My barber is a little late today. I sit on the couch amid a few Vietnamese ladies and prop my arm up on the cushion. Upon being made to wait due to someone else’s lateness, my first instinct is usually anger. But I have been concerned recently at my inability to be present. Or at the very least, to lose myself in thoughts as opposed to Reddit. Recently, therefore, I have decided to actively attempt to use my phone less. And unfortunately, once I did that I found there was nothing to keep me from this horror show called ‘thinking’.

Now, I sit quietly and watch the mall people go by. When they prove distressingly real, I let my mind wander. Burke and I have decided to play hooky this afternoon and are going to a restaurant for some beers and pizza. At this moment, the world is my oyster and it will come on bread with mozzarella. But after three months of daily busyness to the point of exhaustion, an afternoon hidden in the garden of some off-the-beaten-track restaurant is exactly what the doctor ordered.

I am irritated with myself for wasting May and June this year. This is one of my favorite times of year – we are no longer teaching but only testing and doing other work. This year, however, I have bitten off more than I can gobble and the time has passed in a blur of stress and short fuses. It was in an attempt to rein that in that we came up with our hooky day.

Paní July – my barber – is still not here. Though I don’t know her well, she must have a medical condition which results in her believing that I am 21 years old. As a result, she cuts my hair as one would someone who is hip to modern trendiography™. She leaves my hair longer on top – as Burke has assured me is the fashion. And while I was disconcerted at first, the number of compliments I got from my 21-year-old students seem to support Burke’s thesis and Paní July’s follicular tactics. The one time I asked Ms. July if she could cut my hair on top a wee bit shorter, she replied, in a somewhat startling but not altogether unpleasant way, ‘No.’

For this reason, I cannot forego haircuts lest I begin resembling Doyle Wolfgang von Frankenstein in 1995. So while I usually let my hair go for two months, Paní July has convinced me that I should come every month. So here I am for the third time in three months like some Prima Donna. So I’ll get twelve haircuts a year instead of six. I’m trying to reckon with the extra time push. It’s a 100% uptick in time. Let’s say each haircut is 30 minutes, I will now spend six hours a year getting a haircut. I marvel a little at that – how the small things add up. And then there’s how the small things add up over the course of your life, not in hours, but in how many more times of an activity or a object your life amounts to. I make the mistake of doing math in my head. Let’s say I have 35 years left on Planet X (bringing me to a lucky, if irritable 85 years old) at twelve haircuts a year, including this one, that brings me up to 425 haircuts left in my whole life.

About 40,000 years ago, I was working as a bartender in an Italian restaurant-bar. OK, this was around 2000. This place was staffed with young, enthusiastic college or recently-post-college kids. They were optimistic and happy, having not yet been bludgeoned down by the real life waiting around the corner for them.

I had worked in dive bars before this and found this experience to be wholly more enjoyable. For one thing, I very rarely had to battle vagrants over a sixpack of malt liquor. I didn’t reach for a billy club at all in this job. And 911 was not on speed dial. This was one of those pubs that just felt nice to be in. It put off a good energy. The staff liked working there and had fun doing so. Many of the employees had formed fast friendships and, like many bar staff, they hung out with each other – oftentimes at the bar itself. Regulars fed off of these good vibes and gravitated towards the place. It was a great bar.

One day, someone – and I won’t say who – conceived of a Drink Off. A good old fashioned drinking contest. See, we had these 3-liter bottles of wine meant for large parties. However, somehow the idea that matriculated down through discussion that we make teams and each team would drink one of these bottles. Five teams of two (2) were created, made up mostly of waitresses and waiters, one bartender (not me), and one manager. We laughed about the potential shenanigans of this contest. We had visions of trash-talking waitresses and lighthearted rivalry slurred by wine.  

As luck would have it, I was the bartender working this drink off. The teams took up their spots around the bar. Ten people. Some had dressed in football jerseys and had applied eye black. The mood was light and the teams jibed each other in a friendly competitive manner. At 5 pm sharp I blew the proverbial whistle and they were off to the races. And then everyone started chugging wine – aka cry juice.

