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Second Base at the Bar

30 Jul

So you guys.  I know that I should be a smart and responsible person and learn from my mistakes.  Well, “mistakes” is not actually the right word so maybe I should try that sentence again.  I know that I should be a smart and responsible person and try to understand and respect the expectations of others, even though it means keeping my mouth shut in the face of really shitty behavior.  As much as I want to do it, I will not write another bartender tip.  I have a really good one in mind (many, actually) but in an effort to not complicate my life again I will just keep them to myself until the time when I no longer have to tend bar (that one was for you, Ben) for a living which is seeming less and less likely to ever be the case.  I might have to take these tips to my grave.  But just because I can’t write about the absurd things people do from the perspective of a bartender does not mean I cannot write about the absurd things people do from the perspective of a bar customer, right? Right!  Let’s go!

Okay, so, this is funny.  I know we have all done this at some point (I totally have and I still feel awful about it).  We have all made poor choices and made out at a bar.  It is not right but it happens.  As someone who has done this before, I really try to be as understanding about other people’s situations as possible.  Maybe one of them lives with their mom.  Maybe one, or both, of them is in a relationship with someone else who they live with and so neither one can take the other one home and they don’t have enough money, or motivation, for a hotel room.  Maybe one of the people ate something really good and the other person wanted to taste the thing but the first person had already finished it and so the only hope of getting a little sample is to somehow experience the flavor through the remnants of the food that is caught in the other person’s mouth.  I mean, this can involve some very creative uses of the tongue.  Anyway, as I said, I tend to not be bothered too much by making out at the bar.  I mean, it’s not great, but I get it.  We all make mistakes.  There are circumstances.  Hormones.  Also, booze.  It’s cool.  Sometimes, though, people go a little too far.

So the other night I went out for a drink with my friend Ben to try and recap this thing we had done earlier in the day that we were both really excited about.  We did one of those things where one of us was like

“Hey, remember that really awesome thing we did earlier with that thing and the ideas? Wasn’t that great?!”

And the other one was like,

“Totally.  We are basically the best.”

We were doing that for awhile.  Self-congratulation is always a good time, especially when you have teammate to do it with.  Anyway, so there we were, drinking whisky and feeling like the champions that we are when this couple walked in.  It was one of those weird couples where, like, you look at the two people and they don’t really make so much sense together, physically speaking?  So you think that maybe one of them has a really good personality, or the other one is hot but with a not so good personality.  Or maybe the dude has a huge dick.  I don’t know, that’s what I thought.  But maybe that’s just because I haven’t had sex in a while.  Anyway, we went back to doing what we were doing (read: feeling like super heroes) when the two of them started making out hardcore at the bar right behind the taps.  Whatever, I didn’t really care.  I mean, maybe a booth would be a better location but who am I to say.  Also, maybe he had her favorite flavor gum and she just wanted to borrow it for a minute.  I could see that happening.  Ben and I looked at them for a quick second and went back to our conversation.  A few minutes later, and for reasons I cannot really explain, I looked back over at the couple.  I looked back over at exactly the right (actually, wrong) moment.  I saw the girl reaching into her shirt.  I thought at first that maybe she dropped a crumb in there.  Or the piece of gum she had possibly borrowed from her friend minutes prior.  But, no.  There weren’t crumbs.  No gum.  Just her tit.  She pulled her boob out and, in a very graceful movement and before even the dude knew what was happening, she had put her hand on the back of his head and literally shoved him downward, thrusting her now exposed breast into his mouth where he proceeded to suck on it.  At the bar.  Where there were other people.  Watching.  Not so much in a voyeuristic way but more in a “wait a second is what I think I am seeing actually what I am seeing?” sort of a way.  It was exactly what we all thought we were seeing.  Second base at the bar.  At that point Ben turned to me and said,

“What time is it?”

I looked at my watch.  It was not yet 10pm.  We immediately started laughing which caught the attention of the bartender who then looked over, saw what was happening, and also started laughing.  I mean, there really was no other response.  I mean, you couldn’t be mad really.  Or disgusted.  You almost had to respect it.  It was just so damn ballsy!  So the bartender, once he was done cackling, told them that they could kiss a little but to maybe keep it more PG and also that they should probably keep their clothes on.  A few minutes later she started grinding on him.  To Bjork.  It was really very odd.  Anyway, at this point the bartender had had enough and asked them to leave.  They got confused and tried to exit out of literally every door in the place, bathroom included, before they figured out they just had to leave out the same door that had previously come in through.  They remained on the ramp to the bar for some period of time doing I can only imagine what, with the male half taking occasional bathroom breaks.  It was all very strange.  As it turns out, they had been kicked out of two other bars before the one Ben and I saw them in which leads one to wonder, was this a repeat performance or a case of escalation?  Did they get caught before he got a little handy action?  (Do people still call it a handy?)  Was this part of some sort of huge social experiment to see how far thye could take it before getting asked to leave?  Did she ever get to have a chew of the gum he so selfishly had the last piece of?  I have so many questions.

Now today I am left wondering whether they ever ended up finding a place to have sex.  I sort of hope they did because I would imagine the whole experience would leave them both rather frustrated indeed.  Also though right now, having recounted the fact that I thought about the culmination of their very strange and public version of foreplay, I feel like a little bit of a perv.  I am going to cleanse my mind by watching this video on repeat and trying to figure out how to make this song my ringtone:

UPDATE:  Just moments after finishing this post I headed to train at the next stop on Rebekah’s Tour de Bars 2014.  So I walk in and no more than 25 minutes later in walks the same couple that I wrote the blog about, still sort of drunk, maybe coked out, in the same clothes.  I tried so hard to not laugh that, in an effort to hold the laughter inside, tears started pouring out of my eyes.  And this bar was not one of the three bars (that I know of) that this couple got kicked out of for public boob sucking.  Folks, you just can’t make this shit up.

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Doc Says…

20 May

Alright you guys, here’s the thing.  I am in a bit of a holding pattern at the moment which means that what is going on inside of my head right now is something akin to a hamster running round and round on her exercise wheel.  She isn’t getting anywhere, isn’t really doing anything, just sort of trying to pass the time in her little glass cage until she gets the opportunity to run around the room in one of those awesome plastic balls.  Remember those?  I had a hamster when I was little and I was always sort of afraid that one day I would put her in the ball and she would somehow escape my room and go rolling right down the stairs.  Then the ball would pop open right in front of my cat, Sassafras, and bye bye hamster.  Anyway, I digress.  It’s really not that bad.  The holding pattern, I mean.  I have been spending a lot of time in the garden with my mom and have been reading the New York Times from cover to cover almost everyday.  I am pretty up to speed on the Times view of the world and what they think is worthy of their precious space and what is not.  I read about El Nino today so that was sort of a blast from the past.

