Close Encounters of the Bar Kind

C and I meet a lot of interesting people in bars. I don’t know if we secrete some undetectable pheromone that screams “Here, right here, tell us your deepest, darkest secrets” but that is exactly what happens everywhere we go. Two cases in point:

Last weekend we attended a cow show and sale in Fort Worth. By Saturday at four, the sale cows were all beginning to look alike and the auctioneers droning was putting me to sleep so we decided to cut out early. We headed back to a restaurant in the historic stock yards that caters to out of state tourists. Half of the bar stools are saddles. No self respecting Texan would sit in a bar stool that is a saddle. We grabbed two normal bar stools, ordered drinks and settled in.

The woman next to us struck up a conversation and before long was revealing her idea for a new strip joint in Fort Worth named “Chubbys”. All plus size all the time. This would be perfect she thought for other men like her husband who are “chubby chasers”. I had never heard this term before and it more than struck me as odd that when her friend’s called her husband a chubby chaser she didn’t turn around and eat them on the spot. We began discussing livestock (of course that would be the natural progression of any conversation about a larger than life strip joint) and bad quickly went to worse. How long should you know someone before they tell you that they walk around in their pasture naked? She was a great girl and as far as entertainment factors go it did not get much better than this for free.

Last night was yet another chance encounter of the bar kind. We weren’t even there to drink but were being forced to sit at the bar to eat because Houston has passed this crappy smoking law that limits where we can eat and smoke in peace. Health nuts be damned! The woman at the bar next to us was going on and on and on to the bartender a mile a minute when (and I am not sure how) we began a conversation with her about her recent bout of depression. In a nutshell, she was estranged from a family member who left her quite an inheritance which became a problem with her loser boyfriend then they broke up and now she is depressed. Rich and depressed, but depressed none the less. This woman listed the medications she is on and I am telling you there is not one second of the day her mood isn’t being controlled by one chemical or another. She could medicate the state of Texas with one swipe of her medicine cabinet.

These are just two of the recent stories. My memory is overflowing with many more that vary from the strange to deranged.