Notes From a Dive Bar XII

(above - a spaceship)

Take George, an enterprising captain of drinking. Cast him on Booze Trek. Beamed to his stool, he announces it is his longest drinking day of the year. It's the Summer Solstice, he claims, but who knows? This bar gets no sunshine.

He's on vacation, starts at 11am and goes until his axis wobbles. Then he falls into a black hole designed around decades of light speed drinking. The only thing keeping him erect -- to boldly go -- to the toilet now and again.

When people ask where I hail from, sometimes I tell them I'm Vulcan, as a joke, and they ask, where is that? Geography is not their strong point. Communication is lost when you speak in an accent designed to burr and brogue. I switch to an American voice, now and again. Sounds like John Wayne on dope. Deployed when I meet another Vulcan visiting America from the homeland. Sometimes, I don't want them to know I am one of them. Not for any logical reason but simply to avoid going through the list -- Which town are you from? Which soccer team do you support? How long have you been here? Followed by ticking the boxes on fading affinities on the spectrum of origins which makes one feel sort of guilty.

Is time dead? Who knows but the days are getting shorter. So too, the drinks. The summer pour reaches its zenith. Time shortens on the liquor arc from bottle to glass. Look at the trajectory on it. Like bronzed plume from a rocket. And liftoff, as George leaves his stool for the voyage into the night, and the stars don't shine, unless you count the ones around his head. He crashes into the wooden pole at the door and we are reminded of attraction and repulsion, the chaos of the universe.