Went out for drinks last night with GWBoyfriend and Dr. Fun, and wound up staying for hours and shutting down the pub. Dr. Fun is a colleague of GWB's, a novelist as well as a scholar, and also pretty much what his name implies. I hadn't seen him for a few months, having just missed him each of the last few times I was in town. (First he was in Europe visiting the incorrupted body of Saint Somebody; then he was in the midwest visiting family; and then most recently in MEC, visiting his lovely girlfriend. Somewhere in the middle there he may have fallen into an open manhole and gotten lost for a few weeks--that's just the kind of thing that happens to Dr. F.)

This particular pub is right up the street from Atypical College, where GWB and Fun teach, and also just up the street from Fun's apartment; the two of them are regulars, and I'm not entirely sure that Fun doesn't actually keep a room in back as well. We shot the shit for a while with Horse the bartender and got some free samples of a new beer they have on tap, and in between the drinks we purchased for ourselves kept winding up getting free ones--first because Horse was glad to see us, then because Dr. Fun just proposed to his girlfriend, and then because, after about a goddamn hour, we succeeded in putting back together one of those wooden bar puzzles--a cube that breaks down into about eight oddly-shaped pieces that seem impossible to reassemble. I'm sure my engineer friends could have done it in five minutes, but goddamn!

(Horse told us that last week he'd dropped the puzzle in front of a group of three somewhat obnoxious ex-military guys who are also regulars, and that the moment he did, silence descended. When they finally came up for air two hours later and wanted to know why he'd given them that damn thing, he said, "Why? Because for two hours I haven't had to listen to your loudmouthed, Republican BULLSHIT, that's why!" Yeah. Smart man.)