When Risa and Eddie stood me up, I hopped an Uber to a dive bar that had been recommended to me. There I sat, black cloud over my head, pounding down cheap bourbons. It wasn't long before another customer and the bartender were discussing the Walking Dead. They mocked people who stopped watching because Negan is too gorey.
"Not me. I stopped watching because he bored me shitless," I said.
"He bores you?!" they exclaimed, and then I had to explain that endlessly mugging, monologuing, zero-dimensional cartoon characters do, in fact, kinda bore me.
The other customer's name is Lucy. She's a chain-smoking, red-haired barfly at what was quite correctly billed as a sticky-floored dive bar. We talked Walking Dead for a while, and then we somehow transitioned to transformational grammar. Turns out we're both geeks there, too, and she's got fistfuls of degrees as credentials. Not exactly expecting to meet such a person at this bar, I immediately went Full Dumb Guy.
"Gosh, she's pretty," I thought, right before laying way, way, way too many drunken compliments on her. She didn't seem to mind. She moved over to sit next to me, and the arm touches were coming about once every five minutes. I looked down; yep, I was wearing the Google fleece.
Ever since I started mentoring red-haired Darcy, however, I've had an aversion to redheads. It's like being attracted to someone who looks like your niece. It's not wrong, really, but once you notice it, it's hard to unnotice it. But I gamely soldiered on. Then she blurted out her age. She's the exact same age as Darcy.
"Yeah, that killed it," I said, waving at the bartender. "I'd like to cash out, please."