Sometimes the bar felt like the best place in the world, other nights it felt like the world itself. After one especially grueling day at the Times, I found the men in a circle at Uncle Charlie’s end of the bar. They had arranged cocktail garnishes in the shape of the solar system, a lemon as the sun, and they were moving the olive around the lemon, explaining to each other why New York gets dark before California, why seasons change, how many millennia we have before the whole thing falls apart. I stood behind them, letting their conversation orbit around me. What’s a black hole anyway? A thing that sucks up everything in its path. So it’s like my ex? Yeah only smaller. I’ll tell her you said that. A black hole’s like the Grand Canyon with extra gravy. Not gravy, dipshit—gravity. What’d I say? Think of it this way—the universe is held together with gravity, your ex is held together with gravy. Don’t use an olive for the earth, I hate olives. Whaddya got against olives? Pits—I don’t like food that fights me. Who the fuck ate Mars? Sorry, I see a cherry, I eat a cherry. How big is the fucking earth anyways? It’s twenty-five thousand miles around. That sounds almost walkable. You don’t even like to walk to the corner for the Daily News. You mean to say everyone in this joint is going sixty-seven thousand miles an hour right now? No wonder I feel so fucking dizzy.
Apparently, a bar is not the best place to discuss science (it´s very difficult to argue about science, in any case) , but alcohol can do anything. In the text, it´s all very well explained: black holes, the solar system, translation speed of the earth, which is higher in the winter, the earth´s diameter…
What an extraordinary thing is a bar with a good parish!! As the song goes:
With people to laugh and argue with
It doesn’t matter if it’s a bar or home”
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