Cantley's, Carnegie

After and excruciatingly long day at work, I made my way to this local establishment to simply calm my nerves. However, halfway through that first glorious beer, while my songs were playing on the jukebox and I was talking with a man to my left, a group of three women on my right (all regulars) couldn't stop talking.

Their conversation lurched and gyrated into and out of my notice, much the way an AM radio broadcast explodes, squeals, and vanishes in a thunderstorm. Except that it was growing, in volume and hostility, becoming a haphazard and omnidirectional lightning-strike of complaint, beginning with the insipid transgressions of people who can’t park, and rising to a crescendo of hearsay and holy terror over other women having sex.

As the feeding frenzy reached a fever pitch, I suddenly became woozy—perhaps it was the blood trickling out of my ears. I had a horrible premonition that I was about to become the first documented case in medical history of a brain hemorrhage caused by the fearsome cacophony of three female orcas—she-beasts by any standard, with white, slimy underbellies, leather lungs, and a lust for the blood of fornicators. Like some desperate Greek hero, I fled from these Furies, and narrowly escaped with my life and wits.

The moral of this story: becareful coming in here. If such steroidal lemmings do not carry you into the sea with them, they may still trap you in a wasteland fit only for such misbegotten mutants as deserve to have their reproductive rights revoked.