Brush with a Black Hole

I had a cosmic revelation at the Lounge last night right after last call. The think-a-hol was flowing freely because of this yahoo (see pic) from out of town who started buying drinks for everyone as soon as old Angus, our big-ass bartender who is the ghost of a dead Scottish poet (no not a famous one, a self-published one), bellowed for last call.

Anyway, I pulled out my state-of-the-art cell phone and secretly snapped a digital picture of this nonhuman stranger. Not all living creatures have arms and legs and a face. I photographed this annoying asswipe with the big pocketbook right after I heard him tell Angus that he was the entity responsible for turning a lot of people over to the dark side on Earth. Angus thought the stranger meant that he worked for the devil and that made the little shit laugh like hell.

He told Angus that he was an electrical creature that lived inside everyone at one time or another but that he felt most a home with the "Y" generation on planet Earth and he said that's why teens and twentysomethings there are so fascinated by the dark side of everything, why they wear so much black and "why they worship dark, cookie-cutter bad-asses on clones of sci-fi TV shows" (his words). He also said that's why no one could get a clear picture of him, too. He never stayed in one place long enough for much light to bounce off him into a camera lens.

That's when Angus spilled a drink on him and the little bastard left. On his way out I heard him mumble something about being late for a screenwriters' conference in Vegas. This was my first encounter with a living, breathing black hole and I hope I never run into another one.

The Dark Side of Thinking

One of the reasons Think-A-Holic Lounge has so few customers in the afternoon isn't because most people are at work during those hours. That might be a good reason anywhere else but the Lounge is not located in real time or real space.

No, the real reason this cosmic watering hole has only a handful of regulars in the afternoon is because of an anomaly that often occurs there and always without warning. It's a powerful vortex that tries to split struggling authors into two people, one of them a failure who gives up writing altogether because of abysmal book sales and the other a wide-eyed fool who continues to court and even suck up to the publishing gnomes of Bad Apple City who have been known to chew up new authors and spit them out without even tasting them.

I got caught in the vortex, myself, last night just before last call (see pic). As you can see, I was way over my limit of think-a-hol and deluded into believing that I was Michael Casher — the real McCoy — and not merely Jonco Bugos, his reflection and alter ego. Anyway, I got caught in this powerful vortex last night and, even though it nearly split me in two, it couldn't even begin to wipe the shit-eating grin off my face. Over the years I gradually became immune to its effects and, in fact, each time it tries to split me in two, it only squeezes another book out of me.