Just one quick drink at Laptop Stealers

Every once in a while I’m installing a bidet at a friend’s apartment when suddenly it’s getting late and I need to start thinking about getting to wherever I must for my evening plans. But what am I going to do about my backpack? 

“Oh why don’t you just leave it here and you can come pick it up tomorrow or whatever.” 

I could do that. But it’s Friday, and I know I’m not going to feel like picking it up until Sunday. And the friend lives all the way downtown so now my Sunday is going to be all about taking the bus downtown and back up.

I could just bring it with me and be backpack guy. Backpack guy is one of the worst guys to be on a Friday night. It’s not just that you have to carry the backpack with you wherever you go– it’s the constant commentary.

“Why do you have a backpack,” “what’s in your backpack,” “I hate you for having a backpack.” 

Then there’s this other problem where your backpack has your laptop in it, which wouldn’t really matter if it weren’t for the fact that your friends invariably want to end the night with a cheeky drink at Laptop Stealers. 

There’s always that third option where you go all the way back uptown to drop off your bag. At a distance this always feels like what you’ll do but it never is. You realize what you would actually be doing is punishing current Mike for the benefit of future Mike, and Friday night is generally not the preferred time of the week for self-flagellation. Besides, it goes against your basic inclination to never burn the candle on this end when you could just as easily burn the other. 

Ideally you just wouldn’t need the backpack. Like what if everything you needed could be found everywhere you went. The world might be a better place for me if Laptop Stealers had my chapstick and headphones behind the bar just in case I need them. 

We can take this a step further: Forget needing the backpack– what if you didn’t need anything. What if you could just operate as a closed system, where if it's not part of the man, it's not part of the plan. 

But if you didn’t need anything, why would you ever do anything? Who would bother to invite you to Laptop Stealers?

If everyone was like you, it’s difficult to imagine there’d even be a Laptop Stealers in the first place.