There’s a bar in the suburban town next to my hometown. It’s the type of place where it helps to have your wits about you, for your safety and also to fend off sh**-talkers. I kind of like it for that.
As should hardly come as a surprise to anybody familiar with the area, there’s a dude who goes to the bar every day, during the day. It seems that every such establishment has one of these. What’s funny, too, is that all of these people are a little different. You’d think there would be some common thread between all of them, given their shared behavioral folly. Yet, you get some of them introverted and some of them outgoing, while, perhaps, all furnishing the tendency to be a bit gross with the ladies.
Indeed, the guy I’m talking about at this particular bar is someone whom I’ve heard deliver inappropriate conversation to female bartenders. This was a while ago, though, and for all I know he’s cleaned up his act in this regard and withholds whatever sexual rhetoric he’d otherwise be aiming at the girls.
What I’ve seen developing in him recently, anyway, is a bizarre impetus to kind of regulate the proceedings, like making himself the arbiter of people’s respective level of coolness, more or less. I couldn’t believe it, that is, when, last time I was at this place, this pretty cute girl started talking to me about all the problems in her life, and then this dude who’s there every day acted glad when she left, saying something like “It’s a lot quieter in here now that she’s gone.”
Now, you’d think somebody who was a big enough loser to go to the same bar every day and stay for an average of about five hours each of those days would be grateful that any good-looking chick would let him anywhere near her. This is a dude, also, who, per his own report, has been to prison, and has had some unmentionable stuff happen to him in there, too. He was sure to make this clear to all of us who were present in that bar this one day, the fact of whether or not I was in earshot dictating his admissions perhaps up in the air still. Somehow, I don’t doubt it.
Well this was a trick he could only do once, you might say, and now his thing seems to be taking up gripes with other patrons who don’t seem, at the time, to be bothering anyone else in the whole establishment other than him. What would possess him to take issue with this girl in there, who was not only good-looking but also pretty kind, friendly and pleasant, if perhaps a little chatty and plaintive? There must just be some impetus for conquest in him, like the need to be at the top (almost like a Fascist dictator’s personality, in a sense), like a superiority complex. And as funny as it seems to see a superiority complex turn up in someone who’s such a barfly as he is, it’s equally troubling and ominous, almost firmly indicating that something bad will happen in there, at some point, as a result of him. People will surely see through, and quickly, his laughable attempts at infusing himself with this element of “coolness,” like the alpha male, mischievous group leader in high school, more or less. (For the record, I’ve effectively stared him down before, and he definitely doesn’t come across as tough.) But it seems inherent that this hunger for conquest and superiority is what got him in trouble in the first place, with whatever it was which initially landed him in prison. His restless social disposition, that is, bespeaks the inability to feel contentedness, to benevolently joke around and to just be happy with miscellaneous moments, the type of thing surely beneficial to the variant level of happiness in a given tavern mainstay such as himself.