Thread by @thehipp

Bartender here: the rest of you are fucked in about two weeks.

As the vanguards of the pandemic, I can tell you that Omicron and the flu/whatever this cold is is ripping through the service industry at a 1:4 ratio, maybe 1:2 once I hear from a few people whose results have been delayed. We will survive but we are fuuuuuuucked.

Revising my BARCON defensive state to 1. This shit is going to sweep through so swiftly we will not be able to adjust. We're going to be ringing in the new year in underground bunkers.

Oh hell yes, total fucking chaos

Good fucking lord, get the flu shot. People are getting dropped with 104 fevers and negative PCRs. It's fucking Captain Trips out there. I wanted to be in the *adaptation* of @StephenKing's The Stand, not *live* in it.

We won't have another lockdown, but we will have rolling lockdowns, with understaffed businesses shuttering at staggering intervals.

Be extra nice to your bartenders and servers the next few weeks, we have all been given secret government clearance to each kill one person at our place of business, no questions asked.

It's honestly starting to feel like either we're losing control of omicron OR some sick tech sneezed in the covid machine at the beginning of the week.

Absolute March 2020 vibes on this full moon

Bars are rapidly losing staff to positive covid tests. Everyone is catching this thing. Hard to believe a species could be dumb enough to be this unprepared after 22 months of the same shit repeating over and over, telegraphing what the solutions are the whole time.

It's so empty on the streets tonight that there's an air of March 2020, with only a few stragglers who somehow missed the lockdown announcement.

One of the reasons the city won't lock down is because we're largely locking ourselves down already. As usual, New Yorkers led by example.

In large part, the people out tonight have been walking in maskless, no vaccine info at the ready, totally unprepared to be in public after six months of lifted restrictions. No attempt to read the ostentatious sign on the door saying to mask up before entering.

Sure, it's a full moon, but the ratio of assholes to delightful people has shifted drastically towards the assholes in just 24 hours. Sensible people are staying home or walking in wearing masks, having read the literal fucking signs.

A lot of people leaving in huffs when I get stern on the third repetition of "Could you put your mask on please?" My loves, if you're telling me at the threshold that I'm going to hate having you in my bar, you're doing me a favor by leaving.

This is my fourth shift in a row. If you think any bartender, on whatever number shift in a row, wants your money so much they'll tolerate you being intolerable, I have some bad fucking news for you: you may be an hobbyist asshole, but we do it for a living.

BY ALL MEANS leave a bad review on Google or Yelp or I don't know, the citizen app? I will leave a bad review as a reply, I have that power. And I will tell the world what a complete asshole you were. Because it's my profession.

Guys, I've spent 22 months avoiding this, don't make me finally go viral I have a PCR test on Monday.

Ecstatic that this piece I wrote about Seasons 1-2 of the pandemic is going to have to have a part two:

Just a wandering thought re: patents on vaccines... imagine if we'd allowed the first human to discover fire to patent that shit.

Man, we went from "be safe" back to "have a good one" and back again to "stay safe" in a devastatingly short time.

Pizza Guy: Man, tell me something positive.
Me: The entire fucking neighborhood, you dumbass, have you not heard a word I said?

This is from a bartender friend who works at a very busy bar near Barclay's. America, you're next.

The worst part is *we could've been prepared for this.* There's a reason curfew got moved up to 8pm when people realized they were going to lose St. Patrick's the next day: they all planned to rage. I'm getting fuller slowly as people realize we are in the fucking brink again.

It's funmy because the whole of the service industry is losing it.

Guys do I seem like the kind of person who doesn't have a SoundCloud with an audiobook of Cocktail the novel I recorded during the early pandemic?

Liaising with @laineyday353

Fine, you all deserve this–my @SoundCloud audiobook of Cocktail the novel:
soundcloud.app.goo.gl/XfMPr

Kids, I'm working, how dare you do this to me, I'm trying to enter my credit card tips while refusing to serve absolutely drunk nerds. Imagine if Roman Roy was raised by a single mother and wound up bartending in his mid-30s.

*internal Irish Catholic voice* well clearly the solution to this is the same as the rest of the pandemic: drink your way through it.

Again, the real shit is in the @EvergreenReview: evergreenreview.com/read/werewolve…

If I end up being scapegoated on Tucker tomorrow, I will stand outside if every one of your houses blasting "Wonderful Christmastime" like Lloyd Dobbler. Don't try me.

While I've got you all here: most of you are really bad tippers. I address this in my new bit of policy wonkery, the Buy Back Better bill.

Look, my job is to make sure you're healthy enough to poison you. Don't make it weird.

Bar's closed, I have to do math and clean up. Just wanted to say that most of you are great, but some of you are the worst, and you're louder than the great people. So congrats, we turned Twitter into a bar on Saturday night!

Drawer was exactly on, your move, Internet.

These shift drinks brought to you by Four Roses, the absolute apex bourbon for the price, and High Life, the Seltzer of Beers. As with any bartending shift, I'm kicking you all out because I'm done with your nonsense. Until tomorrow night.

Oh god dammit, Europe just woke up. You know, the place I became an alcoholic? I am now legally bound to wander around, drunkenly looking for a hostel with Camel Crushes behind the counter or an alimentation that knows me well enough to sell me some Chamoues Bleues.

Back to the matter at hand: this omicron shit is scary. I'm not worried about myself or my friends because we're all vaccinated and boosted. We'll live because we woke and chose science.

What's scary is how quickly this more contagious but milder variant will rip through the immunocompromised because of the willfully unvaccinated and the populations we've left vulnerable because we won't just Department Of Defense-spend a global vaccination effort.

It's fucking shameful. The West should be ashamed of being cultural Elon Musks who hoard the plenty we could easily share with the world at no fucking loss to ourselves. As Bill Hicks said, "It's a round fucking world the last time I checked."

I managed my bar through 22 months of never-in-our-lifetime pandemic. How many of my people got covid? None. Because I posted a thousand signs, I yelled at people for being pieces of shit, I bar mom'd my people safely through the worst of it, then I got them all vax appointments.

Because of that, neither of the (currently) two coworkers with omicron will die or even be hospitalized. But they're still sick, they're still at risk, it's still ripping through my industry. For those of us who did our part, it's hard not to feel betrayed by society at large.

Bars are known as "public houses." We are your living rooms when you can't afford more than a studio. This is the epitome of community. It's the embodiment of knowing you're not alone, solely responsible for your environment.

We have one responsibility on this earth, best articulated by Kurt Vonnegut's adopted son: "We're here to help each other through this thing–whatever it is." A lot of people are shockingly numb to that reality.

We live or die with each other. Anyone who chooses the latter can fuck right off.

Anyway, I'm off to the one bar I might be able to get a drink this close to last call. Will I get in? Doubtful, that's the state of this surge. And this is happening to all your first responders in a way more real way than us, your last despondents.

Good morning, I'm hungover and the surge is still happening. Testing is still backed up like traffic approaching the Holland Tunnel. Tonight is my fifth shift in a row.

I had a show tomorrow that's now been canceled because THE ENTIRETY OF NEW YORK HAS COVID

How are there so many of you and yet not one of you is a literary agent.

A Roman Roy is a Manhattan but with Jager instead of bourbon.

"We need federal intervention at this point" is a vibe.

Shout out to this sign, which went viral when someone else posted it.

This number is now over 50.

Wheeeeeeee