Anyway, none of this is to the point.  The point is that since I am in a holding pattern I have decided to publish a comment I got back in the day when all that bullshit was happening on my blog.  Remember all that bullshit?  Well, I sure do.  Anyway, I got the following comment (posted here in italics) on the post called “Rebekah vs. Rob, (Documented) Battle #2”  I have changed nothing about the comment, nor have I omitted anything, so any spelling or grammatical errors are not, for once, mine.  Just keep in mind that the non-italicized part is just me adding my trademark snark which I am sure that this individual, who calls himself “Doc,” would have a thing or two to say about.  If he hadn’t unfollowed my blog promptly after posting this comment that is.

I’ve been following your posts for a couple months now, since I was told there was a blog that detailed my local watering hole. I’m not a regular but I do come in with some frequency so it is fun for me to read the goings on and see if I can picture who it is you’re talking about. I must say I’ve noticed the tone of your posts has gotten very snarky and downright mean. Are you sure being a bartender is the right career for you? 🙂

I very much enjoyed his use of emoticon.  Nothing breaks up criticism like a good, old-fashioned smiley face!

Your recent post regarding “Hal” however has picqued my psychological background radar.

Ooh! Psychological background radar!  Do continue!  (Also, for the record, I have changed the alias “Hal” to the subject’s real name, Rob, after he sent me various mean emails from anonymous email accounts.  I figured if he wasn’t willing to put his name on his behavior, then I would.)

This is, if I’m reading correctly and if this person is who I think he is (and I’m fairly certain it is) now the 3rd post he’s been prominently featured in. I’m reminded of that old adage, “There’s a thin line between love and hate.” Your borderline obsession with this man leads me to believe that there is more to your feelings than blind hatred. Honestly, I think I know who he is, and he’s nowhere near as bad as you paint him to be.

Doc has got me there.  I think that Rob WAS featured in a fair amount of posts.  There was his appearance in Tip #12 after he snuck his own booze into the bar  and then there was the following visit when I told him I wouldn’t serve him and he stayed at the bar for hours afterwards, trying to get other people to buy him drinks, and also asking my coworker out when his fiance was sitting like 4 barstools down.  I can’t actually find the third one because I don’t keep an inventory of my blogs like some anonymous commenters seem to.

When he’s in the bar by himself or with one or two friends, I’ve had conversations with him and found him to be perfectly interesting and charming.

Here’s the thing that I have noticed about misogynists:  they tend to be perfectly nice-seeming to other men, who they view as their equals, but when it comes to their dealing with women it is a totally different ballgame.  I would like for “Doc” to be called a cunt, a word that I find extremely violent, by the same person on more than one occasion, and to have that person attempt to physically intimidate him at his workplace, and then tell me dude is “perfectly interesting and charming.”  Just sayin’.

I have seen him act loud and start chants etc., but usually only when he was with a large group of men, and really, isn’t that how most men in a large group at a bar act?

I hate to break it to you but no, that is not how most men in large groups in bars act.

He’s nowhere near the devil you make him out to be. And you lose all credibility when you say he’s unattractive. He is, objectively, a very good looking man.

Personally, I think that levels of attractiveness are more a subjective, than objective, thing.  For example, Adam Levine was voted People Magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive in 2013 and I sort of think he looks like a ferret.  And I do not like ferrets.  Also, what does my taste in men have to do with my credibility?  Nothing, that’s what.

In reading your posts about him, I notice the following keywords pop out at me when you’re writing of him: Wit, good looks, intellect, excellence, sexiest, awesome-est. All words used by you in your posts. Granted you’ll reply that this is how he thinks of himself, but it’s interesting how one’s psyche projects itself. Could it be that deep down you really have feelings for this man?

This, friends, is the result of pop-psychology 101.  I would very much like access to this person’s reading list.

This may be something you want to confront within, because otherwise your anger is irrational and concerns me.

I LOVE CONCERN TROLLING!

I’m sure that if you choose to reply you’ll merely launch into more vitriol, but to that I would merely reply, “Me thinks the lady doth protest too much” 🙂

Shakespeare quotes give everything validity! Also, emoticons!

And if he is who I think he is, wasn’t he involved with your good friend and boss for a while there? I could have sworn I saw them in an embrace more than a time or two. Cue the Gin Blossoms: Hey Jealousy….

Blog comments now come complete with soundtrack from the late 80s.

That’s the end of my comment analysis.  The thing is that I would have discussed this comment with the commenter had I known who he was but, of course, anonymous email addresses.  I wonder what his pop-psychology books have to say about that.  “This individual thinks his opinion is necessary but is not confident enough in himself as a critic to stand behind his words.  He is afraid of the social fallout associated with publicly, and confidently, airing his complaints.”

And, now I can send that comment into the trash where it belongs.  And this, friends, is the beauty of having your very own blog!  You can publish, and trash, comments as you see fit!  No democracy here!  This is a Rebekah-ocracy and thank goodness for that.

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Can I Smell Your Feet?

13 Apr

As any of you avid readers already know, I have gotten a new job.  Well, I think I have.  I am sort of waiting for all the details to sort themselves out.  So in the meantime I have been running around like a crazy person trying to get things done.  You know, buying clothes with my friend Meredith (who totally saved my fucking life, by the way) and doing important things like having an impromptu shredding party with my friend Ben!  So, get this.  I am subletting my room while I am away to a friend, and former roommate, who is going to double as a catsitter!  I decided that the most important thing to do before his arrival was not to clean out space for his stuff in the closet but instead to shred all the paper that has been piling up around the room.  I had noticed when I was at Staples the other day that they have a shredding service and since the drawer in my shredder is jammed shut somehow I thought I would lug all the paper to Staples and have them do away with it.  But first, I had to go to Ben’s to help him out with something.  So I walked up the block with all my shreddable things, figuring I would ask him if he needed anything shredded and I could just take it with me to Staples.  So he opens the door to his building and you will not believe what happened.

Ben: So I have to show you my new toy.
Me: Oh?
Ben: Yea. Well, I already maybe jammed it but look at my new shredder!

I kid you not.  Ben was sitting in his house shredding!  And I needed to shred!  What are the odds?!  It was like, totally meant to be.  Anyway, after two hours we had over-heated the shredder and had to call it quits but we both felt totally accomplished and I felt like we were really meant to be friends, you know?  I mean, who else but a real friend would (a) be shredding when you needed to be shredding (b) invite you to shred with him and (c) play kickass tunes while shredding?!  No one, that’s who!

Anyway, none of this is the point.  The point is that while I am waiting for my job to come through I have been picking up a bar shift here and there to make some extra cash and keep myself busy.  So last night I picked up a shift and it was really fun!  The people were nice, it was chill, I did some chatting, I caught up with an old friend who I hadn’t sat down with and talked to for quite some time.  It was all really good.  Except for this one thing.  They have a creepy prank phone caller!  So there I was, behind the bar, minding my own business when the phone rang.  I answered.

Me: Good evening, (insert name of bar here).
Creeper: Mumbles something incomprehensible.Me: Come again?
Creeper: More incomprehensible mumbling.
Me: Dude, you really are going to need to enunciate a little better than that if you want me to help you with something.
Creeper: Still completely incapable of speaking comprehensibly.

