Richard Armitage, difficult muse?

Last night, I was at the Best Bar on the Planet, and Chad was my bartender (he and Lisa broke up — I should ask them what they did with their Star Trek posters and who got X*nax kitty) and I was drinking some Oskar Blues Old Chub, and staring aimlessly at some MMA match on the screen (now that hockey and basketball are both over, the bartenders are struggling for stuff to watch — although the Best Bar on the Planet is not a sports bar).

I had just been musing over the bitter irony that what I had been calling The Gospel of Friendship According to Richard Armitage had come to include words from the Gospel According to Matthew. Note that the first post says, explicitly, “but I never thought he was Jesus, either.” Honestly, I could not make this stuff up if I wanted to. Talk about how life imitates art.

Chad was counting his till and said, “Hey, Serv, did you read your horoscope yet this week?”

The print version of the local weekly entertainment supplement runs my horoscope of choice, and the bartenders and I have this running joke where we read the horoscopes and they ask me the meaning of any words that they aren’t familiar with and I try to make jokes about the vocabulary. This is probably much funnier in person than it sounds when described. The guy who writes the horoscope makes a lot of high cultural references and every now and then there’s a word in French — and at this bar, which sells a lot of foreign beers, pronunciation and jokes about it are running gags. Sometimes I think they pick a foreign word out of the horoscope to test me to see if I can make a joke about it.

“No,” I said, “slipped my mind.”

“Well, mine’s great!” Chad said. Chad just finished his MBA and is looking for a full-time job in finance. He’s had a second interview at a local brokerage firm, but nothing’s firm yet. “And I understand the all the words,” he joked. Chad’s vocabulary’s certainly as good as mine.

“Here,” he said, “read yours,” and gave me the paper.

I opened it up and this is what I saw:

I was kind of speechless.

“I think I got all the words, too,” I said to Chad.

He looked at it, “Huh,” he said, “I hate that song. ‘nother round?”

“Sure,” I said, and in my imagination I slammed my head four times against the bar.

~ by Servetus on June 20, 2015.