Perhaps the most bizarre thing about him is his taste in music. His jukebox choices are ironic — if that adjective applies — and cause for concern among me and Tomas, who presume the bar's inhabitants are ready to take the interruption of Sinatra, hair metal, and rock standards (Hendrix, Cream, the Stones, Zeppelin, BOC, early Aerosmith, AC/DC, the Black Crowes, Metallica, or any grunge band with the possible exception of Collective Soul) personally. He puts on Maria Mulder's “Midnight at the Oasis,” King Harvest's “Dancing in the Moonlight,” Bread's “Guitar Man.” and Captain and Tennille's “Love Will Keep Us Together.” The last song generates a relatively serious amount of disgust from most of the patrons. This arouses a thief's grin from Shaheen.
He informs us that he is three-quarters Irish and one-quarter Lebanese. By the look of him, one would think he is either Greek or Italian, though this assumption would be quickly abandoned upon hearing an impression of his mother's broach. He claims that he has lived in either Ireland or Wales for the majority of his life, but he is without accent. He tells us that he is thirty-one, but, for whatever reason, I don't believe him.
Patrick dodges straight questions with the agility of a pugilist, provoking chronic sighs of exhaustion from both Tomas and I. When we ask about Coprolalia and Willis Faxo, he presents a coy grin. “I have never met the washroom fellow, and I have only met his friend twice. Not to go too far off topic here, but something Mr. Faxo once said to me reminds me of a Graham Greene novel. Do you know the work of Greene?”
“Never heard of him,” Tomas respond.
“Ah, he's one of the best authors of the twentieth century. Not that you'd know that,” as condescending as it appears on the page. “I rarely meet well-read Americans. I met a woman the other day who thought Dickens was the author of Gulliver's Travels,” he says with a laugh. “And guess what? The Yahoo had never even heard of Swift. Regardless, I'd assume that it's due to the education system here. You do know that it's absolutely horrendous and terribly backward. The No Child Left Behind Act is perhaps one of the most foolish policies the world has ever known. Then again, what do you expect from the same administration that started a war to dethrone a tyrant incapable of threatening his immediate region, Europe, or anyone in this hemisphere? Neither of you voted for the latest paragon of American Pylism, Mr. Bush, I presume?”
“No,” I respond. Was that a The Quiet American reference?
“I voted for Nader,” Tomas says as he begins towards the bar. “You guys need anything?”
“No,” I respond. “Pat, are you okay?”
“Marvelous.” Exeunt Tomas. “As I was saying…”
Two hours pass. Subject matter is addressed and quickly cast by the wayside. Topics include, in chronological order: Locke's treatise on education, Voltaire, Diderot, de Gouges, d'Alembert, Descartes, Bacon, Spinoza, Maimonides, Aquinas, Scotus, Origen, Piso, Colet, St. Jerome, Erasmus, Rabelais, More, Milton, Lord Byron's Cain, the war between Caesar and Pompey, which Patrick calls the first real Roman Civil War, Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, the cobbler in the first act of the aforementioned play, Plato's Meno, the allegory of Jesus and Melchizedek, Lazarus, Faust, the meaning of the term “hero” to the Stoics and the Cynics (someone virtuous enough to survive the death of their body), the fact that most of the Cynic philosophers evidently committed suicide by self-imposed starvation or asphyxiation, the benefits of taking a Vitamin B Complex every day, Dvorák's “New World Symphony,” “Sir Duke,” Sir Duke, Schubert, Mauro Giuliani, Boccherini, Chopin, Debussy, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Manet, Monet, Cezanne, Zola, Matisse, Mondrian, Satie, Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Bartok, Hungary's struggle for freedom in the fifties, Prague in sixty-eight, Kundera, Woody Allen, Coltrane's “Central Park West,” Freud, Wilhelm Reich, Erich Fromm, B. F. Skinner, Seymour Skinner, Itchy and Scratchy, Crumb, Ginsburg, Cage, Dine, Ono, Lennon, Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre, Camus, Nietzsche, Wagner, Bakunin, ants, the existence or non-existence of super-organisms, Darwinism, Neural Darwinism, the perplexities of quantum mechanics, “the universe's rate of expansion is increasing; how fucked up is that!” M Theory, Egyptian mythology, Jenna Haze, Lolita, bestiality, Humbolt's Gift, Underworld, the Mets, bestiality again, the Yankees, Gehrig, A-Rod, David Beckham, Ichiro, Ricky