I hung up the phone.  I then walked over to my coworker and told him that someone called and I couldn’t understand what the hell he was saying and my coworker said,

“Did he ask if he could smell your feet?”

I realized just in that moment that that was exactly what he had asked!  I was immediately disgusted and went on one of my “what is wrong with people?!” downward spirals.  In mid-spiral the phone rang again!

Me: Good evening, (insert name of bar here).
Creeper:  Can I smell you feet?
Me: Dude!

I hung up. Then my coworker informed me that this guy only calls when there is a female bartender working.  Like, what?!  So then I was even more grossed out cuz he is like, chilling outside maybe.  Or he lives across the street and spies with creepy little binoculars while wearing a satin robe.  I mean, if you are going to do all that at least ask everyone if you can smell their feet.  I mean, it is still a totally creepy thing to do but it is maybe less creepy when it is like an equal opportunity thing, am I right?  So I decided something had to be done.  I simply could not stand idly by and allow this weird phone creeper to keep calling, creeping people out and being a weirdo.  So I waited, patiently, for the phone to ring again and when it did I was ready!

Me:  Good evening, (insert name of bar here).
Creeper:  Can I smell your feet?
Me:  Sure.  But only if I can shit in your mouth.

And then he hung up!  I out creeped the creeper!  I don’t know if this is something that I should necessarily be proud of but, you know, I felt as though there was a job that needed doing and I was the one who could do it.  If anyone can out creep someone by using statements about fecal matter, it was this girl.  The funny thing about all this is that the people around the phone when I answered really didn’t know what was going on so all they heard was this:

Me:  Good evening, (insert name of bar here).
Silence as I awaited the response I knew was coming.
Me:  Sure.  But only if I can shit in your mouth.

And then I had a big smile on my face.  So there was a moment there where I wasn’t a woman in battle with a creeper, I was the creeper!  It was me.  Rebekah the creeper.  Obviously I cleared up the situation and we all laughed and laughed but there was a moment there where I really saw the fear in their eyes as if they were thinking

“if she would shit in the mouth of some random caller what else is she capable of?!”

I felt what it might be like to be a creeper and I didn’t like it.  I didn’t like it one bit.

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Sometimes You Quit Your Job to Speak Your Mind

10 Feb

We are currently living in an environment in which our freedom of speech is under siege more than ever before.  We are denied access to vital information, misinformed by those who we trust to keep us aware, denied the opportunity to safely express our opinions.  Students are threatened with expulsion, journalists with incarceration, employees with termination all simply for holding others to reasonable standards of behavior.  And all this is so incredibly intertwined with money, power, ego, and entitlement that those of us lacking access to any, and sometimes all, of those things can be left completely voiceless, powerless.  That shouldn’t be so.  At a time when people reference the Bill of Rights almost constantly, why do so many of us feel so very silenced?

I have always been an opinionated girl.  What started out as indiscriminate screaming as a toddler has evolved into well thought out and incredibly strongly held beliefs about all manner of things.  It is one of my favorite things about myself but also what gets me into most of the jams I find myself in.  Sometimes I wish I could just keep my mouth shut, simply not care as much as I do, but then I wouldn’t be me.  The fact of the matter is that I care. If I had to go out on a limb and articulate what I care about more than anything else it would probably be equality.  At the same time,  if I had to say what it is that I personally work on harder than anything else, it is seeing everyone as equal.

I think that we are all raised in environments that, due to a myriad different factors, value certain people over others.  Be it due to skin color, religious beliefs, gender, sexual orientation, class, appearance, profession, native language, accent, mental or physical ailments, we have a very unfortunate tendency to assign worth to individuals.  I am by no means innocent of this very thing.  The thing about it, though, is that I am trying.  I am trying, while understanding the privilege that I was born with, to shed preconceived notions of people, to make myself more tolerant, more understanding, more open, more human.  One of the by-products of this journey is that I am acutely aware of when I, and those whom I love, are treated as somehow lesser than.  It happens to me because I am Jewish, because I am female, because I work in the service profession.  It happens all the time and, just as I think others do not deserve that kind of treatment, I believe that I deserve better.  And so I speak and I write and for that I am not sorry.

Honestly, I am angry that I am writing this right now.  I think it is crazy that I have to sit here and talk about the fact that I believe people, all people, should be able to wake up in the morning and feel safe.  We should feel safe in our homes, on the streets, at our jobs.  We should feel as though we are of some value, some worth.  We should feel as though our friends and families are in our corner.  That should simply be part of being.  None of us should go through life constantly being told that we are not deserving of simple human kindness and yet, day after day, this is what happens to so many of us.  We shouldn’t have to justify our existence, our choices.  I was born female, I was born Jewish, I chose to bartend.  All of these things have made me who I am and I am not ashamed of any of them and I never will be.

If you come into the place in which I work and you disrespect me, my coworkers, my employers, you had better believe I am going to have something to say about  it.  Being drunk does not give you an excuse to treat other people with utter disregard.  We should never be called names, be threatened, or have things thrown at us simply for doing our jobs.  Nobody should.  We all are worth something, but by treating others poorly because you think your money or your degree somehow makes you worth more you are simply devaluing yourself.  Threatening a small business with a baseless, frivolous lawsuit simply so you don’t have to be held accountable for your own poor behavior devalues your profession.  Threatening someone’s freedom of speech simply because it gets your nose out of joint devalues the law itself.

So I quit my job.  I quit my job because I was asked to take my blog posts down and apologize to those who were bothered by them and I will not do either of those things.  I quit my job because a few members of an otherwise kind, intelligent, fun and caring group of legal professionals decided to lob an empty, and I believe ethically questionable, lawsuit at a bar because a barely-read blog detailed the extremely poor behavior of a few.  (One of whom, might I point out, has already had his name and profession published in the New York Post in connection with a drunken assault charge.)  The thing is, I never published last names and I have only published first names, and common ones at that, twice.  Once was retroactively, after I received an anonymous comment from an email address that was created for the occasion and subsequently disabled and after I quit my job, and the other because the person repeatedly threw things at me, on camera, which seems to me grounds for an assault charge.  And yet I left their last names out, and will continue to do so, not because I am afraid of being sued but because, for whatever reason and in the face of years of poor treatment and bad behavior, it seems like the moral thing to do.  Sometimes a girl just needs to vent, she does not need to impact someone else’s life in any real and negative way (possible ego bruising aside).  But that’s just me.  Some of these people might be assholes, but they are human beings and deserve to be treated as such.

And besides, my integrity is simply too valuable to me.  I might not have as much money as some other people, and my resume might not be as impressive, but I feel damn good.  I have a right to say what I believe and I have the obligation to attach my name to what I say.  If that means that people don’t like me, that people threaten me, that people undermine the ethics of their own profession, that is their problem, not mine.  I have always been me and I always will be.  If I like you, believe me you will know it.  I will tell you in no uncertain terms.  But if you are disrespectful to me or someone I care about, I will tell you what I think.  That is my right and my obligation as a person who gives a damn.  You want to use your education to scare a few kind, hard-working, small business owners to death?  Go for it I hope you’re proud.  I will use mine to simply treat people with the kindness and respect they deserve.

