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Notes -
Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action. Four times? That is something worse, because it means you are no longer the victim of enemy action, you are the enemy.
Which is how I found myself back at the gay bar, Thursday afternoon, for the fourth time.
The precipitating event was that my great-aunt and uncle had kicked me out of their house. Not maliciously, just because they were headed off to a doctor's reunion and I was surplus to requirements. I got back to Small Scottish City early in the day, contemplated going home, realized that if I did I would immediately fall asleep, and decided that the most energy-efficient adaptation was to go to the pub instead.
After all, interesting things happen to me at pubs. Or near me. Or in the general vicinity of my alcohol intake. The strongest argument I have ever encountered for alcoholism is not “you will get drunk” but “your life will suddenly become narratively compelling.”
At first this seemed like a mistake. The pub was almost empty, populated only by open-minded pensioners and their dogs. I sighed, resigned myself to wasting an afternoon, and nursed my drink. Then a clearly homeless man approached me and asked me out for a cup of coffee. I declined as politely as possible, partly because I am a nice person, partly because he might own a hatchet. He left without making a scene. I congratulated myself on my social skills, only to realize that the bartender and another man were looking at me like I had just wandered into the lion enclosure at the zoo.
“Did you notice me gesturing for you to turn him down?” the man asked. I had not, but I did have enough sense to avoid dates with the local homeless population.
This led to conversation, which was my true reason for being there in the first place. He bought me shots. He established, through delicate diplomacy, that neither of us were gay. We achieved male platonic bonding, greatly expedited by enthusiastic consumption of many a pint.
My new friend turned out to be a powerlifter, the sort of man who looked like his caloric intake could power a small town. Once professional, now semi-retired, due to a catastrophic equipment failure that had peeled muscle off his shoulder like wallpaper. A dramatic backstory, but not the point of the evening.
Because then she arrived.
She was small, Scottish, and shook my hand like she was trying to break rocks. When I commented, she doubled down and attempted to break my wrist. She did not succeed, but she earned points for enthusiasm.
This somehow segued into my powerlifter friend demonstrating a painful finger manipulation “trick.” He insisted it was unbearably painful and irresistibly attractive to women. I remained stoic, both because I am stoic, and because one cannot weep in front of cute girls.
She was not just cute. She was feral. My friend introduced her as autistic, with the weary tone of someone disclaiming liability for whatever happened next. This was misleading. She should have been introduced as “raised by wolves” and “possessing an oral fixation.” My friend reported that she occasionally bit him, entirely unprompted. I watched him roll up his sleeves to reveal a fading bruise. I must confess that I was not entirely unamused.
She was also a programmer. She told me her favorite language was Pascal. I told her mine was Python. She seemed satisfied. She told me she owned a Quest 3 and spent time in VR Chat. I confessed I had briefly tried VR Chat on a Quest 2 and given up after five minutes of confusion. She seemed even more satisfied.
Her energy was relentless. She taught me nursery games that appeared to consist of throwing gang signs. She complimented my boots. I told her they were from Primark for twenty quid. She remained impressed. She said she had grown up with horses.
Then, apropos of nothing, she performed her pièce de résistance: unhooking her bra under her hoodie, for the sole purpose of producing armpit farts. I did not know how to classify this. It was certainly flirting, as her friend pointed out. She denied it, then resumed flirting.
By this point we had wandered into open-mic night. The bartender and my powerlifter friend both warned her to control her “enthusiasm.” I knew disaster was imminent.
The poetry was… adequate. Some of it was even good. I applauded. I considered performing Howl. Then she growled.
This was not a figurative growl. This was not a playful growl. This was a sound that promised a future career in death metal. The poet on stage nearly fainted. She was shushed. She promised to behave. She growled again thirty seconds later. She was warned again.
Eventually she was ejected. The bartender dragged her outside, delivered a scolding, and sent her away in tears. She stumbled off into the rougher part of town. Nobody else seemed to care. I sighed, followed, and caught up.
She told me she was fine. I asked if she wanted a cab. She declined. At this point, a man materialized. He was impossibly tall, impossibly thin, with glasses that could be used for astronomical observation. He stared at my boots with the intensity of a man hypnotized. He stammered that she did not need my help. She looked away. I left her with him.
Back at the bar, I learned he was her boyfriend. I asked where he had been during her performance. The consensus was that he had been hiding in a corner, avoiding human contact. They probably deserve each other.
I had another drink, made more friends, and went home when I realized I was past inebriated and into alcohol poisoning territory. The next day I was still drunk, and the day after that I'm. still hungover. Interesting things happen at pubs. This particular story also involves the powerlifter, going to a particular raucous club, a very fetching leather jacket, too much booze, and meeting two single moms, one sensible and the other not. I will, probably, write about it when I'm fully sober.
(The first girl? She'd taken my number at some point during that long night, I'm in touch, we'll see how this goes. I know that is a bad idea, but I like to live dangerously.)
Pascal is an odd choice of favorite language. That alone should've tipped you off that you were dealing with a crazy girl. Also... Python? That's the most basic bitch language choice I can imagine, next you're going to tell me that about your great love of pumpkin spice and Ugg boots.
(great post btw, you certainly succeeded at having an entertaining day)
The original draft of my story explicitly called out my basic bitch taste. I removed it because I (correctly) excpected all the professional programmers here to call me out on it, it's what we in the writing business call a hook, heh.
Look, the design of Python is very human, and in a good way. It's not verbose, does a lot of heavy lifting for you, and there are no end of handy libraries. I never needed near bare-metal performance or felt the desire to do my own garbage cleanup.
I’d say the good thing about python is it lets you do just about anything. Any attributes of an objects can be called at any time, you can pass anything into any function, etc.
The bad thing about Python is of course that it lets you do just about anything.
I know just enough Lambda calculus to grokk that programmers/computer scientists think it is normal to treat functions as first class citizens and pass them in and out of each other like a human centipede. Either way, I have libertarian tendencies and I appreciate the opportunity to shoot my head off with a gun.
(I genuinely like Python, and it certainly beats Javascript, which is what I was taught in school)
May I introduce you to the lovely world of C++?
Although Undefined Behavior might better be described as a large caliber chaingun firing explosive rounds…
UB is bad enough that some people built an entire language (Rust) specifically to make it almost impossible. Sure, it has the learning curve of a cliff. Sure, the language stands in the way of doing almost anything ELSE you want to do, unless you do it in the one roundabout clunky way that the language designers permit. But the True Believers like shouting from the rooftops about how this is a Good Thing, Actually.
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Nah. If UB always fired explosives it wouldn't be nearly as bad. What's diabolical is that UB is allowed to be a squirt gun on your test system and then switch to rapid-fire explosives as soon as one of your users installs a minor OS patch.
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