Another night at the bar.

All the bars in the city went smoke-free on January 1st, even though the ban had already been slated for July. So, not only do smokers have to adjust to the ban, but they also have to jump right into smoking outside in the freezing cold without any smoking outside in nice weather and then fall weather and then finally mild snow to ease them into it.

Anyhow, on Friday night I went out with a few friends who all chain smoke over beer, and they were all tense like no other. Someone pulled out a pad at some point to write out a palindrome for us -- "Nurse, I see gypsies, run!", which we realized must actually be, "Nurse, I *spy* gypsies, run!" -- and then somehow we all decided to improvise pictionary to take their minds off of smoking. Since they were the tense ones and competition brings out the worst in me, I ended up being the guy to think up the words and write them on little slips of paper and put them in my knit cap and shake it up and let them pick it out. I could have been a dick and written up words like 'task' and 'azalea', but I decided to be nice and do things like 'hatbox' and 'foam'. By the end of the night, when I was two whiskeys in, I was forgetting the words I had written and could have joined in the playing if I had wanted, with no handicap necessary. If I remember correctly, that was round the time they were drawing 'midget' and 'salmon', though some time after 'yeti'.

At one point, too, we discussed how your cats eat you if you're dead, and a lot of times when they open up an old person's house who'd died from a heart attack, they find the person chewed up by their kitten or what have you. "What I don't get," my friend was like, "Is it because they're hungry, or are they waiting?"

Later on towards right before we left, my one friend's Belgian friend who works with maps was telling us about this one small department that's tucked into the U.S. Geography and Survey Department or whatever the fuck that one department of the federal government is called, and how its main function in history was to make sure there weren't two names of one town in a given state -- if there were two Bloomingtons, for example, one was forced to change its name to "Bloomington Heights" -- but now it mainly keeps track of records of places that have had their names changed in case people need to trace a name through time and they can't find it on current maps. When I then asked him why people would change the names of places, he was like, "Because they're offensive."

"Like what?", I was like.

"'N*gg*r Butte'," he said, dryly.