Pride Crawl

I was hanging out with a buddy last night at a place in Lancaster City called The Fridge. Basically, a beer and pizza joint where both the beer and pizza are a notch above. The beer and pizza are pricey but it is locally owned and I would rather support the proprietors and staff than some chain.

The building looks like a converted transmission shop though. Cinderblocks. It is close to Franklin and Marshall and gets its share of these upscale children of the 1%. No Natty Ice for these collegians. Some of them are probably wine drinkers.

Since the inside was packed and loud, I headed outside to the sidewalk seating to wait for my friend. It wound up being more challenging to get an inside seat at the wire-mesh table spanning the sidewalk in front of the establishment than I thought. There was only one entrance to the chairs and inside table and the route was packed with people like bullets in a clip. I had considered that they might be college students but it turned out that most of them were rude locals making fun of everyone passing by for one reason or another. I thought they might be college kids acting like rednecks but it turned out that they were actually rednecks.

One dude's plastic bottle pint of whiskey in a paper bag slipped out of his pocket and bounced off the pavement like a rubber ball. Word to the unlearned. Don't drink whiskey that comes in plastic. Wrong for so many reasons. Real lowbrow.   

The posse wanted to see me go over the table rather than under it. Being 6'8" the table was about waist high. I declined all night to take the challenge. The construction of the table didn't look quite sturdy enough for my 240 pounds and I didn't want to become the amusement for a crowd looking to engage in some mild mendacity, watching me collapse the 30 foot table like some cheap folding chair from Ollie's.

It made me think of when Jesus taught that we should always take the lesser place, assume the lesser position. Far wiser to be on the sidewalk of humility safe and sturdy on hands and knees rather than the flimsy table of ego and social assertion. So, I crawled in and out of my spot several times last night and made no apologies for doing so.