Barhopping in the Metaverse

On a sweltering summer evening in Massachusetts, while my fellow teachers are busy making as little human contact as possible between semesters, I decide to venture into the nighttime, in search of new friends. Because this is America — run-ragged, pandemic-addled, work-hard-rest-hard, no-you-bring-it-to-me America — I insist on getting my barhopping fix from my office chair. Whatever the metaverse turns out to be about, I decide, it won’t be worth a flip if I can’t wander in there, find a decent lounge or nightclub or sports bar, and get just a shade lit with strangers.

Let history show I can slow-sip and bullshit with the best of barflies anywhere. My natural habitat, though, is a proper dive. Like the old P&H in Memphis, where the bathroom graffiti made you stare just a little too long on your trip to the urinals — longer still if you were buzzed, which you almost certainly were. “We’ve got these motherfuckers on the run,” Pac-Man exclaimed on one dirty white wall where Blinky, Inky, and Clyde hauled ass before him. The P&H’s flickering sign called the place a café, but it didn’t have a menu. On ripped red-pleather booths, beneath yellow beef-tallow lighting, you’d get pitchers of Pabst, and, on nights when the staff felt generous, baskets of stale popcorn that made you feel like you, too, could spend all night gobbling pellets.

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