One Christmas Eve many years ago, I stayed in Prague and cooked a big meal with friends. The food was subsidized by various bottles of wine, liquor, and clear stuff in bottles conspicuously void of label or descriptive promises. Late into the evening, as two of us watched Christmas Vacation as per Christmas ritual tradition 7761/24, I noticed that my cat seemed utterly fascinated with my wine glass. I watched. She was pressing her paw into the remnants of red wine at the bottom of the glass and licking her paws clean. Really clean. I noted this down for future reference and to tell my vet.  

Though we got a kick out of it, it shouldn’t have been so surprising. Animals have a long relationship with alcohol. Oh sure, there are cases throughout history of drinking animals. Like Wojtek the Syrian brown bear who became a soldier in the 22nd Artillery Supply Company in the Polish Army during World War II. He fought in the Battle of Monte Cassino and developed a taste for beers, given his military service. Likewise, beers and bears were often coupled at saloons in the old west. Because what better way to wile away your off-hours than to wrestle a bear who’s been drinking? I think it’s a Hemingway book.

But even today drinking – and even drunk – animals are an everyday reality. An evidently common sight in autumn in Sweden are drunken elk stuck in trees. They get into that fix because they are trying to reach the fermenting apples which made them drunk in the first place. Fruit bats also don’t mind a few pops of ethanol-rich fermenting fruit (hence their name). Scientists even believe that they have developed a stronger resistance to alcohol to keep from getting too tipsy. You know, being drunk is great when you can lie on your couch, eat pizza, and watch Netflix, but when you have to fly and you are surrounded by predators who want to eat you, you might want to keep your head a bit. Evolutionarily, it’s just smarter. In fact, one strategy used to catch invasive moths and flies is getting them drunk in beer. This way they stop eating crops and go to the McDonalds down the road or just pass out in front of the tube light.

The pen-tailed treeshrew seems to have one of the animal kingdom’s higher tolerances to booze. Which explains why the pen-tailed treeshrew is always the other animals’ designated driver. Hamsters too seem to be pretty good at warding off drunkenness. When researchers gave zebrafish alcohol (presumably through a straw?) they found they became more reckless, ignoring a robot version of their main predator – the heron. This is similar to when your mild-mannered accountant friend throws an elbow at a rugby player at the pub after a few beers. Neither are likely to survive long.   

It’s a Thursday, which means it’s my short day. I finish teaching at 10:30 and unless I have some pressing deadline of some pressing work that’s pressing my sinuses, I more or less have the rest of the day free. Sadly, it’s usually the former and I often come home to sit and work while my cat and dog surround me in an obsequiousness borne of sleepiness and too many treats.

Today, however, I seem to have the day free. Since I rarely take a full day off, I tend to take my days off in afternoons. My deadlines for the week were all earlier and as far as I know, nobody is expecting anything from me in the new few days. I decide to celebrate my liberation by attending to tasks, given that it’s too early to hole up in a bar. Besides, I’m on a mission.

A year ago, I bought a pair of light pants perfect for summer travel. But there’s a problem – cause when you’re 5’7 and built like a guy who swung a double-headed battle axe to save Middle Earth from Sauron – pants are never not a problem. These pants are larger around the waist than is totally comfortable. Perfect for sitting in a pub or a restaurant while on holiday and for providing extra space between waist and waistband in which to fit holiday food intake. However, these pants have no belt loop and, though they are comfortable while sitting, are just too large. The one time I used them I grew tired of taking pictures of the Janiculum while holding up my pants with my other hand. I need a solution.

That solution came to me in my sleep one night. I awoke with a vision. The vision made so much sense that I was near certain nobody here would do it. I would get another button hole put in the pants about 2–3 centimeters in from the original button hole. This would be the button hole used for walking when I need a tighter fit. The (original) button hole which made the pants looser would be for sitting and eating ice cream and his assortment of tasty siblings. I’m a genius. Now, let’s just see if I can a. explain it to a tailor and b. convince them to do it.

First, I need a tailor. Preferably one I won’t mind being rejected by. I read about a good one near my flat, but her shop is on the other side of the tracks. In this case, the tracks are those of the metro that separate us from the other side of the road. And, not to sound snobby, between their side and our side, there is a distinct difference in feel, mood, tone, and number of people mostly naked and under the influence of something that makes them think that being naked in public at noon on a Thursday is OK. Nevertheless, I get ready to go.

