I am Cliff Clavin

I have been watching a lot of Cheers lately.

Like everyone else, this means binging for a few hours at a time on Netflix*. I am old enough to remember when you were only able to watch a TV show once a week and cable was a novelty*. Sadly, this may be our greatest achievement of my life time (aside from erectile dysfunction medication, but, alas, that is a subject for another day): Instant gratification. Virtually anything you want is available in seconds; we are slowly eliminating patience as an actual characteristic. Yes, this paragraph reads older than anything other than the Bible.

*Speaking of Netflix, let me air one complaint. While their TV selection is fantastic (Mad Men, Breaking Bad, etc.) the movie selection is a smelly armpit. Here are two suggestions from me that you likely haven’t heard of and I cannot recommend high enough: Goon and Croupier. Just watch them. This is assuming they will still be streaming when you see this; what is available is less predictable than Bigfoot sightings.

*I also distinctly remember having three channels, four if you count PBS. Though if one of your family was willing to wrap themselves in tin foil with a coat hanger in one hand and the TV antennae in the other while thinking happy thoughts, you could sometimes pick up a fifth from Joplin, MO. This channel showed the exact same shows as another local channel, but it seemed more exotic somehow. This is the first time in history someone has called Joplin exotic.

Any-who, Cheers. For my money, this is the most underappreciated sitcom of all time. Everybody talks about Seinfeld, the Simpsons, and Friends, and somehow this gem gets lost in the shuffle. Hell, people talk more fondly about I Love Lucy and that show has to be 90 years old by now, give or take 50 years. This was a great character based show that managed to move from sublime to slapstick so deftly it has lead to it being so underrated. There is no Parks and Rec or the Office without it.

But I digress. What I really want to talk about are the characters, and one in particular. Cheers was made up of a group of people who spend most of their free time in a Boston bar. (Do not underestimate this show’s power: it actually made people from Boston seem likable.) If you have ever spent any regular time with a group of people in a bar, sooner or later you try to figure out which Cheers character you are. Many people want to be Sam, the lady killer bartender, or Diane the perky waitress. Most people had someone they could relate to, a character who was funny, charming, and relatable. But be sure of one thing: no one, and I mean no one, wanted to be Cliff.

People are fine with Norm, the fat lovable drunk. I even had a friend say they would be Paul, a wall flower who had maybe five lines in the entire 10 year series. No one wants to be Cliff, to put it simply, because he is a know it all. A blowhard. He was a fountain of useless, and often incorrect, knowledge that washes across the bar to indifferent and often annoyed ears. There was no subject too random, obscure, or pointless that Cliff would not offer some trivial fact.

No matter how much I try and deny it, this is me. Just slightly more subtle.

I mean, I am not wearing a full postal uniform into a bar, as entertaining as that sounds*.  Cliff’s modus operandi is to show up in his mail man uniform (short hand for someone who is maybe a little less important than he thinks he is) and loudly hold court about a whole lot of unverifiable stuff. The absence of uniform is not due to my own foresight. If not for technology I feel I would have been just as over the top as a character from an 80’s sitcom. And that technology is a simple blue box.

*The only uniform I have ever worn is a Cub Scout uniform, and I have the third grade photos to prove it. I am discounting football and band because you couldn’t show up for picture day in those uniforms and expect to get home with your humility intact. Plus, the Cub Scout uniform had a neckerchief. Come on, how often do you get to wear a neckerchief?!

I was first introduced to bar trivia about ten years ago.

I had just moved to St. Louis and my girlfriend/fiancé/future ex-wife/crazy lady who would later threaten to kill me really liked hanging out in bars. Like needs an intervention liked to hang out in bars. At the time, I was a very light drinker*, and the bar could get a bit tedious. And that is when I stumbled onto Buzztime.

*By light drinker, I mean I had never had a drink until age 31ish. I blame Jesus. My first drunk experience happened when I moved to St. Louis. Here is all you need to know about that experience: Grape martinis, passed out in a bathroom stall, and puking on a tree. I will let you fill in the blanks.

