I'm laboring under a tremendous deadline this week. I have to produce *all* of the Web content for a client for February *before* February. So I have to finish about three times the number of articles, blogs, and press releases for them as usual. To turn the pressure into fun, I decided to try to not only make the deadline -- I *never* miss deadlines, and haven't in over 35 years as a professional writer and developer -- but to find some way to turn it into FUN. So I decided to finish early.
I'm well on my way. Counting the number of pieces I have to write before Friday, I have to write six 600-to-800-word blurbs for them every day. Today I wrote nine. A good start, as they say, and as intended, it turned my day into FUN, rather than a chore. So I went out to celebrate. And so I find myself sitting here in a new bar for me in Leiden. It's more upscale than many of the places I usually hang out, downright Dutch 1% to be honest. Probably as a result, it took me less than a minute of scanning the room after I sat down at my corner table to figure out what kind of a bar this was. It's a Predator Bar. Be warned. The following is a cafe story that may not be in the *least* spiritual, that only Michael may like, and that may have no redeeming qualities. When many of you who saw the Subject line heard the term "Predator Bar," you probably had ideas form in your heads about what that term "meant." Some of you probably thought of the hookup/swinger scene, and envisioned hordes of predatory guys looking for love or whatever would pass for it for only one night. The women are their prey. Or, if you're a gal who frequented such establishments, just looking for nothing more than a one-night stand yourself, you might have thought of hordes of horny women looking the proverbial "a hard man is good to find." :-) But that's not quite what I had in mind when I used the term "Predator Bar." That term I made up when I was still living in Santa Fe but commuting several days a week to my consulting gig near Detroit. During this phase of the gig, I didn't actually live in Detroit but in a way upscale suburb called Birmingham. Its residents were pretty much auto executives and their trophy wives. It wasn't exactly my kinda place, but it was occasionally entertaining. This particular night, out for a night of entertainment with two of my co-consultants on the assignment, I allowed them to drag me with them to a bar there in Birmingham. These guys were far more talented than I was as programmers, but I rocked at tech writing and training, so I was part of their team. Anyway, they were both in their thirties, making screamingly good money, full of hubris and ego and above all testosterone, and hot to trot. I was in my fifties, making as much money but with my testosterone levels somewhat brought into balance by the passage of time. I had gotten over being "horny without an object" some years back. Nowadays it really took the physical presence of an attractive (and real) woman to get my yang up and get me thinking about what it would be like to fuck her. These guys were younger, and more testosterone-impaired; they would have fucked mud, and even imaginary mud. So we walk into this bar, and it's just *full* of attractive, dressed-to-the-nines women. *Seriously* attractive women. They're hanging out in small herds, but the herds are clearly not so exclusive that guys feel reluctant to walk up and hit on them. And there is hittin' on going down all around us. Pretty much every guy in the bar -- including me -- gets hit on several times during the evening. My coworkers *loved* this place. They just couldn't *wait* to go back. They kept raving for days about the attractiveness of the women, and how hot they were. They even spoke about going back there and "looking for a relationship," not just a one-night stand. I was flabbergasted. Speechless. It had taken me less than the minute after we walked in to nail this place as what it was, a Predator Bar. And the prey were the *guys*, not the gals. It was a no-brainer. Almost without exception, the guys in this bar were upscale, and made shitloads of money. Almost without exception, the "hot" women in this bar were not, and did not. They were there because they were from some...uh...lesser area of Detroit and they'd heard that rich men hung out in this bar. So they were there lookin' not for a one-night stand but for a husband. And it was not as if this was a lame strategy. From what I heard around town when in Birmingham, many of its current residents (the trophy wives) had met their future husbands at this bar. When I floated this idea of Predator Bar past my younger colleagues a few days later, they shook their heads and said, "No way." They insisted that at all times during the evening we had spent there, *they* were the ones in charge, and that the hot women were coming onto them for no other reason than that *they* looked pretty hot that night, too. So I asked them, "How much did each of you spend on drinks and bar food for the women coming onto you?" I had "inside information" on this, because I was sitting at the same table they were and noticed that neither of them actually went home with any of these women that night. They got lots of phone numbers, but no nookie. Sheepishly, one guy said, "About 60 bucks." The other said, "Closer to a hundred." Then I asked them to talk about their favorites, and to describe them. They would describe their hair, and (having dated a few hairdressers) I would ask them, "If you married this girl, how much do you think it would cost you to keep paying for her hair on a monthly basis?" They, used to $20 guy haircuts, guessed $40. The real cost would be more like $300 a month. It's not their fault, being so wrapped by these Predator Women...they were just guys, and young, and full of ego and testosterone. That made them easy prey. And if they had ended up finding the love of their life there at that bar (they didn't), it might just have turned out to be a happy marriage and all concerned might have lived happily ever after. They sure would have done better in that Birmingham bar than they would have done in L.A. There are any number of Predator Bars in L.A., too, but there none of the predators are really looking for True Love. I've heard many of the women who frequent them put what they're looking for into four words that are pretty chilling: "A prosperous *first* marriage." What does all of this have to do with spirituality? Nothing, many people would say. For me, it's all "spiritual" because it's about perception, and how perception affects that which we call "reality." For my coworkers, the bar we went to was like a Babe Buffet, full of attractive women who fawned over them *exactly* the way that they'd always dreamed they should be fawned over. For me, it was a classic Predator Bar, full of women who weren't likely to be what I was looking for because of what *they* were there looking for. Different strokes for different folks. If Buck had gone there, he might have seen it as a Quaker Meeting bar. If Card had gone there, he might have seen it as a Sanskrit Study bar. If Judy had gone there, she might have seen the bar as a roomful arguments just waiting for her to start them. :-) And all of these things might be true. But none of them is "truth," because no one is able to provide the objective point of view necessary to define "truth." So it really does come down to different strokes for different folks. IMO, of course.