It’s Friday night. For the general populus, Friday has a different feel. This is true no matter what you do: Stay in, go to the pub, eat a bag of fries on a park bench. For example. When you do these things on a Friday night, you do so with a calmer mind, one setting at arm’s length the previous five days of work while looking forward to a day or so of rest.

Usually.

This Friday night has been dampened (for me and, by the transitive properties of grumpiness, the other inhabitants of the flat) by a working Saturday. So, as I make dinner, I think about the next day. As I tidy the kitchen, I think about the next day. As I read, I think about the next day. My brain can’t process and forget a week’s worth of the joys, stresses, minor humiliations, and personal epithets that come along with a life of teaching. I have been robbed not only of a Saturday, but of the calm contemplation of a Friday night mostly found through TV and a drooling that might suggest the recent removal of my frontal lobe. But, no, not this Friday. I show my displeasure for this by throwing several tiny mini-tantrums. These mostly involve colorful language regarding people and what they can do with their Saturday. 

Making matters worse are the facts. The facts that refuse to modify as I examine them under a microscope in the hopes of rendering them less invasive. That is, there ain’t enough lipstick in Europe to make this Saturday pig beautiful. This Saturday I work from 9–17:10. In other words: all frickin’ day. No matter how I put this into my spin factory, it all comes up that I will spend the 8 hours the next day in front of students and others online. People on their way to the chopping block have had brighter futures.  

What’s worse, the other inhabitants in the flat have become used to a cycle of sorts. The dog and cat understand that there are a few days, we’ll call them Monday through Wednesday, where we humans get up very early and there’s a subdued tone of misery and hopelessness in the flat along with the smell of coffee and soap. The dog wakes up each day in a state of absolute joy, as if she can’t believe she gets another day of being spoiled, walked, fed. She licks us like a happy white mop with dark eyes and then rolls onto her back waiting for the day’s inaugural belly scratch. She also knows intuitively that on a few days a week, the optimism that we return to her is a bit … forced. She knows that on a few of those days – we’ll call them Thursday through Sunday – the optimism is truer. The cat may also understand this, but does not alter from her routine of standing outside the bedroom door screaming at us until we feed her. 

I worked in a bar for a long time, which made my working hours other peoples’ leisure hours. I showed up to work on Friday and Saturday nights, right when people were in full unwind mode. This was the first time I explored my Other Self. You see, for me to not only work when others were relaxing, but to work to help them reach higher levels of that relaxation, it was necessary for me to put myself into a state of mind and I had to do this without pharmaceuticals. Enter Jimmie Kuhl. Perhaps the grandest of all bar gurus. I related this to him once – namely, that my jealousy was getting the better of me – and he said he fully understood. He had been at this bartending game for much longer and had come up with a system.

It’s a Monday night. I am walking, well walk-pulling, our easily distractable Shih tzu along a path. Our walks involve a few optimistic steps. Then there’s a hunt through grass and a satisfying pee (sometimes the dog pees too). After that, the dog will play along with this whole ‘sure, you own me’ thing and walk. But after a while, the small animal starts adding up the context clues and deduces that I’m probably not the one in charge. Surely, the fact that I follow her around, pick up her poop, and feed her blueberries can only logically add up to one conclusion.

When this conclusion is reached, the doggy decides it would rather not go on and lies in the dirt. Whether or not this is a power move is answered moments later when no amount of tugging or of picking up and placing on feet will result in anything more than the dog slipping back onto her rump and watching me try to explain with facial expressions to passersby with well-trained dogs that that I am in charge.  

When everyone’s gone, I take out a blueberry from my blueberry pocket. (Nota bene: I now have a blueberry pocket in most cardigans, as has been realized by my fascinated and somewhat disturbed students. I also have a poop bag pocket too. Usually unfulfilled). When the dog decides this mishigas is over, she emits a high-pitched offkey song reminiscent of Donald Sutherland’s terrifying scream at the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It’s then that I give in and pick her up for the final leg of our walk. And a reckoning begins.  