Good luck and enjoy the bar, it’s all yours.

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Tip #13 on Being a Good Bar Customer

31 Jan

The hits just keep on coming, folks.  If you want to catch up on the earlier tips, you can go to them here: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, and XII.  Did I get those right?  I haven’t done roman numerals in a long time.  But the Super Bowl is coming up and that’s basically the only time you ever see roman numerals so I figured I would get in the spirit.  Go sports.

So you guys.  We have made it all the way to 13 tips.  When I first started doing these lo these many years ago, I figured I would have five, maybe six, tips.  But no.  People just keep upping their game.  They keep fucking up, and I keep writing about it.  This might turn out to have as many tips as Sue Grafton has mystery novels.  Only time will tell.

So over the past number of years that I have worked behind the same bar, I have had this reoccurring nightmare of people walking behind the bar. It’s like, I’m there, working, and I can’t seem to get to people fast enough.  There are barely any people there and they order relatively simple things, but I just can’t seem to put them across the bar in any reasonable amount of time.  I just sort of wander around, looking for things, spilling, forgetting.  And then, they come.  One after another after another people just start filing behind the bar so I am left trying to make drinks while shooing people away.  It’s awful.  Thankfully, that has never happened in real life. Well, until a few weeks ago.

It was a normal Sunday.  I had sports on.  So, this trio came in, one girl and two guys.  The guy must have been married to the girl because he had a picture of her as the background of his debit card.  I thought that was weird and decided that if I ever get to a point in my life where I think that is a reasonable thing to do I will pack up some belongings and move into a cave for however long it takes for me to figure out exactly where everything went so horribly wrong.  The guy ordered three “beers.”

Eye roll.

I told him I wasn’t really sure what he meant by that and asked what kind of beer he generally likes.  In a surprising turn of events he decided upon the hoppiest thing we had on tap. Those beers went unfinished.  Oh well.  The reason that I give you all these seemingly inane details is that I had already kind of pegged this group as a little off.  Not that they did anything wrong, but just that I had to be prepared for the potentiality of weirdness.  I actually kind of like that.  I mean, normal, more or less predictable people are great but every once in a while it is nice to throw some weird in there.  Keep things interesting.  Anyway, it was one of those days where I had a pretty full bar but all the drinkers were really pacing themselves.  So even though I had lots of people in there, I had very little to do.  I paced.  I made awkward comments to no one in particular.  I washed a few glasses.  I received a text message!  Before responding I did a quick walk around the bar, checking to make sure everyone was sufficiently drinked (they were) and I settled down to respond to the text which was, as it turns out, hilarious.  I have a lot of funny friends.  For those who don’t know, I work in a long bar.  I think we probably have something like 24 seats at the bar?  Maybe more?  Anyway, I was standing in the middle of the bar with my back to the backdoor when all of a sudden I hear a small little “excuse me…?” and a tap, tap, tap on my shoulder.

Oh. My. God.  I froze.  I whipped around and made a face that looked like this squirrel which I know I have used before but whatever I don’t care.  I am this squirrel and no, Aaron, 2008 cannot have its meme back, it is mine.  So this woman, obviously a member of the weird crew, had walked like 10-12 feet behind the bar and what did she want?  What in the world could have been so pressing at that very moment that she couldn’t have (a) asked me for it like 30 seconds earlier when I had checked on her group, (b) waited another 30 seconds for me to walk back to where she was standing, or (c) walk on the other side of the bar, where she belonged, and say “excuse me” over the piece of wood separating us that isn’t, I have learned, a force field that disallows me from hearing what happens on the other side.  In fact, I would say that that piece of wood actually intensifies sound, making me able to hear orders from a ways away while my back is turned and I am having a conversation with someone else over my right shoulder.  What she wanted was a piece of chalk to mark down her score from darts.

…………

There she was, behind the bar waving a piece of chalk in my face and repeating the word “chalk” while she pointed at it because clearly I have no idea what chalk is.  So obviously I got mad.

Lady, waving the chalk.
Me: Get out from behind my bar.
Lady, still waving the chalk.
Me: Seriously, get the fuck out from behind my bar.
Lady, now seriously confused but still doggedly waving the chalk.
Me: This is unreal.  Under no circumstance do you ever walk behind someone’s bar.  Ever.  Get out from behind the bar.  Now.  And no, you cannot have any goddamn chalk!

I was really mad.  I felt like I was dealing with a toddler only this toddler was a little bit taller than me, really stupid, and badly in need of a writing implement.  Oh, and she was hurling pointy things through the air which, I have to tell you, did not make me feel confident in my safety.  The woman-child who, for those who have forgotten, is featured as the background of her husband’s debit card, spent the next 10 minutes trying to figure out why I was so mad and why she couldn’t have any chalk.  She then went back to happily hurling things.

Oh and, by the way, she barely even touched her half pint of whatever the hell it was.  It is possible that she was on drugs or had been drinking somewhere else but I don’t know.  I have served a lot of drunk and drugged out people and they have never walked behind the bar.  I guess she could have just been stupid but I have also served a lot of stupid people and they also haven’t ever walked behind the bar.  So I don’t know.  This one is a mystery to me.  But I am happy to know that, thanks to all those nightmares over the years, I was more than prepared to handle this particular interloper.  Oh psyche, you have outdone yourself yet again.

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Rebekah vs. Rob, (Documented) Battle #2

17 Jan

So you know how sometimes on bad television shows one of the male characters will say something along the lines of “I could have any woman I want?”  And you think to yourself two things: (a) what a stupid line and (b) could you imagine if people actually said that?  Well you know what I found out a few weeks ago?  They do!  And it is just as ridiculous and amusing and untrue as you might assume!

So remember that time I wrote that blog that I never thought I would have had to write about bringing your own booze into the bar?  And how, you know, you probably shouldn’t bring your own booze into the bar?  Well, it just so happens that the star of that post is definitely my least favorite customer ever and might actually also hold the title of person I like least in the world.  Well, of the people I’ve met, that is.  So he gets to star in not one but two blog posts! His name is Rob.  Rob is just like, not nice.  He thinks he loves women but he actually hates us.  He doesn’t respect us, he thinks we are all stupid and, as I learned the other day, he thinks he is irresistible.  Men, am I right?

