Oh, THAT'S Why I Drank So Much Back Then

As mentioned in the previous post, yesterday was Kathleen’s birthday.
To celebrate, she invited her friends join her at a bar/restaurant, starting at Happy Hour.
I stopped by on the way home from work and stayed for quite some time. Long enough for the temperature to drop sufficiently for those of us still there to move inside from the patio.
While I was there I came to understand why it was that I drank so much when I used to hang out in bars: I needed to be drunk in order to be able to stand being in a bar.
(Well, being a total lush probably had something to do with it as well.)
The place was packed. I shudder to think of what it would be like in there on a weekend.
Eventually my crowd phobia – which bothered me much more than just being in a bar did – drove my discomfort level up, and so I bid my farewells and left.
Among the people really crowding us in were a huge, obnoxious, middle-aged eternal frat boy and a couple of chicks who, along with their boyfriends/guys who were humoring them because they wanted to fuck said chicks, were playing some game that they referred to as “Snaps.”
(I know this because every time they started a new round one of them would say, “The game is Snaps.”)
From what I could glean, the game seemed vaguely akin to Charades, but in execution had more in common with an old Saturday Night Live fake ad for a game called “Mmmm!”
The way the game of “Mmmm!” was played involved teams of two, one of whom had a card with the answer which the other had to guess. The guesser would just shout out random guesses to which the one with the answer would respond “Mmmm!” indicating the “hotness” or “coldness” of the guess via inflection.
So, yeah, bars. Without booze, not so much in the way of entertaining.
Not much in the way of entertainment value at work today either. A very long, excruciatingly slow day.
(To be fair, I did have a pretty good time for the most part, the food was good, and I was glad that Kathleen had a good birthday.)
But at least I made it to the weekend, and all the fun and excitement that promises.
What’s that? Oh, it didn’t promise any fun and excitement? Oh well.