A GUY ON ACID TRIES TO PICK UP A WOMAN AT A BAR

Hey, how’s it going? Mind if I sidle up? I saw you over here sitting alone and I started crying. In a way, we’re all alone, but to be alone at a bar, at a place specifically designed to meet other humans—and what are humans? We’re all just carbon-based light refractions anyway—was particularly unnerving. Do you want a piece of gum? I have four left.

Are you waiting for someone? It’s always so awkward to approach a person at a bar and then find out they’re waiting for someone else. I was waiting for someone tonight as well, but she never showed. It was my mother, who died in a car accident when I was seven.

She’s not really dead. I just lied to you because I’m in denial because she actually is dead. It’s like when the baby panda is torn away from its mother by a scientist. But I’m the baby panda and my mother is the mother panda and the scientist is my mother’s faulty brake pads. Have you ever watched baseball? Do you know how to make fire? I would die in the wild! Do you want some gum? There’s still three pieces left.

So, do you want to go out with me? Just kidding, we’re already here. We’re out. What is out? We’re all carbon based! Do you want to have sex with me is what I really meant to ask you. Do you? I mean, not here of course, it would be gauche and my mother could walk in at any moment, but we could go back to my apartment, which smells because I rarely flush the toilet because I think I’m conserving water. But I flushed it before I came here in anticipation of meeting someone like you who would be disgusted by something like that. There’s only two pieces of gum left! Time is running out on this gum! We’ll all be dead in a hundred years!

What are you drinking? It’s so weird how people drink alcohol at these places so that they can talk to each other. Alcohol is poison, you know. It’s all poison, made from rotting fruits and vegetables. Isn’t that so weird? And then we get in our cars and drive home! What a great idea: Hey, let me sit inside this glass-and-metal death cage and drive it sixty miles an hour in the dark! It’s not like I have a son who needs me!

You have really beautiful eyes, by the way. The way the light in your stroma scatters across your ocular fluid creating a bluish-green color is attractive to me for some reason. I also like your body. Your cleavage excites me on a carnal, albeit unsustainable, level and the fact that you’re revealing your legs in that short skirt makes me feel like you’re eager to have sex with someone, which I also am. Even though I know you’re mostly carbon based and that we share most of the same chemical compounds and we’re all just light refractions through space, I still want to have sex with you. And even though I know you’re almost genetically identical to the woman at the far end of the bar with the slight overbite, I still want to have sex with you a lot more than I want to have sex with her.

What’s that? Your boyfriend just showed up? Oh yes, I can see why you’d prefer to date him. He is better looking than me. I’m ashamed of my physical body. I have a weird-looking sternum, but his looks more desirable. Does he make fire? Would he like my final piece of gum?

Ah yes! The sensation my face feels from you throwing your beer all over it is simply exhilarating! Thank you for enlivening my nervous system at this late hour.

Ow! Thank you, sir, for punching me in the face to defend your girlfriend from my frantic advances. The blood is now rushing to my face in a desperate attempt to stave off the pain and my prefrontal cortex is making a mental note to avoid carbon-based life-forms with your properly aligned sternum.

Okay, okay! I’m leaving!

If you see my mother, please tell her I’m in the bathroom wiping my face and nursing my wounds. And if the girl with the overbite appears to be leaving, tell her to wait a few minutes for me because I’d still be up for sex. Have a good night, which is just an arbitrary illusion created by the Earth blocking the sun.