So and So Walk Into a Bar…

that’s too well lit for contemplation.

D — sat in the corner of the bar, his fingers wrapped around the rocks glass, his face contemplative in the way he supposed fit weary travelers… or the popular image of the weary traveler. But he wasn’t alone at his table, the bar seemed too well lit for contemplation, and the weariness stemmed not from traveling but from work.

Was he still traveling? Did traveling count as work? If work is defined as products or services rendered for payment, then occasionally traveling became work. If work is defined as one’s life’s work, as in a work of art or pursuit of some higher mission, then traveling had always been work. It was work that was not work until it became work.

Does the joke still fly if this person, that person, and another person — all members of separate and identifiably different groups — start out sitting in a bar instead of walking into the establishment? How many variations of the joke exist?

The persons are of different races or ethnicities or nationalities, of different generations or occupations, of different religions or politics, of different genders, of different species, of different myths or legends or folklores. Of different fictions.

Maybe this was a fiction he’d been telling himself.

He had not bothered slapping on the cap and gown and parading himself across the stage for a hot second while the principal probably pronounced his name wrong.

Dash Ip might or might not have done the above while writing his novels.

In response to Zane Dickens’s weekly writing prompt: