The Lounge closed early for the Thanksgiving holiday, shutting its doors at midnight last night. Even though Think-A-Holic Lounge has no actual position in the physical universe and cannot be pin-pointed in the space-time continuum, it respects all known holidays in this solar system.A large crowd had gathered around this particular customer (see pic) who had just blown in from the planet Saturn, which everyone knows is still the jewel of the solar system as well as a hotbed of publishing gossip and where most shakers still do their shaking. He was buying drinks for just about everyone and I mentioned to Angus, our big-ass bartender, that this was the real reason for this goofball's popularity.
"Wrong," Angus replied, looking a little starry-eyed himself.
"Oh?" I said, arching my eyebrows in the process. This was the big Scot's cue to embellish his theory out loud.
"Yessir, lad," Angus said, "when this jasper blew in from Saturn the scuttlebutt around here was that he was a writer who'd recently been published by a traditional publishing house on Earth."
"I see," I told him, totally unimpressed. I knew that only meant that this joker from Saturn either had an inside connection to the Great Publishing Wizards in Big Apple City or else he had penned his book after doing considerable market research and had written only what the market would bear, not what he had a mind to write.
"And that makes him just about as close to being a big star around here as you can get ," Angus added. "Hell, all the rest of us are either unpublished or self-published. POD people, you know, most of us." His starry-eyed gaze dimmed slightly as he remembered the real reason he was here at the Lounge. "Pour you another one?"
"No thanks," I said, tossing a couple singles on the bar. "I think I've had enough think-a-hol for one night."
Then I went outside where the air was decidedly cleaner and my mind clearer and began the long trek back home.
