Two very young women just walked into the bar. Hard to tell what they do. Are they strippers? Are they students? Neither? Both? Can’t tell yet. More drinks are required to puzzle this out.

The couple shooting pool are, while clearly in love, equally clearly starting to wear on each other a bit. Most people these days might be kind of quick to pull the plug on something like that, but I have a feeling about these two. Young as they are, they look like they have their heads right.

Relationships are hard work, man. They – or at least she, arguably more important – seem to know this, and seem to know where their pressure valves are.

I hope I’m right. I’ve been wrong about this kind of thing before – if you want to know the best thing for your relationship, ask me what I think you should do and go the opposite way – but again, I have a good feeling about these two. I like their odds. Also, they have an awesome dog. His name is Mike, same as me. We bonded. I’m biased.

I still don’t know about these other two girls, though. They’re doing tequila shots, and tapping their glasses on the bar first the way Industry people do out here, so they might be bartenders at a particularly misogynistic establishment nearby. Or they could be strippers, pre-medicating before facing the certain and terrible stream of balding middle-aged lechers and entitled white college students. Christ, if that’s what I did for a living, I’d be shooting heroin, not drinking. Of course, as often as not such workers are putting themselves through school, or working toward something that requires either brains or ambition or both, so I guess that rules out heroin. At least long-term.

Pity, though. I often think that’s the only way to keep what’s left of your soul, working at a strip joint. Not that conventional workplaces are all that different. Less honest about it, maybe. But don’t let me paint this picture with a rose-colored brush: I would far rather the prostitution of indulging the brain-dead suggestions of a technology manager with the mind of a grapefruit than try to convince a sweaty, self-indulgent, sex-blind father of three that I relish his company, enjoy his jokes, and don’t cling to the image of stabbing him in the neck with a metal barstraw and watch the diluted, poisoned slurry of his lifeblood pour into a pitcher (replacing carpets costs money, after all, and it would only be fair that I should be responsible for cleaning the mess if I created it) every time he speaks to me with his scotch-scented breath.

They buy themselves another round with only a perfunctory amount of appeal to the bartender; they can see that on some level he’s one of them. Even so, the minimum amount of effort necessary to pretend that they don’t want to not only stab people in their necks with siphons but actually level whole swaths of the city was more than they cared to keep up when on duty. I still don’t know what they do, but do I ever weep for what their hours must be like on this planet.

Old white woman music is playing on the jukebox. Not Karen music, but close. I think the couple behind me, shooting pool, were the culprits, like the way three people who like hip-hop, country, and yacht rock can all come together on ‘Girl of Ipanema’.

It’s a pretty good afternoon, for a Sunday.