The Good Old Mind-F**k

Yesterday afternoon, the office let us go at 3:00 p.m. so I went to Rio Rita's with Shannon for lunch/dinner and margaritas. The plan was that Shannon was going to hang out with me until Carly and Chris came out later. However, lunch/dinner went faster than expected and by 6:00 p.m. I didn't want Shannon to have to wait any longer so we left the Star Bar. My intentions were to go back out to Crockett Street at around 7:00 p.m. to catch up with everyone.

Instead, I ended up watching "Butt-Face the Cable Guy" work on my cable modem and, as an added attraction, disconnect my digital television channels. Rather than drive back downtown, I decided to meet Terry and Dan at The West, the very nice little bar which is about two minutes from my house. When we left there, we went across the street to Fast Eddie's which is a huge pool hall with about 50 tables. It was packed and I was once again amazed at what is going on practically right outside my front door.

At The West, there is a digital juke box. I had never seen such a thing. You can even use your credit card to play your music choices. In the tradition of slot machines, your money is referred to as "credits" so you don't realize how much money you're stuffing into the machine. For two extra "credits", you can force your songs to play in front of everyone else's songs.

Dan put some money into the jukebox but his songs never played. The younger people at the table beside us were obviously forcing all their songs to play. Their group had grown from four to about fifteen and we kept having to move our table to give them room. They had cameras and were just having a great time.

When Dan realized that they were monopolizing the jukebox, he said, "I was going to offer to take a couple of pictures for them but since they're not going to let any of my songs play, they can just be one motherf***er short in all their pictures. Yeah, they'll get home and look at their pictures and say 'where is so-and-so' and 'oh, we don't have a picture of all of us.' Ha! Bastards!"

That's one thing I love about Dan. No big scenes, no hitting and cursing and throwing of beer bottles, just the good old mind-f**k. Of course, they didn't know they had been screwed out of what would surely have been their most memorable holiday pictures of all, but we knew. Ha! Bastards!