Check Your Stuff?

You know the feeling. You're in a bar or a lounge, and you're talking to friends and new people are arriving, and you're greeting newcomers and moving around a a bit, and suddenly you're totally not standing where you were 45 minutes ago, when you arrived, and you're like, Where's my shit? You didn't check your coat and bag, because this is a bar/lounge and not a club proper (where you'd visit the coat check, 'cause you're making a night of it), so when you arrived you just plopped your stuff down somewhere. Uh, now where was that?

You look around and you say "Excuse me for a second" to the people you're talking to. If you haven't had too many cocktails yet, you do realize where your shit is and go retrieve it with no problem. You smile at the strangers who were sitting near your shit and suddenly you feel a little guilty for having suspected these nice people, or people like them, of felonious intentions. And, since you've have had at least one cocktail, you do decide that people are basically honest and, like you, just want to have a good time. As you make your way back to your to the conversation you were having, shit safely in hand, you reproach yourself for your petty, materialist panic and decide to rededicate yourself to Higher Ideals, the key to which, of course, is a genial toast with other fellow human beings-- except that the people you were talking to have disappeared and now you must make your toast with other fellow human beings.

And you think, What the hell? Other human beings it is! And you say hello to somebody new and buy him or her a drink, comfortable in the knowledge that your one-of-a-kind bag and designer coat and expensive phone and precious papers are all right there in plain sight. With the peace that only serving as your own policeman can confer, you chatter on about humanity and brotherhood and stuff like that....