Seattle 2011

So, I'm drinking beer in the Holiday Inn hotel bar in Seattle. Don't ask me how I always end up in these places, I once spent 72 hours in Copenhagen and ate half my meals at the shawarma stand in the train station. What can I say, sandwiches were cheap, left me more money for Tuborg.

Anyway, I'm in this Holiday Inn bar. Food is awful. Beer is good, some sort of local pale ale. This bottle blond waitress in a navy blue work shirt is putting up fake cobwebs and orange Christmas lights for Halloween. That sort of place. I'm watching the National League Playoffs on one of the flatscreens. I only watch baseball in the post season because it lets me play politics by proxy via sport. I cheer for leftist cities over conservative cities, free states over right to work states, and teams without unholy amounts of money over the Yankees.

But really, I'm not watching baseball. I mean, I'm looking at the TV but I'm paying attention to two or three conversations going on in the bar. An older woman in a red sweatshirt is kind of sort of flirting with this guy sitting next to her, while her husband looks on. It's nothing really, just the way married people sometimes get sometimes when they want someone new to talk to. She puts her hand on his elbow when she gets up to go to the bathroom. At least, I think she does. I'm trying not to look, and frankly, my peripheral vision is shit in these glasses.

And this kid in the table in the back corner is just killing. He's got friends, and family too I guess, just packed in back there and he's got them all around his little finger. He launches in to some story about how he got cut off from ordering drinks on the flight out here. "I step out of the bathroom," he says, "and the stewardess is waiting for me, and she tells me, 'I can't serve you anymore, we've had complaints'" and then he waits, just this perfect beat before he goes on, "and I'm like, 'FROM THE WHOLE PLANE?'" His voice cracks at the end. The whole booth howls with laughter. I've had nights like his. I know he'll be trying to get that beat just right the next 4 times he tells that story, and it will never be right, he'll try like mad to get it back and it will never quite be right. Sorry kid, guess that's why we aren't professionals.