i play one on tv

Hey, partner, the next drink’s on the house. If you don’t mind me saying so, friend, you look like you’re carrying a pretty heavy load. Anything you wanna talk about? Because let me tell you, as the owner and proprietor of a bar located directly across the street from an anger management clinic, I’ve heard it all, and everything told to me remains in complete confidence. I won’t breathe a word of it to anyone. For example, see that guy in the blue shirt playing pool? The first time he came in, he was all stressed out, kinda like you. He told me his court-appointed counselor couldn’t understand where he was coming from, so I lent him my ear for a while. Turns out he had been at the grocery store, stuck behind some old man trying to pay for a bag of Werther’s Originals with his library card when he just snapped. The manager came over to calm him down, so he yelled, “food fight!” and threw an unopened can of peas at a pregnant lady’s face. You wouldn’t trust just anyone with a story like that, which is why I never told a soul. Or the fella over there with the orange jacket. He got so mad about the quality of the magazines in his doctor’s office that he took out a Sharpie and wrote “fuck you” on a quarter and swallowed it right there in the waiting room, just to see the look on that doctor’s face after he pumped his stomach and read the quarter. That admission went directly into the ol’ safe, never again to fall on human ears. Of course, the angriest patron I ever had is right behind you pushing a broom, as I finally felt bad enough for him and gave him a job. See, he was once a promising actor, but he made a deal with the devil when he agreed to appear in a line of underwear ads. I tried to advise him to do summer Shakespeare instead, but he said he needed the money. Of course, he had to spend most of that money on a special custom mirror, since he was no longer able to look at himself in a regular one after the humiliation of having his face plastered all over the enormous bus ads reading “Gary’s: the Underwear For Guys With Super Small Wangs.” He had a lot of anger built up over that, but once he completes his treatments across the street, he should be able to interact socially with other humans again, sometimes without even having to wear a muzzle. Now, how about that drink? Hurry up and decide; I need to go into the back and scream into a towel for a couple of hours.