Like many boys growing up in the 1980s, I took a lot of misguided life lessons from movies. From TV I learned that learning is half the battle (GI-Joe!), I learned that nobody put Baby in the corner, and I learned that action heroes had very little sense of humor. Action movies were the ones I wanted, as My Dinner with Andre was still out of reach for my fledgling gray matter. Action heroes didn’t smile. Why, who had time to smile when they were about to go fight the Russians or a terrorist cell at the local mall. Those men would be easily identifiable by the keffiyehs they were donning.

These action heroes also had a dog. If not overly large, then sturdy, and either dark brown or black. This dog could do math and save people from avalanches. This dog was loyal to the hero, he knew who the bad guys were, and he could take a shot if need be. He also looked really cool walking alongside the hero in the woods after his successful mission when he has some time to get back to nature and solitude.     

The movie antithesis of the rugged character with a rugged dog was a comic character with a comic dog. He was a harmless neighbor, an accountant, maybe, or a lawyer, some brand of overly-officious nerd who was there to present a bureaucratic issue for the hero to swat away as he has bigger fish to fry, and what could a defaulted loan mean to a man who just killed ten terrorists hiding in his yard? This guy in the 1980s movies wore light clothing – pink golf shirts, white shorts, white shoes. Perish the thought. And my 1980s-movie education told me that these officious-type guys had lapdogs and those lapdogs were meant to be an appendage of their urbanity and unmanliness.

You’ll be happy to know that the movies of the 1980s don’t rule supreme in my life view anymore. For example, my dreams of fighting bad guys with Arnie got sidelined when I realized just how great it was to read on my couch and not get shot. But would it be so bad to be the officious next-door neighbor? That officious guy was rather admirable when I think about it. At a time when boys were being told what boys should be, in that little fictional world, dressed in white and carrying around a poodle, he was being true to himself. It’s almost heroic.    

Heroics are part of the last leg of our walk journey. I have put the dog back down and she has agreed to walk for a little while. She is only a foot or so off the ground and can sleep sixteen hours a day, but even she has the killer instincts at times. I recognize the look of the hunt. So, I let her chase me. I run away and she comes after my ankles and growls and chews the bottom of my pantleg. Then I chase her back and she runs away, quickly dashing between my reaching hands. She would be able to avoid any 1980s-movie terrorist. Then I run away and let her catch me. I eventually surrender. I let her know she has won, she gloats and allows me to live another day.

We finish the walk feeling content, ready for inside. She’s tired, she’ll recline on her little bed and I’ll sit on the couch and we’ll watch TV. I’ll probably treat her to some blueberries or maybe even a piškoty. We’ll relax this evening mindfully safe in the comfort that the officious man’s house brings, not a terrorist nor a bureaucrat in sight.

After college, I moved back to Langhorne, PA in desperate search of a job. I wanted something I had trained for. Something on a newspaper or a local magazine. What I wanted was to start a career in writing and editing. What I got was Kahunaville.

Kahunaville was a themed bar & restaurant, done up to look as though you’d just walked into the exotic rainforest where they were filming Jurassic Park. It would have simply been a rainforest but for the droves of confused-looking white guys in khakis. Also it was in the Oxford Valley Mall, so the Sunglass Hut visible from the bar sort of smashed the effect. Attempting to immerse the clientele was the occasional and abrupt screech of a kookaburra and water fountain shows set to music – as if those things happen in the real rainforest all the time. If that wasn’t enough to make the diners choke on their burgers, then the hourly bar-top dance-party the staff were forced to endure surely did the trick. It definitely did it for me. I lasted two weeks before disappearing on Halloween night on a search for a wig that has yet to end.

For ages, people have been drinking in theme bars. People have sipped cocktails while mermaids swam around a tank behind the bar. Others have pounded mugs of mead while men in armor battled in an arena near a hotdog stand. Business lunches have been held at Hooters, Golden Oldies, and inside giant replicas of the human heart. For generations, kids have been searing their lips off with pizza cheese while animatronic hillbilly animals play a jamboree at Chuck E. Cheese, no doubt instigating at least three lifelong fears in one blast.

Anyone who has been handed a butter beer from a guy with a wand tucked into his pants has wondered where this whole theme bar thing started. Well, they can thank the good folks of the Belle Epoque.