Taking a break from all the Very Serious Posts which I should be writing, let\u2019s have a little bit of story time.<\/p>\n
Aradia and I are hosting some of my college friends right now, so we took them to our favorite bar in Kansas City, which also happens to be the best gay bar in town.\u00a0 It was also our first trip there since I got back from the summer, and we were delighted to find our favorite bartender working.\u00a0 He greeted us warmly, made our friends feel welcome, and made us the best drinks ever.\u00a0 It was glorious.<\/p>\n
But he was also holding his left arm at a funny angle, and it was clearly paining him.\u00a0 I asked what was wrong, and he made a lot of inarticulate noises and hand gestures (which I originally translated as, \u201cI was drunk at the time and I feel stupid\u201d) before finally explaining that he had taken the pain from the lovely lesbian with the broken arm sitting next to us.<\/p>\n
\u201cGive it to me,\u201d I said.\u00a0 \u201cI\u2019m a professional.\u201d\u00a0 (Perhaps a slight exaggeration.)<\/p>\n
\u201cNo,\u201d he said.\u00a0 \u201cI took it.\u00a0 It\u2019s my responsibility.\u201d<\/p>\n
I respected that, so I let it go.\u00a0 My friends were like, \u201cwhat?\u201d and I explained the principles to them.<\/p>\n
\u201cOh,\u201d my one friend says, very\u00a0 much to my surprise..\u00a0 \u201cI did that once.\u201d\u00a0 He goes on to tell me about how this one time he took half of his friend\u2019s migraine so that they could both study before a test.\u00a0 \u201cIf I hadn\u2019t done it myself,\u201d he said, \u201cI wouldn\u2019t believe it was possible.\u201d<\/p>\n
The evening progresses, and I come back to the bar to order the next round of drinks.\u00a0 My bartender is in so much pain that he actually shorts me my change.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy do we do this, again?\u201d he asks me.<\/p>\n
\u201cBecause we can,\u201d I say.<\/p>\n
As I work down on my third bourbon, though, the whole thing starts to weigh on me.\u00a0 He\u2019s nourishing the pain, taking it on as some sort of martyrdom, and it\u2019s making it so he can\u2019t work.\u00a0 I\u2019m reluctant to push the issue, but Aradia argues that it\u2019s just as idiotically macho to let him suffer as it is for him to insist on suffering, and that if I won\u2019t take the pain off of him, she\u2019ll do it.<\/p>\n
We all finish our drinks, and its time to go.\u00a0 Aradia and one of my friends go to the ladies\u2019 room, while my other friend and I go in search of the bartender to say goodbye and (again) offer to take the woman\u2019s pain from him, and to tip him a little more before we leave.\u00a0 He refuses both my offer and the tip, but then he gets all weird about it, twisting my friend\u2019s arm rather than taking the tip, and patting me on the heart with the wounded arm.<\/p>\n
While his hand is resting on my heart something goes off in the back of my brain, and I just breathe the pain into my lungs, and exhale it as fire into the air above us.<\/p>\n
He looks at me in shock and says, \u201cYou took it.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI did.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBut you know we have to give it back.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cNo, we don\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n
Aradia shows up and we finish our goodbyes with a little more drama and groping than usual, then leave the bar.<\/p>\n
My friend can no longer contain his enthusiasm: \u201cYou breathed it out as smoke.\u00a0 I saw you take the pain.\u00a0 I was watching really close because I wanted to see how you did it, and I saw you breathe it out as smoke!\u201d<\/p>\n
There is nothing like third party confirmation to make an evening perfect.<\/p>\n
I feel a little bad about it, now.\u00a0 He took the burden so seriously.\u00a0 But the whole martyr angle just grated on me, and the way he touched me with the wounded hand \u2026 it just seemed to be the thing to do a the time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Taking a break from all the Very Serious Posts which I should be writing, let\u2019s have a little bit of story time. Aradia and I are hosting some of my college friends right now, so we took them to our favorite bar in Kansas City, which also happens to be the best gay bar in … Read More<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[18,76,99,149,258],"class_list":["post-1114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-witchcraft","tag-aradia","tag-ethics","tag-healing","tag-magic","tag-stories"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8kUcm-hY","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1114","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1114"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1114\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}