Mile-High Malt

Bear with me while I quote too lengthily from Kurt Vonnegut's book, Timequake. I will put in some original stuff at the end, but if you are satisfied by the Vonnegut and wish to read no further after its completion, I understand.

"I myself paint pictures on sheets of acetate with black India ink. An artist half my age, Joe Petro III, who lives and works in Lexington, Kentucky, prints them by means of the silk-screen process. I paint a separate acetate sheet, again in opaque black, for each color I want Joe to use. I do not see my pictures, which I have painted in black alone, in color until Joe has printed them, one color at a time.
"I make negatives for his positives.
"There may be easier, quicker, and cheaper ways to create pictures. They might leave us more time for golf, and for making model airplanes and whacking off. We should look into that. Joe's studio looks like something out of the Middle Ages.

"I can't thank Joe enough for having me make negatives for his postives after the little radio in my head stopped receiving messages from wherever it is the bright ideas come from. Art is so absorbing.
"It is a sopper-upper.

""Listen: Only three weeks ago at this writing, on September 6th, 1996, Joe and I opened a show of twenty-six of our prints in the 1/1 Gallery in Denver, Colorado. A local microbrewery, Wynkoop, bottled a special beer for the occasion. The label was one of my self-portraits. The name of the beer was Kurt's Mile-High Malt."

And listen to this: My family and I were down town Denver on Christmas Eve of this year waiting to ride the Amtrak to Chicago, Illinois. We got to Union Station and checked our bags and took to the city on foot. The sixteenth-street mall was nearly empty. Its trees were lit up by twinkle lights, and rows of large bulbs hung between the buildings.

One side street was converted to an ice-skating rink.

Dad and I ducked into the Wynkoop brewery, kitty-corner from the station, to have a beer. I didn't know that their Kurt's Mile-High Malt was Kurt Vonnegut Jr's Mile-High Malt so I got a black ale. Dad got up to go to the bathroom, and while I was sitting at the bar by myself, a man sat at the stool next to me. I got nervous that he would start talking to me or hitting on me, thinking that I was there by myself. And then Dad would come back and it'd be all awkward. And how disastrous!

The man ordered Wynkoop's sour beer while I sat irrationally petrified. Dad has a penchant for taking dog years in the restroom.

I ended up having to chug my beer, non-inspired by a great American author of prose, in order to catch our train. It wasn't until sometime later that I realized I had full-on ignored someone, another human being, sitting alone at a bar on Christmas Eve.

Cheers to missed opportunities!