== NEWSFLASH - NEWSFLASH - NEWSFLASH ==

I went to bar #1,000 last night.

I don't even know what that number means anymore - some of the bars have closed, I wonder if I've accidentally been to the same bar twice (maybe one I had been to before my project began, and then back to once and then another time, and wrote it down both times), and one of the bars I've been to has been re-opened under a new name by its Bosnian owner for tax evasion purposes (and I've been to it under each of its names).

I only planned to go to bar #997 and maybe bar #998 last night since my friend I was meeting from out of town is not much of a drinker and is in the middle of studying for her qualifying exams, but it turns out her girlfriend of almost 5 years had an affair, so we spent a lot of time talking about their relationship, and so went out for multiple drinks.

The bar we went to last was this gay leather daddy bar from the 1970s.  The bartender was this balding late 40s blonde guy in chaps with a goatee and serious fuzzy hair on his upper arms, but he was very very nice to have a woman in the bar, and he even went to open up the (unmarked) women's restroom for her (they keep it locked so men don't have sex in there?).

When I was talking with my friend, I noticed there was a DVD case of gay porn on a shelf, but the screens behind the bar were playing some sports game...

Then, later, my friend was like, "Did you see what's on the screens?", and it turns out that on a screen way over to the right out of my line of vision porn was playing, and there was porn playing on a screen that was behind her head, which I hadn't noticed.

From then on, whenever she shifted in the course of talking about her horrendous breakup, I couldn't help glancing up at the screen, which was full of muscled hairy older guys fucking.