IT’S LIKE LOOKING IN A MIRROR!

I have always wanted to be a bad-ass action hero, from the time I was about four, watching The Six-Million Dollar Man, up until about two days ago.

One of the great pleasures I get working at my bar is that about once every three or four months some drunk person whose vision is quite blurry tells me that I look like Matt Damon, which means all I really hear is that I am Jason Bourne.  I get so excited by this that I spend the rest of my day or night daydreaming about the collateral damage I would deliver to a thug assaulting a young mother or to a group of European terrorists who had taken over a skyscraper while holding 75 people hostage.  My fantasy only works if I try to push the truth aside, which is to say that if I actually witnessed a lady getting mugged I would more than likely turn to the 12 year old girl a few feet away and ask her, “WHAT THE FUCK SHOULD WE DO?!!!”.

I spend my shift anticipating the next person who will feed me my crack, licking my lips as each person approaches the bar to order a drink, and if within a few weeks no one has told me that I look like Matt Damon, I start to get antsy and irritable.

But it finally happened again a couple of days ago right at the end of my shift:  someone told me I looked exactly like Matt Damon.  I said (with a trembling voice), “You mean like in The Bourne Identity,” and she said, “No, I was thinking more like in that movie I just saw….it was called…oh, yeah, We Bought a Zoo.  He was so sweet and vulnerable in that movie.”

I quickly discarded the fact that Damon is about 40 pounds heavier and weeps throughout the entire movie, and then I drove home scanning the rearview mirror to see if anyone from Treadstone was tailing me.  When I got home I was so jazzed that I started practicing my Special Forces forward snap and roundhouse kicks in the living room at 2:30 a.m.  On about kick number twelve, I delivered a death blow to my living room lamp.  My dismayed wife came racing downstairs, found me standing over the debris and asked what had happened.

“I had no choice,” I told her.  ”it was holding three light bulbs hostage.”  I’m not sure because she was mumbling, but there was something about “marrying a jackass” before she turned and headed back upstairs.

My Broken Lamp (a.k.a Terrorist)

Since the lamp tragedy, I have decided to grow up and retire from my espionage fantasy life.  There is no place for lamp violence on this Earth.  The next time someone tells me I look like Matt Damon, I will simply thank them and then drive home and fantasize that I am a subdued zoo keeper tending to a motley family of neglected animals on my property.

Cheers, until next time.

TheRealBarman