Primates, no more nor less than other animals, live as social beings. Our brother and sister primates ritually groom, snarl, fight and seek sex in the jungles. We humans seem to have devised the bar for much these same purposes. Primates have rites of passage too; time and place where childish things are put aside and the serious work of survival of the fittest begun. My friend Bruce Thomas lists the essentials as: feed, fuck, fight, flight.

Bartenders are not supposed to serve those under twenty one years, thus defining, unrealistically to be sure, that as the age of survivalism. Long before I was accepted into bars I longed for them and fantasized about the possible outcomes. The years of longing and fantasizing surely hardwired enough synapses that to this day I fill with pleasant expectations upon entering a bar, new or familiar. To the best of my memory my bar survival skills have never been tested beyond the first F, yet there’s always a thrill, a catching of the breath when I go into any bar at all.

“’Twas a woman who drove me to drink and I never had the courtesy to thank her for it.” W.C. Fields