Day drinking

OPINION

They sat under a tent in a parking lot, at a folddown table, with a nerdy weak sun slanting in from the west-southwest. A couple of hours of daylight were left, and it was a little raw, an intimation of impending Arkansas winter, but in their jackets and caps they could just about stand it.

Two of the three men had known each other for more than 40 years, so the third sat with his beer in a plastic cup and the gaiter that served him as a mask pulled down around his neck and listened to them as they talked about another friend of theirs, who hadn’t been invited because he’d lately been acting like a word that, though a kid could say it as often as he wanted in a PG-13 movie, you can’t print in a general interest newspaper unless you use it as a verb or modify it with the word “pin.”

Maybe you could get away with the adverbial form, which is more accurately descriptive than the vulgar slang connotation of the root word. What the man had been lately was prickly, overly keen to take offense when someone told him to stop acting childishly on the Internet. So he had defriended his two friends on social media platforms, though he curiously remained Facebook friends with the third man, whom he did not know outside a cyber-context.

In real life he remained involved with his friends, though he had temporarily exhausted their patience and had not been invited to have a beer with them on a chilly and breezy weekday afternoon, even though he probably had nothing else to do.

He’s really an interesting guy, one of the defriended real-life friends says. He knows everything about baseball and movies and music, and he’s a lot of fun to talk to on those subjects. Sure, every once in a while he has to slip in some snide comment about politics, but he won’t take it too far. But when he gets behind that screen …

He feels impervious, the third man thinks.

He has seen this. People who are perfectly polite and even kind if they encounter you in person will write all sorts of nasty, rude things in an email. A portion of that might be due to simple physical cowardice and the fact that people cannot generally pop you in the face over the Internet, but it probably has more to do with the facelessness of the intended target. The virtual world is just that, virtual, which means it is not quite the world.

Which can be good, because the real world is not always an ice cream social. Vulnerable people can use the Internet as a kind of shield; it allows everybody a protective layer of insulation. Our devices allow us to experience — or almost experience — things we might never have occasion to experience in real life.

It allows us to press our faces up against the glass of thousands of windows all over the world while never leaving our kitchen table. Or our mother’s basement. We can reach out electronically and connect with people who share our interests; we can communicate with people who have very different ideas than ourselves. Some find love through the Internet. Some find community.

But like most wonderful things, it can be overdone. It can also encourage us to think of the world as a matrix of pixels, fluid and sparkly and ultimately of little consequence. Some of us learn to prefer screens, because they offer a frame for a world that’s not nearly so confusing and irrational as the world of people who have to go out in it and deal with it hand-to-hand.

Staring at screens encourages a certain solipsism, especially among lonely people driven even deeper into their own heads by a pandemic that, if we tap around on a screen for a few moments, we might find cause to deem dubious.

So, the third man reasons, maybe it is not such a bad idea to get out in the world now and then, to have a socially distant beer with interesting, thoughtful people who are mindful of other people’s anxiety.

Life, somebody says, is really an assumption of risk. We always have to weigh the possible consequences of our actions, even though we can’t always know them. We adopt best practices not necessarily because we want to save ourselves — though we do — but because we don’t want to be irresponsible. We don’t want to contribute to someone else’s suffering, or their discomfort.

Unless we’re one of those words that kids can say in PG-13 movies.

Unless we’ve become inured to other people’s problems, unless we’ve been conditioned to disbelieve in other people. Which is one of the things that might happen to a person who filters everything through a screen, through a channel curated to make himself feel especially special about himself. Then maybe you really don’t care, do you?

But he really does have a great record collection, one of the friends says.

He was smart, the other says. Back in the day he bought two copies of a lot of albums, one to play and one to put away. He’s never taken the shrink wrap off a lot of them. They’re probably worth a lot.

You’re probably the only other person who’s ever actually seen his record collection.

Yeah, maybe. Well, you know we probably shouldn’t talk about him, seeing how he’s not here to defend himself.

Yeah, you’re probably right. And they sat there, not talking about their absent friend who had defriended them but was, in real life, still their friend, though it might be a while before they’d have him over for pizza or to watch a movie, and thinking about how it wasn’t so bad after all. They’d all get the vaccine as soon as they could. Maybe by spring things might be moving toward normal again. There might be baseball next summer.

It was a lot colder in other places. Colder in Minnesota. Colder in Chicago. Colder in London. At least in Arkansas it wasn’t too cold to sit outside and drink a beer.

“When I was 35 years old I had a boss give me some advice once,” one of the friends says. “He said, ‘Son, every time you move, make it somewhere further South.’”