Wine (Part XIII)

Two firsts: sitting at a bar with a drunk-skunk Irishman talking about women, and clapping my hands to flamenco music at a table full of drunk German exchange students. These are new experiences on a night that seemed quite usual in other resepctes, what with the uncalled-for stories and the slightly disturbed spatial relations of the buildings on the streets and the tables and the cars on the streets that seem frozen in time if you fixate on them really hard. The beer was green due to leftover carcinogenic dye from last week. There were dancers greedily eating nachos and bobble-head girls coming from nowhere to make me twitch, twitchy as I am.

It's just an ordinary bar on an ordinary night.

There was a fellow who came in and did a ridiculous riverdance. Probably everyone in the bar wanted to sleep with him. My feeling was that he was aiming that dance at a blonde girl he had walked in with, but she was talking to her friend and probably missed the full impact of the admittedly impressive skill. He pines for her, and on really slow nights he probably riverdances to curry favour with the ancient Celtic pantheon to aid him with his grim task.

The night is full of four-sentence anecdotes.

Inevitably we move to dimly spot-lit tables, talking to the bearded Scotsman (not an actual Scotsman), a contemporary of mine. Hearing about tits and ass and other things, hearing about preferences, proclivities to fighting, revisiting memories from three years ago, getting a fuller picture of our ancient implicit man-rivalries. He talked all night about fighting, but didn't. Instead we fell to watching a hilarious/hideous piece of real-life performace art tableaux: one woman at a pool table, four men surround her. They shout and joke and gesture to curry favour, much as the riverdancer curried favour with the gods; fights almost break out; intoxicated brains smash pool cues against the solid tables. This ruckus makes the woman realize, even in her impaired decision-making state, that something is afoot. She slips out undetected, while the men srut and pose, vying for dominance, not really realizing that such triangular hierarchies are a few decades out of date. Or so I thought.

Consider: "Mystery is the ontological foundation for tolerance."