Guest post by ThoughtTrain

So last night I was out with a number of my friends, including Shakedown. The entire night was a lot of fun. I ate nachos, I played billiards, and I danced in probably the most ridiculous way possible (the best way to dance). It’s hard to put into words how I dance at bars but it involves a lot of jumping, timed arm movements, and unnecessary spinning. I should also note for the record that I’m not actually good at billiards, or really any endeavor that requires hand-eye coordination and physical prowess, but I do have a lot of fun being bad at sports. It’s a rich source of humor. I find a lot of people will forgive you for being bad at things if you can laugh about it and still have a good time.

I’m not really here to talk about billiards, though. I’m here to discuss events at the last bar we went to, or at least I went to. I’m not actually sure what happened to Shakedown and the rest of my friends after this bar. I can only hope they had more magical adventures.

I walked down the stairs from the upper level of this bar to find the rest of my friends, and found them I did. They were at the bar counter and seemed to be involved in a heated discussion of some matter. This is actually a normal occurrence when I’m out with Shakedown, as he tends to remind me of a fencer when he carries on a conversation. I think that is why many people seem to be more invested and focused in conversations they have with him than in similar interactions with other people, but no matter what happens he does always end up getting a lot of attention. I was content to let him fence with our friends while I figured out what I wanted to drink.

I asked a group of women congregating beside our group what drinks tend to be good at this bar. I like asking strangers for advice on drinks because sometimes they suggest a new drink I’ve never heard of or one I haven’t even thought about since R.E.M. was still a band but would really like to have again. These strangers didn’t have much advice to offer on that score, but one girl, let’s call her Rita as I really like the Beatles song “Lovely Rita”, told me about how she’s from the area. Apparently there was some game going on between this group and my group of friends from before I had arrived, because she didn’t offer her name but my friends chimed in a told me she was going under the name of a local geographical feature. I didn’t question this. I talked about my area, which is apparently as where she’s from, along with other trivial matters. I also learned her friend, she shall be “Eleanor” after “Eleanor Rigby”, was from another place entirely and just visiting.

I never did around getting that drink like I intended to, but I was having fun talking about random stuff. I really like talking about random stuff. Every so often these guys the size of small trucks would try and flirt with her. Rita has this interesting way of delivering some harsh lines, but if you watch her eyes you could tell she just found flirting boring and the men boorish. At one point Shakedown talked with her, as I just kinda hung out, enjoying the show. Swipe, faint, parry, counter-parry, swipe, false retreat, unexpected advance, faint, parry, swipe. Rita was a fencer too if you worked her up to it, but I was trying to read the face, since I was still trying to get to the bottom of this speaking-without-words thing that seemed to be going on. I talked to her about how she seemed to have conversations with just her face, and she seemed to enjoy talking about it.

At some point Rita and I got surrounded by the giant truck-like men. They kept flirting with her. She’d turn to them and then there’d be more ‘swipe, parry, parry, faint’, but it was much less fun and artful. At one point this guy started dancing with Eleanor, and my friends wandered down to the other end of the bar. Still working under the assumption that she wasn’t interested in flirting, I just proceeded to roll with everything and enjoy the conversation. I stood in one spot and didn’t really make any effort to get closer or further from her, but at some point she moved closer to me. As I was more interested in talking about something or other, I only faintly noticed that her gaze had gotten much more intense. In mid-sentence, she darted even closer and started kissing me. For me, it was an entirely unexpected turn of events, but a welcome one. My evening only dramatically improved from there.