I entered the store—quite drunk—I said, “I want to look like Ryan Gosling from Crazy, Stupid, Love.”
The employees exchanged looks of either annoyance or pity (I was too drunk to tell which). I certainly don’t look like Gos in the face so what good would it do me to shop at Banana Republic they might be thinking. In either case, a fellow named Alton led me up the stairs to the men’s section and picked out six pairs of pants, four shirts, two sweaters, a sweatshirt, jacket, and shoes. I took them all. And you know what…it worked! I was the new Gos in town (well, the only Gos), receiving looks from guys and gals all over the place. Until I got to Tampa.
A brief hiatus. For the past year, I’ve been running (although, since I officially left Oakland, I suppose it’s technically over) backyard workouts with what started with a group of friends. That group grew larger and over time, I was “training” up to fifteen people. No, possibly not the most intelligent of activities during a global pandemic, however, not one of us got COVID.
My neighbor and friend during that period, Amos, entitled the workouts “BoPo,” short for Body Positive, as most of us had been quite out of shape before the pandemic. The name was appropriate, albeit facetious, as the environment for the workouts was meant to provide an atmosphere of community, positivity, and motivation. All this to say that somewhere during this time, I became acutely aware of my body in all of its splendor and imperfections.
The confidence was on the rise during this time period (as was the pandemic) is the point. And walking out of the store in my new clothes provided another brief period of self-awareness and respect. So what happened in Tampa?
Mandatory jump rope for the first 10 minutes of “BoPo.”
Attempting to get jacked through “BoPo.”
After New Orleans, I went to the Ybor City Historic District in Tampa. The neighborhood is known as the “Cigar Capital of the World,” (not that I have any interest in cigars…I was going for the women). Thousands of immigrants in the early 1900’s, mostly from Cuba, Spain, and Italy, worked in the cigar factories first began by a Mr. Vicente Martinez-Ybor. Walking down East 7th Ave, the main thoroughfare in Ybor City, you’ll come across large men sitting outside in their guayaberas, rum in hand, smoking the largest hand-rolled cigars that I’ve certainly ever seen.
The area is also frequented by what can only be described as flocks of college girls from what must be nearby University of Tampa. To steal a bit from Christian Finnegan on the aforementioned school, “spoiler alert, not an ivy league institution.”
A cigar factory in Ybor City in the 1920’s.
I was staying at Hotel Haya, another boutique hotel where the television welcomes you by name in an elegant typeface over a looping, touristy (though well-shot) video. The restaurant on the first floor, Flor Fina, serves a sort of pan-Latin fusion with the obligatory mixologists in denim aprons, sleeve tattoos, and mustaches that only a bartender could or should rock.
In my new clothes, freshly BoPo-ed body, a TV with my name on it upstairs parked in front of a king-sized bed, I should have been able to meet a single university gal. I ordered an expensive mezcal on the rocks, threw a $100 bill on the bar, corrected my posture and visualized the Gos pulling tail in every direction.
But then my parents joined me and my dreams were crushed. I forgot to mention that they were picking me up in Tampa. The remote life hasn’t, so far, required a car. I sipped my mezcal and, despite my love for my parents, bemoaned the evening’s certainty of failure to mingle. The Gos, I am sure, does not get picked up by his parents.
