Jesse Schwartz over at Dig Boston posted another outtake from my book today. I like the part where they say nice things about me.  Go read it there.

The diving never stops here at the Dig. Perhaps this is not a good thing. But with a book like , an excellent little guide written by our former A&E editor Luke O’Neil, at least when you’re five pitchers in, throwing Cyndi Lauper on the internet jukebox and directing 80% of your piss into the small drain on the bathroom floor, you’ll be in a place with character. 

Ever since I got my own copy of Luke’s book, I’ve been introducing CL hit “” to some of Boston’s darkest, scuzziest watering holes, from Jamaica Plain to Dorchester. Recently my friends sat me down. “We think you should lay low for a while,” they said. But like Luke, I’ve got two smelly bearded devils perched on my shoulders with pints in their hands and hints of desperation in their eyes.
Join us.

From the outtakes of Boston’s Best Dive Bars, which Luke sent us exclusively, we present the Blackthorn Bar, a Southie dive and sanctuary for local Irish soccer hooligans “young and old alike.”

Finding himself in such a tightly bound, firmly established neighborhood, Luke maintains the sense of an outsider’s unease but balances it with a levity and humor that come to characterize his style and, overall, make the book such a pleasure to read.

Now pleasure yourself and check the omitted piece below.

Pick up Luke’s book , or at your local Newbury Comics.

BLACKTHORN BAR 471 W. BROADWAY, SOUTH BOSTON. . 

BY LUKE O’NEIL

Seems kind of pointless to be big-upping my own book while you’re reading it, because odds are you’ve already purchased it by this point, but this Irish pub dive reminds me that you can’t exactly go dive-hunting on Yelp. Read the reviews online and they’d have you believe this is the 7^th circle of hell.  You’d expect to find a group of sullen neighborhood Irish pissing and puking all over each other in here, fighting and bleeding into each other’s mugs of bitter. I’m sure that’s just as likely to happen here as anywhere else, but it’s hardly as bad as all that. It’s just a soccer dive that serves a function for the hood’s Irish, young and old alike. The old timers sweat out the day in the same bar seat they’ve been sitting in since before you were born, maybe glancing up at the soccer match from time to time. The youngsters come to dance and fight outside and find someone to go home to dance and fight with in bed. (They call it the Blackeye for a reason.) Nothing exactly out of the ordinary there.

I last came by during the World Cup, which may or may not have been a great idea. I found more shaved skulls and footie kits in here than the mosh pit at Glastonbury.  Sweatier here too in July, with just as many pointy elbows. The décor of the place announces its allegiance to soccer pretty evidently. There are framed posters on the wall from nearly every World Cup in the past 50 years. Autographed posters, Arsenal and Celtic jerseys, pictures of hairy men I have never heard of — but most of the guys drinking in here right now would likely push their own mothers down a flight of stairs for them.

But since the bar is located on a busy Southie intersection of Broadway and Dorchester St., it turns into a livelier scene at night. The music can be a louder in here than you might expect. And since it’s a European element, it tends more toward the techno and beat-driven side than most other dive bars. That’s because European girls are a lot more fun than American girls, especially the ones that hang out in dive bars. They’ve got better taste too. Maybe not in men, but that’s a whole other story.  There’s a difference in the way people get drunk in every country. But it’s most notable among women. Women from the UK, particularly soccer fans, are something to behold. They put our American girls with their body shots and their Facebook lives and boring jobs to shame. I’m sure their antics seem just as boring when you live there, but there is just something magical about a pissed girl at 10 am on a Monday screaming at the bartender that he’s a cunt with a voice like a mouthful of highlands moss that makes me want to settle down. 

Maybe I’m just a romantic like that.