Williams, John Muir, Mormonism, Mead, Dickinson, Ibsen, the best book of the nineteenth century (Balzac's Lost Illusions is my pick; Patrick praises Gogol's Dead Souls, but ends up picking Dostoevsky's The Possessed; Tomas votes for Through the Looking Glass; the argument ends in stalemate), the Decemberists, the Decemberists, Death Cab for Cutie, favorite album of the aforementioned band (Patrick: “I don't really know them well enough to make an informed decision”; Tomas: Transatlanticism; Me: Photo Album), Magical Mystery Tour, worst movie ever (the aforementioned, we all agree), favorite Beatles album (Patrick: Abbey Road; Tomas: Sgt. Pepper; Me: Revolver), Doctor Robert, Leary, Comte, Tocqueville, Cole, the reasons for the Revolutionary War (because a certain group of wealthy and famous Virginians had their rights to vast acres of Ohio Valley property abrogated as a consequence of the Proclamation Line of 1763; Patrick recommends Forced Founders for further information), that the legends of Roland and Thanksgiving are both epics born from historical footnotes, Zinn, Chomsky, Goebbels, St. Helen, Bush, Commodus (Herculi Romano Augusto), Nero, Seneca, Booth, Oswald, Kennedy, Castro, Paine, Michael Collins, and what Ireland is like (boring and “verdant”).
Patrick throws in his two cents on everything between and beyond, while Tomas and repeatly fail to scrounge up more than a half penny between us. Patrick’s anger is aroused by the unfortunate fact that most people think the title of the song “Brand New Key” is “The Roller-Skate Song.” He's in favor of the death penalty, especially when it comes to people who commit insider trading. (“So you have a system that's based on speculation. Some people speculate on a stock price going up; some speculate on the price going down. I don't know how the latter is still legal, especially now that it is so easy to disseminate false information. People will admit that this is terrible for small companies, true, but the relative ease by which one can deceive the public is considered a topic for conspiracy theorists. Why? All the short-seller has to do is pay off someone who works for a small, web-based financial journal. Even the rather minor ones are reviewed by tens of thousands of investors. It doesn't matter if they have virtually no credibility to begin with — the investors want as much information as possible, and they are persuaded rather easily on account of their being so skittish. It's so simple: the site posts whatever the short-seller wants, the short-seller is called an unnamed source, and suddenly all of those predictions the short-seller made about a stock price going down come true. By the time the lie is exposed, all of the money has already been exchanged. Done deaclass="underline" The short-seller makes a profit, the writer counts his bribe money, and the website, suddenly known for its ability to obtain unique information, even if it is false, gets more web traffic. Sure it destroys companies who have done no real wrong, but why the hell should the Social Darwinists care about justice, truth, or the lives that they destroy? To them, these are just nebulous obstacles in the way of success, utility, and, most importantly, money.”) There’s something wrong with Third Avenue in sunlight. I don't really understand why. The word gestalt comes up a lot. He calls Tilden the poor man's Kierkegaard; Browning the most underrated poet of the nineteenth century; Abbagnano the greatest philosopher that no one has ever heard of; Averroes the most influential man of the twelfth century; Lucan the seventh-most eloquent man Rome ever produced, even if he wasn't really from Rome. He does not provide the names of the six who top his list, though he does tell us that Suetonius is his second-favorite Latin historian. Marx is frequently cited. Lenin is, too. Castro and Mao are regarded with an almost haughty indifference. He applauds the premises behind Julius Nyerere's Ujamaa movement, but says that the system was never properly implemented. Proudhon, he muses, should be more popular among American liberals. After talking about Ireland, he goes back to politics, and complains that too many American conservatives equate his beliefs with the Stalinist brand of totalitarianism, which, he notes, is different than Fascism for predominately economic reasons. As a footnote, he adds that the term “Islamo-Fascist” only makes sense if one is ignorant of the fact that Fascism is a distinct branch of totalitarianism, and that one could make the argument that Fascism is sufficient for atheism.