If only I could get paid to hang out in bars and talk to interesting strangers. This thought occurred to me, not for the first time, after going out Friday night and meeting some interesting folks. There seem to be a lot of friendly people in Portland, and many of them like to drink beer as much as me.
It’s not that the beer, or other alcoholic beverage, is a critical part of the equation. I don’t want to give anybody the impression that I’m a complete lush, but there is something contemplative and bonding about sitting at a bar or a table and sharing a drink with somebody.
Last Friday, there were several somebodies. First, there was Mike, the tiny Irishman who’d just quit a job he hated and was celebrating. Having abruptly quit jobs I hated on more than one occasion, I was eager to give support and reassure him. I know from my own experience that there’s not much that’s worse than waking up in the morning and contemplating a day of mind numbing drudgery with uninspiring people. Mike will be fine, I’m sure. He’ll very likely be happier with a new job hanging drywall or working in a warehouse, instead of slinging hash with a bunch of alcoholics he can’t stand.
Then there was Mark, a fifty-three year old recent divorcee, and exile from a life of corporate servitude. I seem to meet a lot of corporate exiles, for some reason. Perhaps it’s because I’m a bit of one myself, or maybe I just attract iconoclasts and non-conformists. Mark was a nice guy, full of energy and generosity. It’s a reward in itself, meeting people who have that kind of insatiable joie de vivre. That’s French, by the way.
After swilling a few pints of Pabst with those boys, I headed home for the night. Alas, I had to stop one more time to secure at least one good beer before going to bed. This is Portland, after all, home of some of the best beer in the world. It simply wouldn’t do to ignore them all. Here I struck up a conversation with a German engineer who was in the States helping to set up wind generators. He complimented me on being “well informed” because I knew a little about European wind energy policies. It doesn’t take much to stand out from the crowd, I guess.
When we got to the inevitable political conversation, he expressed some confusion about how Bush continued to be president, and had avoided impeachment by apparently cuckolding much of the populace. I told him I hoped he wouldn’t take it the wrong way, but I thought that he, as a German, might understand better than many. He got a pained look on his face, and muttered something about that being different. Not really that different, in my mind. Manipulation through fear and propaganda is the oldest story in the book.
Anyway, I mention all this not to detail my night of revelry, but because it reminded me of all those other memorable times I met interesting strangers in bars and the like. There was John, the American ex-pat I met in Zipolite, Mexico, who made a living smuggling LSD and selling it in Mexico City. Or Abraham, the ex-drug dealer in Puerto Barrios, Guatemala, who’d been deported from his home in Texas for selling cocaine, and turned to hustling boat trips to Belize and hookers for tourists. He only supplied me with the former, I swear.
And there have been many others, some of whom probably never sold drugs. I guess I’m lucky in that people seem to open up to me easily, and spill their guts with little or no inducement. In the midst of this consensual hallucination we call modern civilization, it’s so easy to get distracted, to delude one’s self that all those twinkly, shiny things out there have some kind of inherent value. For me, there’s nothing like a getting buzzed with some interesting strangers to bring me back to Earth. Bless ‘em all.