So my issues with this guy goes back years.  He is one of those guys who just harasses women.  He thinks he is god’s gift and therefore that anyone in possession of breasts and a vagina is lucky if he decides to give them the time of day.  Only the thing is, he is loud, obnoxious, and extremely fond of chanting which is something that I honestly thought went out of style when people outgrew fraternity membership.  Apparently I was wrong, again.  So, whatever, he incorrectly thinks he’s a ladies man.  Okay that wouldn’t be so bad except that whenever he is in my bar I have to watch him like a hawk to make sure he doesn’t make women uncomfortable.  As an aside, I think that the mark of a good bar is one in which women, either alone or in groups, feel safe and comfortable coming in and hanging out.  I love nothing more than to see a few single ladies at the bar, not out to meet anyone, just there to chat with the bartender or read their book or watch sports or whatever.  If you have women flying solo, I think you are doing something right.  At my bar, we do occasionally have women there alone and I really don’t want to lose that because some asshat decides that she is reading her book only to pass the time until he comes and impresses her with his wit, good looks, and intellect.  But that’s what Rob thinks.  Women are just going about their lives preparing for the moment when they meet him.  His excellence.  The sexiest and most awesome-est man alive.  It would be maddening if it weren’t so hilarious.

I could practically write a book about how much I don’t like Rob.  I have been hoping against hope that Rob would just melt away or at least move to the Bronx or something.  It seemed like no matter what he did — call me a cunt, annoy women enough that they mouthed the word “help” to me to get him away from them, ask for buybacks, try to sneak away without paying on the regular — he never seemed to get kicked out.  And then he snuck booze in and I was like “this is finally the moment!”  And he had the nerve to not only pretend he didn’t sneak booze in, but to subsequently go over my head and call my boss and tell her how unreasonable I was for accusing him of sneaking the booze in because he would never, ever do that.  Only he did do it.  I don’t like, go around the bar planting bottles of illicit vodka in the bags and coat pockets of people I don’t like.  I’m just observant. Anyway.  That was a lot of build up for the following story:

So last Thursday I approached the bar on my way to start my night shift and I heard it.  From the street.  The voice.  The chanting and the yelling and the general obnoxiousness.  I walked into the bar, happily greeting the people I enjoy (which, honestly, is like 95% of the people) and then I arrived at him and he was  all “hello, Rebekah” in a tone that made it abundantly clear that he felt like he could do whatever the fuck he wanted and I just stared back.  I then proceeded behind the bar and told my coworkers that, after 8pm when I took over, he was not getting served because he was the ass who brought his own liquor in.  They both essentially responded with the same thing:

It was that guy?!?  I wish I had known because he is such a fucking douchebag.

Eventually he came up to the bar to order a drink from me.   I told him he wasn’t getting served.  A heated conversation followed which I will not recount for you.  He then had the nerve to walk over to my coworker and order a drink from her, in secret, because obviously I would never notice.  Except what he didn’t know is that when I am working I have super sonic hearing!  (Also, she told me.)

Me:  You tried to order a drink from my coworker? What part of you are not getting served do you not understand?
Rob:  I did not.
Me:  You are such a liar!  She just told me you did and also, I heard you.  You know what? Just leave.  You know where the door is.

But I guess he didn’t actually know where the door was because he wouldn’t leave.  He wouldn’t leave because he is a fucking idiot who thinks that the world was made for him.  And then he tried to argue with me about it which is never a good idea.  Not only do I hold a grudge, and not only do I never forget when people are disrespectful shitbags to me and the place I work, but I also HATE when I ask politely for someone to leave and they fight about it.  This is my house, motherfucker.  Get out of my face.  But oh, he spends so much money in the bar and he has been coming for years and how dare I and all the other shit.  I decided to spell it out for him.  I explained to him exactly why I don’t want him in the bar.  Not only did he bring his own booze in, but he lied about it and tried to get me in trouble.  He called me a cunt and a bitch a few years back for standing up for one of the many women he harassed over the years.  He feels entitled to buybacks and whenever we have new bartenders he always tries to take advantage of them.  He chases customers out with this chanting and his general obnoxiousness and, oh yea, he always tries to walk away without paying for his drinks.  He got very caught up on the part about harassing women and that’s when he said it.

I could have any woman in the world I want.

I think that I actually might have spit in his face accidentally when I explosively laughed.  Seriously.  It was SO funny.  I then responded with probably my favorite line that I have ever said ever in my entire life:

There are 13 women in the bar right now and only one of them would fuck you and she is your fiance.  I am still trying to figure out how much you paid her to agree to that arrangement.

Meanwhile, his poor fiance was sitting at the end of the bar by herself waiting for him to stop parading around the bar with this stupid trophy that he had won for winning in fantasy football.  I told him that he should just stop making an ass of himself and leave and maybe he should speak to his fiance who he had not acknowledged the entire time she sat at the end of the bar waiting for his sorry ass.  He then said the following thing:

Rob:  Why don’t you talk to her?  I talk to her every day.
Me:  You’re engaged to her!  Jesus, what is wrong with you?!

He then, and I kid you not, asked my coworker out on a date.  While his fiance was sitting like 4 stools away.  And when my coworker said “I thought you were engaged” he actually had the nerve to say “who told you that?”

It’s like, what?!  These people exist?  And they walk around amongst us as if they are normal?!  Man oh man.  Eventually he left.  But not until he gave me a piece of his itsy-bitsy mind.  It took me from like 8 to about 10:30 to get his sorry ass out the door.  He just wouldn’t leave because he thinks he is entitled to be anywhere he fucking pleases.  Oh and, in the meantime, he tried calling, texting and facetiming my boss from the backyard while she was downstairs in the office to bitch about how I wouldn’t serve him.  Being in a room with this guy and his overly inflated ego should be considered a form of torture.  No joke.

Luckily for you this story has a happy ending.  He again called me a cunt (people love that word) and he is no longer welcome in the bar.  As far as I know, anyway.  This guy has like 9 miserable lives so I’m fairly certain he will weasel his way back in which means more stories for you!  Finally, Rob comes in handy.

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The Day I was Visited at Work by an MRA

9 Jan

The interaction described in this blog was actually worse than I have made out here but I just don’t have the energy to be sufficiently outraged right now.  (Also at a certain point I simply quit listening.)  So this watered-down version will have to do.

Right now I have a half marathon to train for which has been difficult considering that the weather has made Tuesday, my long run day, the day that it wants to express itself through snow and rain and polar vortexes.  I also have an article to write for an online magazine thing that I have known about for months and yet only just started because I love to procrastinate.  It is due on Saturday.  And I have to work tonight until 4am and I am going to visit my aunts in the Poconos for the weekend.  Obviously, all of this means that this is the perfect time for me to write a blog.

As it turns out, the weather doesn’t only like to arrive on my long run days, it also likes to rear its ugly head during my shifts.  I was working during the recent snow storm AND the night the polar vortex…vortexed.  My bar has high ceilings and not well reinforced windows and doors, so it gets a bit nippy in there when it’s cold out and there isn’t enough body heat to warm the room (AKA when I have barely any customers).  So, my bosses, being Nice People, texted me on Monday afternoon to tell me that if it was super slow and also insanely cold I could close early.  It was both of those things and so I did but not before I had a very annoying conversation with a customer who before I could care less about but now I actually think is a dipshit.

Okay, that’s not exactly accurate.  I started thinking he was a dipshit about a month ago when my boss told me that he had pulled her aside and said that he was very upset because he drinks at the bar all the time and never gets a buyback.

……… <—- Those dots refer to what happened in my brain after she told me that.