It was soon after this (let’s say 5:08 pm) that the on-duty manager and I realized the flaw in the plan. We had made a drinking contest based on how quickly everyone could drink one of these bottles, not on how much they could drink or not a series of drinking challenges. No. How fast can all young twentysomethings and one fortysomething drink a 3-liter bottle of wine. Huh.

The friendly jibes stopped because people were too busy bringing wine glasses to their mouths and chugging its contents. For the next forty minutes or so, these young, enthusiastic kids devolved into slouching, cross-eyed protohumans whose linguistic skills dissipated along with their ability to monitor volume, and, it should be mentioned, bladder control. About an hour later all hell broke loose. And I was in an island among ten of the drunkest people I had ever laid eyes on while sober. Never have I felt more like a character on The Walking Dead.  

Trouble? Yes.

Unprecedented? No.

Many times throughout history has alcohol made large groups of people go simply bonkers. Sure, sometimes the problem was the booze itself. In the Munich beer riots in 1844, people lost their collective Teutonic heads over a rise in the price of beer. The Irish joined the Germans during the Lager beer riots in Chicago 1855, when new temperance laws and bar closures on Sundays didn’t quite sit right. In the late 18^th century, Americans showed their early irrational aversion to taxes when they started lynching tax collectors during what would become known as the Whiskey Rebellion.  

Sometimes the problem was giving a large group of people a lot of alcohol. Ten Cent Beer Night is a famous example of the equation of mob + booze x 1000 = uh oh. Ten cent beer night was a promotion held for the Texas Rangers-Cleveland Indians (baseball) game at Cleveland Stadium on June 4 1974. The beer was discounted down from 64 cents. Orders were limited to 6 beers per order, but no limit was placed on how many orders. Besides the uncannily dumb idea to give sports fans in a stadium cheap unlimited booze, this situation was set up by a perfect storm of bad luck, bad accidents, and more stupidity.

I walk through the doors of our local pub. Two of my three comrades are at the table already. As I walk in, I am hearing the tune of the Magnificent Seven. It is also possible that I hear that song because I am humming that song. My friends – we’ll call them Bertie and Jay – are in good spirits. Bertie has just received a renewal on his permanent residence. He is visiting after a long absence in Prague. Jay is in a good mood because we are in our testing period at the university and work for the day is well over. Done. Finished. A thing of the morning and the past.

It is time to day drink.  

When I was a younger man, day drinking was put into play on a whim. Any random Tuesday or Thursday could turn into a session with no help from anyone or anything except some guy who might ask ‘so you want something to drink?’ It might be mentioned that this person was often a paid employee of an establishment, and, given the time and context of his question, ‘something to drink’ usually meant iced tea or a coke.

But such were the frenzied outlaw days of my early outlaw life. When ‘liver health’ was a phrase I heard Thursday nights on ER. When a hangover was twenty minutes of discomfort in the morning and cured by a glass of water. Sometimes day drinking was a continuity of the night before, one of those special times when all hit right, everyone’s tolerance was shifted into overdrive, and you could just keep going, and so, in a way that was agreed-upon without a word exchanged, you did just that: kept going until you were done.

But now that my age recently stopped starting with a 4, things have changed. They changed when my age stopped starting with a 3, but I was stubborn. Nowadays, a drink at lunch can mean a headache until dinner. A hangover is a phasal thing, like the moon cycle, or a werewolf cycle. Day one is head pain, day two is joint pain, day three is anxiety, day four is when all the pieces begin to settle back into place, day five, I begin to find hope in the world once again. Just in time for the weekend.

So to decide on a program of day drinking is not done lightly. Affairs have to be put in order, obligations taken care of, organized, pet duties relegated to a mildly irked partner, meals plotted and planned. It’s a scene man. And when all of this is done, there is still one big ole X factor. And that is Knox Wren. And he has just walked through the door. The waiter’s knees buckle.