Dearest reader, as you know, I don’t really do holidays, but if you are the sort that does, I hope yours are going well.

I don’t know if you are also the sort that drinks regularly at the same bar, but I suspect you are.  I certainly am. And when you are such a person, you will eventually get to know your fellow drinkers at your chosen bar.

So there’s this guy who puts a decent dent in the local whiskey supply.  Bald, white goatee, mid-60s, retired desk jockey, divorced…normal enough guy.

So sometime around the beginning of the summer, back in May or June, we’re sitting there sipping our suds and pounding our fists on the bar and getting indignant about the General State of Things, and all of a sudden he says, “You know, I slept in a coffin.”

I suspect he said this as a segue from whatever we were talking about into something else he wanted to talk about, but the shock of incongruent weirdness from what he’d just said eclipsed everything that had been said before and I lost all sense of place in the conversation.  No idea what we’d been talking about.  Had he really said that?  Well, goood for him.  Maybe he lost a bet.  Or accepted a dare.  Maybe it was part of some immersion therapy to help him get over his fear of death.  Maybe it was just an item on his bucket list.  Hypotheses for what he had meant flooded my mind.  Before I could ask for clarification, my friend spoke again, destroying all of my ideas and complicating things significantly: “For years…I slept in a coffin.”

Holy shit, dear reader.  This is about the last thing I would expect this guy to ever say. Hell, I’ve known plenty of people who have slept in coffins either as a one off or as a lifestyle choice, but those people you’d totally expect to have slept in coffins. It would be weird if they hadn’t slept in a coffin.  But this guy? No way.

I was reminded of when, back in the day, the conversation started to get ordinary, I would inject something ridiculous, like, “One time I killed a bunch of people,” which would  usually get things going again.  But this was different…nobody really thought I’d killed a bunch of people.  There was not a doubt in my mind about this man’s veracity.

To make things even more disturbing, that was the exact last thing he said about it.  Half a year later and he has yet to mention it again.  Weird as hell.

Anyway, I should get back to it.

N.P.: “Black Betty – Edit” – Spiderbait