In case you forgot about how fucked it is to ask for a buyback, I refer you to my first tip on how to properly drink in a bar.  Anyway, he went on about how he owns a business and yadda yadda yadda he is a good customer and he doesn’t really care but he just felt like he should say something.  Well, here’s the thing about that.  Dude doesn’t ever really talk to us, he’s a little snippy, he generally only has three drinks and when I buy someone a drink I generally do their fourth, and actually I HAVE given him buybacks.  At least 1/2 dozen times.  Just out of courtesy because he comes in often.  Obviously he just never noticed despite the fact that when I give buybacks I always say “I got that one for you.”  So, whatever.  He is never getting another buyback because obviously he doesn’t appreciate it.  So, resulting from that conversation I thought he was sort of a dipshit.  But then he came in on Monday feeling chatty and now I can never look at him the same.

This past Monday was the Auburn vs FSU football game for some championship or another.  Honestly, I don’t really know from football.  It involved a lot of someone passing the ball and then observers thinking one team was going to win then all of a sudden someone got the ball and ran for a really long time and TOUCHDOWN!  Anyway, after the game ended and all my other customers cleared out except for this one guy he asked me what I thought about the game.  I told him I didn’t really think much about it at all except that I had a hard time getting behind an FSU win considering Jameis Winston was the star quarterback and that watching him get interviewed on TV after the win, when he was never interviewed after he was accused of raping a classmate, made me kind of sick.  I know, I know, I shouldn’t have said anything.  I should have just kept my mouth shut and just said I could care less about college football.  I should have because I know all too well that there are people sneaking around among us who immediately assume that every single rape accusation against a beloved sports figure or a respected businessman/politician is clearly bullshit, or that the woman’s sexual history made a rape impossible.  Obviously the first thing that he brought up, the first thing that all fucking people bring up, is that false rape allegation against the Duke lacrosse team back in 2006.  Seriously, as if it wasn’t hard enough for women already, Crystal Gail Mangum had to go and give people a well-publicized example of how sinister women are.  When he brought that story up I was pretty sure I was in for it.  I told him that false rape accusations are incredibly rare and although I feel badly that those three lacrosse players got caught up in that whole thing and had their names smeared the result has not been for me to assume that every subsequent rape accusation I hear about is bullshit.  He then asked me if I was a feminist.  He said the word feminist as if he had just accidentally eaten his own feces.  I said that I was.  He then went into a whole long diatribe about how he thinks feminism is bullshit because he hates that women think they are equal to men and blah blah blah.  He was SO mad about the word “equal.”  So I said in my best ‘I am trying not to poke you in the eye with this drink straw’ voice,

“Listen, do I understand that men and women have different physical qualities?  Yes.  Does that mean that I don’t think that men and women should be treated equally under the law?  Should have access to the same opportunities?  Should be equally respected within society?  Should be held to the same standards of humanity?  No.  Me having a vagina and you having a penis does not mean that I should somehow be considered lesser by the law or society or anything.”

That didn’t really do the trick.  He kept spitting the word “equal” at me and making “what about the men” type comments.  I started reorganizing the napkin caddy.  Sometimes, people are so bullheaded that is just isn’t worth it.  Sometimes, you would just rather close the bar and tell your friend the new cheesy joke your dad texted you that very morning.

What does the baby computer call its father?
Data.

Happy Thursday, everyone.  Now it’s back to writing or running or procrastinating.  Here’s to hoping I don’t get anymore visits from buyback-requesting men’s rights activists.

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Tip #12 on Being a Good Bar Customer

19 Dec

And we’re back, folks!  It’s amazing.  Just when I think people can’t do anything else stupid, they do!  So here it is.  The latest tip.  And if you are feeling nostalgic for all the other tips, you can go ahead and read them here: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven.

Tip number 12 is: don’t bring your own alcohol into a bar.  I know, I know, I can’t believe I actually have to write this either but there you have it.  You are probably sitting at home, or at the office because most of you probably have like, a job that involves going to the same place and sitting in a chair 5 days a week (nothing wrong with that! Sort of jealous!) thinking to yourself, who goes into that bar, anyway?  A bunch of animals?  Well, in short, yes.  A bunch of animals.  Or, more like a bunch of reasonable people and a smattering of animals.  Anyway, this is a story about one such animal.

Yesterday, all in all, was sort of a rough day.  The guy who usually works Wednesday is off on paternity leave (where is that baby?!) so we have all been sort of filling in the gaps.  As a result, I worked yesterday.  Unbeknownst to me when I decided to cover the shift, one of my bosses had scheduled a holiday party for the early afternoon.  It wasn’t until yesterday when I arrived that I discovered that it was a party of 45 teachers.  And it wasn’t until it actually happened that I realized they would be playing trivia.  A trivia game during which it came to my attention that a good portion of the teachers involved in the game thought that a “green card” had something to do with the environment.  Suffice it to say that I was pretty much done with the day by the end of the trivia extravaganza but sadly I still had 4 hours left.  At that very moment, as if they had been sent by Satan himself, in walked a massive pain in my ass.  This guy is like torture for any bartender.  He refuses to part cards down, feeling entitled to having a tab run because he come in often, yet he always walks on his tabs.  Always.  So you end up having to chase him throughout the bar after each drink you serve him otherwise risk getting stiffed.  He orders the same drinks over and over yet never remembers the price.  He tips poorly and expects buybacks.  He chants.  He always, always chants.  And you have to constantly watch him lest he torture some unsuspecting female bar-goer with his close talking and inappropriate comments.  He is the pits. We don’t actually see him all that often because he is in a serious relationship but yesterday, following an office party, he decided to grace us (read: me) with their presence.  Oh, blessed day.

He only ordered one drink from me, a Bulleit Rye, and yet was continuously seen walking around the bar with a rocks glass full of some clear liquid.  I gave him the benefit of the doubt at first, thinking that perhaps there as a very very off chance that he was simply drinking water, but didn’t want his friends to think he was weak.  But then all his drunken tells started emerging:  the loud talking, the chanting, the close-talking, the thinking he is the best person and savior of everyone.  So I asked my friend/boss/coworker Sasha to investigate the situation.  She walked passed him and asked him what he was drinking to which he replied “water,” then subsequently slammed the rest of the glass (like 2 shots worth) and slapped it down on the bar.  So I, since sometimes I fancy myself a PI, sniffed the glass and, lo and behold, VODKA!  What a shocker.  I decided to confront the situation for the following three reasons: (1) I was PMSing, I had cramps, my boobs hurt and I was therefore in no mood; (2) if there were a store in the mall called “Build a Drunk” where you could build your worst idea of a drunken person, he would be one of the models I would build and since I wasn’t making any money off him I really did not want to deal with his volume and obnoxiousness; and (3) I have rules and he broke one of them, flagrantly.  So, obviously, I marched myself over to him, held the glass up near his nose and said,

“What does that smell like to you?”

