I HAD A busy weekend planned. I’d fully intended on riding Ixion’s wheel over to pick up Maxwell’s demon so we could steal Occam’s razor to kill Schrödinger’s cat, after which we’d kind of root around Pandora’s box. Instead, I watched television for like four hours, which was its own kind of madness, since the television was off the whole time.   

Point being, nobody likes a wiseass. Life’s tough enough without having to look up a bunch of obscure references all smashed together for no discernible reason, like in that last paragraph. I suppose, in a way, that sentence, from Ixion down to Pandora, could serve as awkward metaphor. I felt like a lot had been happening recently and, at the same time, not a damn thing.  

When this strange and paradoxical malaise hits me, I usually head off to the bar. Say what you will about the perils of heavy drinking, it will reconcile the hell out of a contradiction, or at least make me perfectly happy about the contradiction, which is basically the same thing. 

I stopped in at my favorite watering hole and could immediately feel the rage in the air, the quiet tension that lingers thick before an enormous brawl erupts. I thought maybe it was the news on the television, as it had gone back to “normal” in the worst possible way—by reporting about the mass shooting epidemic instead of the COVID epidemic. 

That wasn’t it, though. The source of the outrage was a pointy-headed couple sitting at the bar who had apparently been there all afternoon yukking it up while amassing a $200 bar tab of tequila and potato chips, which should give some idea about the amount of tequila that was involved. They were wearing conical paper birthday hats atop their heads, which may have just been repurposed dunce caps. 

“I’ve got some gift cards,” the man slurred, as he handed over a stack of no less than 80 of them, each with a remaining balance of no more than $3 per card. So the bartender, apoplectic with fury, had announced a moratorium on drink service until, as she so eloquently put it, “I deal with this broke motherfucker’s squaring of his account.” 

Already there was a line of receipts running from the printer to the floor as the bartender swiped card after card, knocking the bar tab down a few bucks at a time. The rest of the customers, empty glasses in front of them, glared at the tequila-and-potato-chips duo with all the fury of Zeus casting Ixion down to Tartarus to spin on his fiery wheel for eternity, which was Ixion’s dubious claim to fame. One bar customer who was lucky enough to still have half a glass of beer in front of her offered to share it with me in exchange for protection and on the condition I buy her a full one when the madness was all over. You know the situation is fraught when a stranger offers to share a beer with another stranger in the midst of a pandemic. And even worse, he accepts. 

The birthday freaks with their pointy caps tilted on their heads looked around like doped-up unicorns. It was folks like these that were the reason for rules of any kind. They are the burden for which we all must suffer, kind of like Ixion’s wheel, and the dumber the behavior, the more draconian the rules. If the Ten Commandments were written today they would be comprised of 50 pages of digital fine print with a “Skip and Accept” button at the bottom. 

So be it. 

Disaster was averted and the birthday couple was saved from serious assault as a miraculous stroke of luck befell the bartender when she ran the last gift card and realized, somehow, that after it had cleared the $2.75 remaining bar tab there was still a $297.25 balance, which she applied to her gratuity. In 25 minutes she’d netted herself almost $300, which isn’t a bad payoff. The birthday couple stumbled out and everybody got a beer on the house, except for me, who had to fork over the cash in exchange for the beer advance I’d gotten from the woman who’d shared her pint. After all, a deal’s a deal. 

Maybe money is the root of all evil, but it definitely solves some problems, on occasion. The bartender was thereafter in a grand mood—quite charitable—and the inebriation I sought wasn’t long in manifesting. 

Life is short and the wait for a beer, sometimes, is far too long, which is the opposite of the way it should be. 

Now I have to avoid the twelve labors of Hercules and climb Sisyphus’s boulder in order to jam a little on Pan’s flute and afterwards maybe flirt with Odysseus’s Sirens…

More Alembics to come…

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