The little blue box that greatly resembles a Timex home computer from circa 1983. For anyone under the age of 30, or whose family could afford a real computer, picture a really big, basic calculator/adding machine encased in plastic. A Commodore 64 was the things dreams were made of in my family.  (Here is my only memory from computers at that time: Running that program that made the entire screen fill up with my name. State. Of. The. Art. Yet, according to the movies, people my age were hacking the missile defense system. I feel like you lied to me Wargames!!) It contains a full keyboard, which is never used. Essentially all you need are the 1-5 number keys to play the game. How it works: The typical game is 15 questions long, multiple choice with four choices. The longer it takes to get the answer, the less points you receive. That’s it, that’s the list. It is the same basic process of any game show, but with no spokesmodel or prizes. Except for “player plus points” which you accumulate every game and have no value or meaning at all, other than to show the rest of the world just how much time you spend in bars playing games.

Basically, you log on* and see just how much useless knowledge is crammed down into the dark recesses of your skull. It took me about 42 minutes to become absolutely and completely hooked. It started innocently enough: Something to do while my significant other got bombed on martinis. Win/win!

*Log in names, as you can imagine, are an interesting time. What is it about entering fake names into games that turns people into third graders? I am pretty sure there is a Pac Man game from 1983 out there somewhere with a top score by “BOOBS.” My extremely creative sign on name: Mike. I know, where do I come up with these things? There is little more humiliating than playing under your real name and losing to “Camltoh” and “Wang-ho”. It tends to keep the ego in check.

It was fun, for a while, basking in the glory of an extensive knowledge of 70’s Oscar winners, capitols of Pacific Islands, and bones of the inner ear. And by a while, I mean about 10 years. However, I should have been taking notes during Cheers. There are reasons Cliff is the most unpopular character. Among them:

-The isolation. It is a lonely world in the bar trivia universe. One man, one machine, and one beer (at a time). Hawthorne can keep his scarlet letter; that little blue box is much more of a pariah than some mild adultery. There are many options of what may keep people away: the fact I am hunched over what looks like a giant desk calculator, the fact I am staring at a TV screen like it is the last minutes of a ball game I have gambled every cent to my name on, or the constant muttering under my breath. (It is probably the muttering. The self-loathing after missing a question can be intense.) The one thing all of the reasons have in common is that they are self-generated. I have become an expert at generating a force field of “leave me alone” energy. The ways to communicate this are numerous; Batman’s utility belt has less options. Refusal to make eye contact with whomever is speaking is usually first off the deck, followed by grunting in response to any questions, and finally turning my body at a precise 34.5% angle away from the speaker/person sitting next to me/completely normal social person enjoying an adult beverage.* That tends to do the trick.

*This would be a good point to introduce this statistic: The number of girls met/won over while playing trivia is exactly 0.0. Here is what that pie chart looks like: 0.

-The disdain. I don’t know what it is about knowing stuff, but it sure tends to annoy people. People like to voice their judgments of you when you know ridiculous information about what state Mary Todd Lincoln was born in. There are lots of cat calls like “Who knows this stuff?” and “Someone needs to t a life.” Sadly, they are all accurate and true. The most typical reactions are: “There is something wrong with you for knowing this,” “you play so much you have these memorized,” and “I quit, I like talking to real people.”* The best way to avoid this is to sit at the very end of the bar, make minimal requests, and wear a hat. People tend to not notice you in hat. The good news is the end of the bar is near the servers’ station. They will be friendly to anyone. It has just dawned on me how many bar staff I have met playing trivia. Those people are the salt of the earth. Or really bored.

-The liver damage. Listen, you can’t just sit there and play sipping water. The beers tend to pile up after three to four hours staring at the TV and plumbing the depths of my brain. I can’t imagine my liver is a big fan of the game. Sadly, my scores seem to go up the more I imbibe. Did I mention meeting a lot of bar staff while playing this game?

There are certainly are more social hobbies. But if you watch your Cheers, Cliff managed to make at least 4-5 friends. Or at least people who would tolerate him. Trivia has led me to meet a handful of good people, a smattering of weirdos, and a large number of people I will likely never see or speak to again. This sounds remarkably similar to every other frivolous activity I have ever taken part in. At the very worst, it gives me a valid excuse to read at an unreasonable rate and in a random selection of topics.

Let me leave with this request: The next time you seem so odd looking dude sitting at the end of the bar, bent over a tiny game, and way into the random questions on the TV, take it easy on him. Don’t assume he has a social disorder or strange body odor. In fact, feel free to make some small talk or offer to buy him a beer. Just make sure it is between games.