He then told me it was his friend’s.  (This friend, by the way, was all but passed-out in the corner, having been over self-served at the office party they were all at before walking into my bar.) The conversation continued, him slurring and yelling, me talking in a normal, sober voice level:

Build-a-Drunk: Would I ever do that to you?
Me: Um…clearly.
Build-a-Drunk: How much money have I spent in this bar over the years and you are going to accuse me of bringing drinks in?  Why would I even do that?
Me:  I don’t know, why would you?

I then walked back behind the bar at which point he pulled out a HUGE wad of cash and attempted to by a drink, while simultaneously asking me when he had ever been a bad customer.  I started listing off examples, beginning with that time that he brought vodka into the bar and got shit-tanked.  Remember that?  Then there was the time he fell of his stool, and the other time he fell off his stool, the time he knocked over a whole bunch of drinks, the time he called me a bitch for telling him to back off a lady who had mouthed the word “help” to me, the time he apologized for calling me a bitch by actually blaming it on me while using his tendency to tower over women while explaining shit to them to corner me behind the bar. I have more, but I’ll stop.  Anyway, he called me a bitch again.  And gave me the stinkeye.  Twice.  But whatever, I just won’t serve him anymore since clearly he is quite adept at serving himself.  The only thing I feel sad about is that he has a daughter.  This man with ZERO respect for women raising a little girl.  I hope she spends more time at her mom’s house.

So wait, what was the point of this post?  Oh yea, don’t be like Build-a-Drunk and bring your own booze.  I don’t work in a BYO joint.

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This is Not a Tip. This is a Story About an Asshole.

26 Nov

Today I am writing my blog from my parent’s house.  Happy Franksgiving week, everyone!

Generally speaking when I write blogs about people, I either don’t know their names or else I change them to save them from embarrassment.  This is the kind of person that I am.  Following the events of this past Thursday, however, I have decided that I am not vindictive enough and that this is a character trait that I must try and develop.  If people act like assholes, after all, they should be called out and called out by (first) name!  (Clearly I am in the very early stages of vindictive-development.)  Also, this dude was such an incredible shithead that I think I would be doing the world a disservice by not calling him out.  So, here goes.  Let us all hope that he doesn’t sue me for libel* (he’s a lawyer, god help us all).

So, you guys, sometimes working behind the bar really blows.  It sucks when you have gotten dumped only days previously and you have to keep running down to the basement to cry in secret.  It sucks when you have a fever.  And it REALLY sucks when some asshole smears his own shit all over the walls of the men’s room.  Worse than all that, though (well, maybe not worse than the shit on the walls but I think that was a once in a lifetime experience), is when someone who has previously been 86’ed walks in and you can tell they are not going to leave without a fight.

As a first little piece of advice here, and I am pretty sure I have mentioned this somewhere before, if you have been asked to never return to a bar, you should probably just never return there.  I mean, why in the world would you?  Seriously, if I was ever kicked out of a bar I would make it my business to never even walk on the same block as the bar.  No, I probably wouldn’t even walk within 3 blocks!  I would be so ashamed that an entire neighborhood would be completely off-limits due to my own obnoxiousness.  But some people just don’t have that same decency or self-respect.  Some people think that they are entitled to go anywhere they damn please and if they scream loud enough then other people will understand their logic and acquiesce.  Only in most places of reason and normalcy, that doesn’t actually work.  Sometimes, not all the time, but sometimes the bar in which I work is a place of reason and normalcy.  It was such a place last Thursday when this guy Mike walked in and assumed he would have his way.  He assumed wrong.

So there me and my friend were, behind the bar, when we saw him walk in.  After some talk, I decided I would break one of my rules by leaving the safety of the bar and talking to him face-to-face.  My only other option was to yell to him from behind the bar because he was standing a ways away, thereby drawing everyone into the drama and making it significantly worse.  So, I calmly walked over to him and then…

Me: Mike, you can’t be in here.  And you can’t have that drink.  If you want to come in tomorrow and speak with the owners, you are more than welcome to do that but as of now you are not allowed to be in here.

At this point, this lovely gentleman made a gun using his thumb and forefinger, held it up to my forehead and pretended to shoot me.

Me:  Okay, well, that is on camera so now any chance you ever had of being let back in here is gone.

Then the yelling began.  He asked me if I was the “enforcer.”  Admittedly, this is a funny question because I am like 5’4″, 115 pounds and he is, from my perspective, kind of huge.  At least 1.5 times my size.  But this underscores for you non-industry readers what it is like being a bartender, and a female one at that.  A lot of the times the people you get into it with could overpower you no questions asked.  Hence why it is always smarter to stay behind the damn bar (stupid Rebekah, stupid!).  Anyway, I (with a slight giggle) told him I was the enforcer.  Then he started calling me a slave.  Apparently not serving him meant that I no longer had any agency whatsoever.  And then all of a sudden I was a bitch and a whore.  Oh, and somewhere in there  I was also useless.  Can’t forget useless.  At some point after being called a bitch, after his girlfriend slapped me in the arm and before Mike threw money at me, my co-worker and I did sort of an asshole hand-off.  I walked behind the bar, she threatened to call the cops but actually just called our boss who lives upstairs, and then she went out to deal with him.  He recycled all his favorite epithets on her, “slave” being his favorite.  At some point he crumpled up a $20 bill and threw it at my face.  I really hate when people do that.  Like, REALLY.  Honestly, if he had never thrown the money at me I probably wouldn’t ever have written this blog but that is just so incredibly disrespectful and demeaning that I can hardly stand it.  I mean, who does that?  You know what?  I do work for money.  But do you know who else works for money?  You guessed it, lawyers!  But you don’t see me going into a court room and throwing money at him.  No, sir.

This went on for quite some time.  At some point I remember standing behind the bar, him yelling all kinds of insulting things and me simply saying, “well, you’re welcome to your own opinion.”  I truly believe that.  He is welcome to it.  Only, his opinion is wrong.  But whatever.  No point in splitting hairs over it. Eventually, after much yelling, he left.  I was happy he left because it meant I didn’t have to deal with him anymore but I was sad he left without handcuffs on his wrists. 

Later I found out this is like a normal thing for him.  He just gets shitcanned and picks fights with people and then his booze-induced selective memory allows him to think that none of it was his fault.  But at some point, you would think that he would realize that the amount of altercations he gets into is because of him and not because of every other person in the entire world.  I was trying to explain this to someone and in doing so I said “well, one of these days he is going to pull this shit on the wrong person” to which this guy responded, interestingly, “I think maybe he’s the wrong person.”  That got me thinking.  Maybe he IS the wrong person.  How sad would it be to wake up one day and realize that you are that theoretical ‘wrong person’ everyone is always warning people they might one day meet?  That person has no friends and eventually dies alone in a tiny apartment somewhere and has his face chewed off by his dog because no one notices for days that he’s dead and the dog is hungry.  Poor dog.

Anyway, all that happened before 10pm.  I had to work until 4.  I was not my normal, sunny self.  Good thing I didn’t learn until a few days later about the other customer who decided to call me a cunt because I didn’t want to hear her gloating about keeping Mike out of jail.  (For the record, I am sad he was not led out in handcuffs and will continue to feel that way.)  Ah, the bar business.  Good times.

