It started off pretty well. Liz, Johnny and I went out and we had a few
drinks. We played a few rounds of “Lying
to Strangers in Bars,” a game invented by Liz.
The basic premise is that we’ll strike up a conversation with someone at
the bar, and then one of us will tell another “Hey, tell them about…” followed
by a vague reference to an improbable and untrue event. The third person is in charge of scoring the
resulting story, on a wide range of category, including how funny it is, how
much the stranger seems to believe it, and, as a result of a long-running joke,
how many times the story teller can work in the word scoundrel.
The winner last night was, by far, Johnny,
who worked off Liz’s prompt, “Hey, tell him about the time we stumbled on that nude
druidic ritual up in the Adirondacks.”
All in all, it should have been a good night.
Then, at the third bar, everything
suddenly seemed terrible. The drinks, the music playing, the company of my
friends- it all at once disgusted and infuriated me. That’s the kind of mood
where I could say something hurtful, but thankfully I still had enough self
awareness to recognize that. I made some excuse about needing fresh air and wandered
out into the cold.
After a
while Liz and Johnny came out to check on me. Like I said, better than I
deserve. I told them I was just feeling a little sick from the beer- no need to ruin their night with my shit. A little while, when I was feeling better, I went back inside, but I was pretty subdued the rest of the night, I guess.
No dogs tonight, at least. The
weirdest thing that happened, my own hang-ups aside, was some guy at the second
bar staring at me and lapping beer out of his pint glass with his tongue. Liz is pretty sure he was flirting with me,
which is flattering, I guess?
No comments:
Post a Comment