Art saw a space open up at the bar next to a small man with a ponytail and he seized it. There were some fifty people either hovering about in line or around the bar proper, including this ponytailed man in his mid-20s of Art’s size. They all held little squares of paper or plastic in between their fingers and they waved them around whenever a bartender beheld them in vague periphery. He saw rising discontentment in those gathered around as they felt inebriation’s giddy fading back into sobriety. There was a growing consensus among those who just wanted a simple bottle of beer to formulate a pilsner posse and lynch everyone – man, woman, or child – ordering elaborate cocktails.
	“How you doing?” Art asked the small man, trying on the tradition of bar patron smalltalk.
	The small man coughed out his drink, a drooly vomit of Sex on the Beach that spills over the counter and onto his groin. “How am I doing? How am I doing? Heh, how the fuck do you think I’m doing with the ozone torn to shit, deranged paramilitary fascists running about, and the corporations making sure that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer? It is just beyond me how anyone can waste their lives having a good time when there are so many world issues to address.”
	“Fucking hell,” Art says. He wishes he had a krugerrand to dangle about and entice the bartenders.
	“Oh yeah, hell,” he says and accompanies the inferno with air quotes. “It just figures that I’d have to stand next to someone who actually believes in religion. I bet he voted for Romney – these red state hillbillies. You know, if it wasn’t for people like you there wouldn’t be all these genocides going on in Africa. Ever think about that, hmm? No, I thought not. All you ever think about are your sportsball games and how to disenfranchise hardworking immigrants.”
	Art picks the pockets of a half dozen drunks in his vicinity. His small fingers, made ultradextrous from years in his little Pontus arcade, wove into jean pockets, purses of every size from hand to tote, snatched origamied presidents right out of finger gaps. He has over six hundred dollars now and is willing to relinquish it all though the drinks were ostensibly free on Cucksfield’s tab. The small man notices the money and it enrages him.
	“Heh, material possessions. I knew I had you pegged. How much of that are you going to donate towards starting up a voter registration drive for underprivileged minorities? I thought so. Probably not even going to tip. Just going to save what you were going to spend and put it towards your next share of Haliburton stock, huh?”
	“If all this stuff bothers you so much why don’t you just go volunteer? Go overseas. Join some militia in one of those African countries and defend a village from raiders in 1980s American trucks and 1990s French fashion. 1970s Russian weaponry. 1960s politics. It could be a nice adventure. Perhaps you’d attract some Nubian goddess.”
	The small man scoffed. “That’s your answer to everything isn’t it? Just go kill them all, right? U-S-A, U-S-A, U-S-A. Laughable. Fighting is for neanderthals, moron. Once you stoop so low to their level as to fight back, you have already lost. Proper morality and enlightenment cannot come about wielding one of those obscene penisary-compensatory devices you morons are so obsessed with. No. I am far more useful to the cause of worldwide good right here and spreading the word through my teachings and my blog which, I’ll have you know, is up to a dozen subscribers by last count – men and women. There is no ill in this world that intellect, reasoned debate, and atheistic rationality cannot solve. One day, with my intelligence, I will become President of the United States and the world will enter into a new golden age. All bombs will be dismantled and the army disbanded. Tanks melted down to build centers for affordable early childhood care. Every penisary-compensatory device repurposed into stunning works of modern art to represent the mind’s triumph over the evil, bloodthirsty heart. We shall raid the Vatican for the funds to supply computer tablets to inner city schoolchildren so that they may become the new Einsteins. We shall recruit scientists, educators, doctors, philosophers, interpretive dancers, writers, and musicians and form a new army dedicated to undoing the sins of the past. We shall drop books and laboratory equipment into every village. A grand atom shall replace that gaudy Cristo Redentor. Ever heard of cancer? Your children won’t. Not after I’ve put a hundred trillion dollars into NASA.”
	Art sees that the bartenders have their backs to him as they busy themselves with fashioning a dozen mojitos for a squealing cadre of women in their fifties. They lean on each other to remain ambulant and form a mass of doctored hair, their daughters’ fashion, celebrity-grade nails. He hops over the bar and drinks, cigarette packs, and napkin containers clatter to the ground. He lands and swipes a trash bag into which he drops two bottles of whisky helpless and pliant like –
	“Oh yes you look to be a natural hand at that. Probably years of practice reaching in to your barbaric spawning pools of genetically modified fish to make a non-vegan meal. You make me sick. Do you know there are some species of fish as emotionally intelligent as your average non-Republican? Didn’t think so.”
	“Get out of my head!” Art says. He slinks under the folding slat with the haul clinking around in the way of –
	“Ah yes, emulating your ‘Christmas’ jinglebells are we? Such a gaudy term for the winter holiday. Did you know that Christmas was originally a pagan holiday where tribal religious officials would burn travelling scientists on pyres of books? No, you didn’t.”
	Art still has the pilfered money in hand and he spots a menacing figure with shaved head and teardrop tattoos fuming at the bartenders busying over embryonic mojitos with protractors and other precision instruments. Art taps him on a leathered shoulder and the man gives him a look of imminent death. “I’ll give you…six hundred and thirty-six dollars to beat the shit out of that guy right there,” Art says.
	“I don’t charge more than five for that kind of work.”
	“Oh, uh, okay,” Art says. He counts it out and tries to press five hundred dollars into the man’s hands.
	“I meant five dollars.”
	“That’s…surprisingly reasonable.” He fans through the wad of bills but cannot find a five. “Smallest I have here is a ten. Will that do?”
	The man produces a wallet emblazoned with the shield of St. George and gives Art a five dollar bill. “Here’s your change. That piece of shit right there, boss?” He jabs a rough finger right at Art’s man.
	Art nods and his flunky hefts up a barstool, strides over to the small man, and takes a batter’s position. “Oh, great. Someone with a shaved head. I bet you didn’t even donate what you cut to dyslexic Cambodian youth going through chemo. Of course you didn’t. Why, just looking at you – ” the henchman swings and the man’s head topples off his body with the trunk and all the rest still upright and standing at the bar. Everyone around gasped at the wondrous platter of mastercrafted mojitos now served up. Blood played ecstatically from the severed collection of decapitation’s devastations and a hellish geyser of it erupted out of the savage knot of mangled spine and sinew accompanied by lesser springs gushing in half-flaccidity but what did nevertheless conspire with the main arterial current to perform elaborate stunts of choreography – a worldclass spectacle of many dozens doing a splendid can-can replete with jointed legs in a crimson kickline. “Wow. Barroom violence. How cliché. Do you know how many universities, libraries, and bookstores are located around here in just a ten mile radius? Of course not. The illiterate cannot even read let alone know where to pick up the latest groundbreaking text by Žižek. So much knowledge and enlightenment readily available and you choose to go and do something as regrettable as attempted murder. Do you even have a degree?”