(By the way, any neighborhood bartenders who want to know this guy’s full name because I know for a fact that he frequents a few of your establishments, — Kris, I’m looking at you! — I am more than happy to oblige.  Part of achieving my goal of vindictiveness is  coincidentally paralleled with my goal of warning others of inevitable volcanic eruptions at their places of employment.)

*As far as I understand it, one can only sue for libel if the the information being shared is an untruth that will do that person harm.  This story is a truth and I don’t think anyone in a position of power reads this blog so I’m pretty sure any real harm is out of the equation.  Safe?

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Just Another Manic Monday

12 Nov

So I am beginning to feel as though maybe I am overdoing it a pinch on my bartender posts, but my customers, it seems, have been in a content-giving mood and who am I deprive you, my readers, of such ridiculousness.  We must prepare ourselves for the inevitability of the oncoming hilarity drought by sneaking in as much enjoyment from my job as is humanly possible.  Or, at least I have to because without moments such as these the tedium would become unbearable.  And so, without further ado, I bring you:  Monday.

The day started off normal enough. I walked to work, bought the Times so I could do the Monday puzzle.  The Monday puzzle is the only puzzle I can successfully complete.  My mom tells me that with practice I would be able to one day tackle the Tuesdays and Wednesdays without too much trouble since the clue-masters reuse a lot of the same words — “oreo,” “uzi,” “el al” — but my ego is far too sensitive.  I would rather feel smart on Mondays and pretend the puzzle doesn’t exist the rest of the week than feel smart on Mondays and then stupid for the following 6 days until I once again complete the puzzle, feet smart, and follow the same trajectory ad infinitum.  I then bought myself some healthy snacks and headed off to the bar where I found, on the curb just in front of the abandoned store next to my bar, a discarded chaise lounge with a decapitated mannequin sitting atop it. I knew right then and there it was going to be an interesting day.

About a half hour into my day an older customer of mine walked in.  He drinks wine and he talks a lot about things that vary from mildly interesting to snooze worthy.  On this particular day he was interested in talking about his appreciation for his grandchildren and also for kale.  He loves kale.  Cleans him right out, he told me.  In the midst of him telling me how men love to talk about sports and women love to talk about the Desperate Housewives and that’s why he prefers to hang out with men, in walked, or should I say crutched, another occasional customer.  He has been on crutches for the past 6 months following ankle reconstruction surgery.  This guy is, how to put this nicely, an arrogant fuck.  I do feel badly about his ankle, though.  I should have realized right away that these two guys in the bar at the same time was a bad thing because they both have very strongly-held and questionably argued opinions based off, in large part, episodes of Dr. Oz.  So while I stood by in wide-eyed disbelief, these two ill-informed know-it-alls started arguing about science.  Just as an aside, to that list of things that should not be discussed in a bar (politics and religion although I disobey that first one on the regular) I would like to add pop-science.  So the argument went something like this:

Kale Guy thinks that vaccines are stupid because Dr. Oz had some guest who he thinks maybe teaches at Harvard and who wrote an article about the fact that vaccines are “a sham.”  He thinks all diseases are due to the fact that people are dirty and if they would just stop pooping in the street then the vaccines wouldn’t be necessary.  He had no argument concerning whooping cough and also no idea as to how to provide low-cost working sewage systems for every person in the entire world in order to prevent the spread of disease.  No matter because Dr. Oz said. (For the record, I think Dr. Oz is the worst and I am mad at Oprah for discovering him.)  He also thinks medicine is bad and vegetables are good.

Ankle Guy thinks Kale guy is full of shit and thinks that vaccines are important.  He also thinks that all pharmaceutical companies are really great, that all the drugs they create are awesome, and that the companies are out to help all the people and not out to make money off the pain and suffering caused by the tendencies of some doctors to over prescribe medication at the behest of said companies.  Had I been a part of this conversation and not a reluctant observer I would have directed Ankle Guy to the recent $2.2 billion settlement being paid by Johnson & Johnson in response to “accusations that it improperly promoted the antipsychotic drug Risperdal to older adults, children and people with developmental disabilities.”  But I was not so I stood idly by.

This went on for awhile. I spent some percentage of the time hiding in the office downstairs, commiserating with my boss/friend, and watching for any and all escalation on the cameras.  The cameras have proven especially useful at times such as these.  Eventually, Ankle Guy decided that calling Kale Guy names was not going to get him anywhere, so he pretended he was late for an appointment and crutched out.  Kale Guy seemed to have a wonderful time and proceeded to compliment me on the health benefits of my lunch.

I thought that, after that interaction, all of the weird for the day was over but it really never is.  Sometime around 7pm a rather drunk individual walked in, carrying on in a voice way too loud for the atmosphere. I was nervous that he would be a problem and was a little reluctant to serve him the shot of rye that he ordered, but my fears were quickly assuaged when he started slurring along with the They Might Be Giants song “Birdhouse in Your Soul.”  There’s nothing quite so entertaining as hearing a fratty-looking guy sing “I’m your only friend I’m not your only friend but I’m your little glowing friend but really I’m not actually your friend but I am.”  (And yes, I did just quote that from memory.  Get over it.)

Anyway, sandwiched between “science” and TMBG I got my first-time visit from my new favorite customers.  Or my favorite new customers.  I don’t want anyone to have their feelings hurt.  I don’t know if these people will ever come back but I really hope they do.  They both work in service and have for a long time.  I figured this out when, upon ordering their Powers neat (!!!), we engaged in a very heated discussion of the recently redesigned Powers bottle.  I was happy to see that they agreed with me that this new bottle was inferior to its prior incarnation for the following two reasons: it looks more fancy and it has a cork which means that it also has that stupid foil shit that spells danger to bartenders fingers everywhere.  The day when my beloved Powers slices my finger open will be a sad day indeed.  What absolutely solidified my love of this couple was when they got into a conversation about drug policy in Colorado.  I don’t know what the exact content of this conversation was because it was at this time that I sadly got busy, but I was present to listen to one portion of the male-half’s contribution.  He started angrily enumerating, using the index, middle, and pointer fingers on his right hand, the things that Colorado loves.  And this is what he said.

“Here’s the thing.  In Colorado they love fitness, they love mountains, and they love fresh air.”

He seemed equal parts confused and angered by these specific preferences and I thought it was hilarious.  It also left me wondering, if he was tasked with choosing, whether  or not he would support the succession of Northern Colorado from the rest of the state.  (Am I the only one that didn’t know that was a thing until recently?  What would happen to the flag? Where would the 51st star go?  On the bottom right hand corner?  A PROPER RECTANGLE CANNOT ACCOMMODATE 51 STARS!)

So there you have it.  Monday.  And, for those among us who are curious, here is a link to an article from the Washington Post that lists the 11 other places within the United States where activists want to secede from their states.  Independent Long Island.  Who knew.

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