Monday, December 3, 2007

Just Another Night at the Bar


American and Europe are different in many ways. One of those ways, is that in Europe it is much easier to find an internet cafe than it is in small town U.S.A. Granted this may be because most of my time was spent in Europe's metropolises but irregardless, it can be a drag getting access to the internet when you do not have a computer of your own.

Anyway although this absence is much shorter than previous ones, I apologize nonetheless. I have been wanting to write for past two days. What happened two days (actually, nights) ago, you might ask? Well it just so happens that me, Archibald Aurelius Samuelson the XLIII, was involved in my first ever bar fight.

Although I was in a bar I was not there to drink. In fact I was just there to eat free pretzels and watch a basketball game on the television. I am not really a basketball fan, but from time to time I like to attempt to tap into the zeitgiest of sports fans. It is a world I do not really understand, but one which seems to have such an astronaumical hold on so many others. Plus the town I was in is about as quiet as they come, so it was either that or another night of E.M. Forrester's company.

The game itself was actually quite exciting. The hometown team seemed to dominate for nearly the entirety of the game. Their star player, was phenomenal drifting from one end of the court to the other like a gazelle, occasionally pulling up to throw the ball in the basket. It was fascinating watching him out there, seemingly in complete control of the game. But things went awry in the final 30 seconds and around the 10 second mark the star player threw a savage elbow into the head of a player on the other team. The court turned to bedlam, as did the bar, and the player was ejected.

This set one of the bar's patrons into a particular fury. He went on an on about how the "refs were always stickin' it to us," knocking over his drink and a bowl of pretzels in the mean time. For some unbeknownst reason I saw this as a time to speak up, pointing out that this was not in fact a case of the referrees "sticking it to" him or his team, and in fact the star player deserved to be thrownout of the game for his violent action. Unsurprisingly this was not what he wanted to hear.

He immediately shot from the stool he was attempting to sit on and started thrashing out at me, with both hands. I am not by natured a fighter, so all I did was put my hands up and cover my face. It was a passive plan of action, but I feel it probably saved my face from a few punches. Eventually others in the bar attempted to pull him off of me, but just as it appeared the nights hostilies were over, he broke loose of their grasp and ran at me, screaming the most confusing of phrases.

"Taste my fuck!"

His last punch was a true wallop, for the next thing I knew it was five minutes later, and I was in the bars back room with the beautiful bartender (Sandy, I believe her name was), with a bag of frozen peas pressed against the entire right side of my face. I asked what had happened, and she answered as plainly as I could have hoped for at that time.

"You just got knocked out."

-AASXLIII

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