Mindful victories celebrated mindlessly.

by Alex Steed

Published November 06, 2008 @ 09:51AM PT

The bar scene on election night was, as I had predicted it would be, substantially epic.

I got there at somewhere between 11 and 11:30, and to be fair about this entire assessment, I had already enjoyed my fair share of local, "handcrafted" brews. I took a cab to a bar called Horse Head and finally settled upon talking with a young, hard-edged, waif-ish gutter-punk. Her eyebrows were shaved and in their place were dotted tattoos. We talked about the success of Proposition 8, and how she felt that gay marriage would have to be put on the ballot next year.

The bar was mostly inhabited by college students. The majority of them looked like clean-cut liberals, and they exploded every time Obama came on television and hooted and hollered and cheered. I stood in line next to two guys who had been a part of the larger, cheering collective. One of the two ended up getting irritable by the bartender's put-off response to his insistence on touching pint glasses until he found the ones he wanted to use, called her "a fucking bitch" under his breath, laughed to his bro, and drunkenly sauntered away with a look on his face that indicated an internalization of the delusion that perhaps the "bitch" had won the battle, but she sure wouldn't win the war. Apparently this "change" isn't going to go into full, transformative effect until Inauguration Day.

There were also a handful of anarchisty-looking 20-somethings, and one girl who wore a shirt that explained to those she stood before that she was, in fact, is what a feminist looks like. Nearly everyone was under the age of 25, or appeared that way, with the exception of the woman I shot the shit with (and would eventually be privy to some off-handed statement she made about her aging vagina - though was certainly not intended to be an advance in any way), and a man in a suit who would would eventually be escorted out by a bouncer for being a creepy-weirdo with some young ladies at the bar.

At one point, the liberal college-student screamers exclaimed, "Obama! Beautiful black president." And then someone knocked over a stack of pint glasses. And the bitch/bros finally left the bar.

Towards the end of the evening, I would drink a little too much and get into a fight with young man and woman, both in their late 20s, who sat at the bar and flaunted not having voted. We argued about militarism, Israel v. Palestine, apathy, and conspiracy theories before the roundish, goateed man started yelling "no politics!" proposed a toast, and declared a truce. Together, we had another beer or two and made polite small talk. He moved to Eugene from Philadelphia in 1999 to blow glass. His girlfriend has moved here in the same year. They met. They've been here since.

I called and waited for a cab. My new friend was surprised that I wasn't driving, then commended me for he perceived to be levelheadedness. The cab-driver picked me up and explained that most of the people from the area he drives around possess at least one D.U.I. I kept quiet and thought about a fall-down drunk who sucked down lemon drops while he hit on me, and then fell over, grasping for my waist to keep himself up.

Millennials can't be mindful all of the time, I guess.