Critical Creig: When nobody is offended, nobody can win

CREIG P. SHERBURNE

Atascadero is a city that makes total and utter sense in at least one major way: its drinking laws.

Many cities — San Luis Obispo and Paso Robles are excellent examples — don’t allow drinking in public. Atascadero does. It is perfectly legal to head to Heilmann Regional Park for a game of disc golf, beer in hand. In fact, it’s one of my favorite things to do with my kid and rent-a-kids. It’s something of a ritual.

We pile into the car with our discs, and make our first stop at Chalk Mountain Liquor. I generally snag something by Firestone-Walker while the kids make the hugely important decision of which horrible soda to buy. As often as not, they all end up with exactly the same thing and we have to mark them with Sharpies before heading out to play.

Watching 11-year-olds choose drinks, by the way, is hilarious. They talk about the various merits of this over that, and then I veto their decision because it’s 5 p.m. and while I am OK with the occasional special treat of a tasty high fructose corn syrup beverage — I’m treating myself with an alcoholic oat-soda on a weekday, after all — I am not OK with loading them full of caffeine.

Back to the drawing board, they usually default to root beer, lemon-lime or orange soda. Is there anything less like what it says it is than orange soda? True, it’s the color orange, but orange soda is to oranges what a McDonald’s hamburger is to an F. McLintock’s New York steak.

And then we head out for a game of disc golf.

Inevitably, somebody drops a soda and it explodes or rolls down a hill or something, but that’s all part of the game. I sip my beer slowly while telling the youngsters “good job!” over six holes or so. It’s good.

And there’s absolutely no reason on earth this should be illegal. And thankfully, it’s not. Atascadero recognizes that there is a difference between “having a beer” and “being a miserable vomiting jerk who is unaware that he is walking in traffic without pants.”

The way I interpret it, we are allowed to have a drink and be responsible, but we are not allowed to be irresponsible jerks.

I applaud that, not in the least because it allows things such as Tuesdays in the Park and the Atascadero Lakeside Wine Festival. At both events, you’re allowed to drink, but you’re not allowed to be a jerk. In short, Atascadero is reasonable about drinking.

In 2000, parody newspaper The Onion ran a headline showing the opposite of Atascadero’s reasonableness: “Fun toy banned because of three stupid dead kids.” It’s a 100-percent made-up story — and it’s funny — but it clearly illustrates the dangers of dumbing everything down.

While I doubt that wine in the park is under threat at the moment, week after week, the Red Light Roundup is full of people being drunk in public. How long until somebody complains about it loudly enough that my disc golf ritual and the wine fest become casualties?

What I’m saying is that Atascadero has reasonable rules and will probably continue to be reasonable until its citizens stop being reasonable.

And I don’t know about you, but I love being smug at Paso, bottle high in the air.

So please. I need your help if I am to stay smug. Don’t be the irresponsible drinker who ruins it for everybody this Fourth of July.