Thursday afternoon.

Here I am, lost in a place somewhere between time and space. I am parked at the Pot Shop, mostly because the rap music they’re playing on the radio is really good. Now I am just sitting here writing and vibing.

I have learned this new term recently: “Bar Girl.” I did not know what this was. Perhaps I had some vague sense of it in South Dakota, but I always thought of that in like… an old timey gold mining way. You know, ruffled skirts and can-can dances and guys who think they got rich off a mine full of pyrite today.

I think I wrote a story like this once. Actually, I did write a story like this once. I went to some short story writing contest at USD where you just show up to a blank lap top and write a story based on whatever topic they give you that day with absolutely no prep whatsoever. I did it twice and lost both times. I didn’t even place.

The first one was about an imaginary cool guy who rescues a drunk girl from a college party instead of taking advantage of her. It was set at a lacrosse house in Georgetown. That was in 2009.

The second one was in 2019 after I came back from the Paris Writing Workshop. It was about a rich girl who ran away from her abusive family and ended up working at some random bar in Deadwood, South Dakota. She met some rich guy like three days in and married him, only for him to suddenly die of a heart attack a year later and leave her with everything. One day she just got up and left her gigantic house behind and moved to California to start a new life and become a movie star. Her house is still a museum today. And they all lived happily ever after, The End.

I received no acknowledgment from the so-called “creative writing” community at USD for either of these epic stories, nor for my column, or for my blog, or for any of the crazy shit I’ve done just to put some words down on the paper. Nothing. Nada. Just silence and rejection and disrespect and some kind of weird sense of awe.

Now I’m in Thailand and they’re still hitting me up from fucking Beresford and I’m like gurl, I see you and I’m here for it. Shoutout to my biggest fans!

Anyway, yes, I was talking about the term Bar Girl. Okay, yes, so this is like… a job here, I guess? I never thought about what I was doing this way. I guess I just thought… the Star Wars Cantina was filled with all these weird, shady characters to different gateways across the universe, so just go there and find all the stories I need to write my own stories.

I did read and write Star Wars fanfiction as a teenager. A lot. So sometimes, when I am able to think about South Dakota in a light-hearted, entertaining way, which is almost never, I do still think of it as like… a galaxy far, far away.

This is why I’m so mad at it. Because I was like… okay, I’m an alien on a different planet now, let’s adjust accordingly. And then I could not ever quite adjust accordingly, and it became increasingly terrible as time went on.

Now I am just left with this pile of stuff and it’s like… oh my god, how do I even dig this ancient, rusted emotional landmine out of the ground, deactivate it, and then repurpose it into something else?

So yeah, like, and that’s why I feel like dealing with technology taught me to release my anger in a a healthier way. Like I used to get mad at technology and now I’m just so complacent whenever the TV randomly turns back into Chinese and won’t let me log onto Netflix. Like, maybe it’s just acting crazy because there’s a thunderstorm out. Stop staring at the screen and go check out the streaks of lightning across the sky that you can see from all angles of the city from your crazy tall haunted tower of an apartment.

Anyway, so I guess the answer to this question is no, I am not a Bar Girl, but I am a woman who hangs out at bars in order to collect stories she would never find while lost in the infinite stacks of the dusty old collection of library books. I was trapped in there for so long. You think it’s such a dream to be locked in a library forever, but eventually you start to notice the peeling on the yellow wallpaper and realize you’re never going to escape the maze. That’s how it felt to live forever in residence at the University of South Dakota. Eventually the high asbestos, lead, and arsenic content of ye olde paint will slowly drive you mad.

Speaking of going mad, they are currently playing an old cartoon from the 90’s on TV at the Pot Shop called “Mummies, Alive!” I’ve never seen this shit in my life. It’s about a cool American kid living in 90’s San Fransisco that gets deported back to Ancient Egypt. Whoops, I mean, transported.

Anyway, it’s fucking wild. There is no sound and no subtitles. I am only watching the animation with rap music blasting in the background while drinking Chang and smoking weed. At what, like, 13:30 in the afternoon? No big deal. I am on the sun dial shit right now and I am here for this crazy animated mummy experience.

The bartender says I’m on Number 4 now. I completely lost track. I haven’t even been here for two hours. Is this one of those tricks they use to get more money from me? I literally don’t even know what’s happening right now, lol.

Okay, this right here is some straight Mad Dog shit right now. I am messed up, for real. Such a strange experience. Wherever you go, there you are, and here I am right now at this random Pot Shop in Thailand, fucked up on beer and weed at 1:30pm. Sounds about right.

I have no idea what I’m doing with my life. I mean, I definitely know what I’m supposed to be doing. But I’m really struggling with accountability towards myself, and therefore lack structure, and that’s how I ended up watching crazy animated mummy cartoons on TV while fucked up at a bar in the middle of the day on a random Thursday afternoon.

At least I’m not angry anymore. I’m just fully sitting here at peace with everything. Who cares, right? It is what it is.

If Mad Dog was here, he would say, “The way I see it, they got basketball on one TV and cartoons on the other.” And it’s true. They really are playing an anime-style cartoon about Ancient Egypt on one TV and a Cleveland Cavaliers-Golden State Warriors NBA Finals rerun game on the other.

Just so my dad can let me know he’s here for me in this moment no matter what, I guess.

Meanwhile I’m just sitting here hunched over my notebook at the bar, laughing to myself because this crazy story I followed of the Passport Bro turned out to be such good material for a Halloween Horror Story. Perfect. Right up there with the Fall of the House of Usher. Just an epic, classic, haunted masterpiece of a girl who left home to find her Eat, Pray, Love Dream Abroad and lived a nightmare instead.

This has been the Betsey Horton Epic Classical Theatric Masterpiece Hour. Thank you for tuning in.

I think maybe in my head I listened to this guy talk for a few minutes about Ancient Rome and thought, “Hey, do you like the HBO show Rome? It’s my favourite show. I own it on DVD. Do you want to just come home to my library full of ancient books and scrolls in Alexandria and watch this show on repeat for the rest of our lives?”

No, that doesn’t sound quite right. That would be too crazy, actually. I don’t think I’m ready for that. After all, I am drunk at a pot shop in the middle of the day on a random Thursday in Thailand. What am I even doing with my life?

I have no idea, actually. Basically just not doing the job I signed up to do and figuring out how to do it even though the world is falling apart and everything is impossible and now I’m just sitting here like… ugh.

Hahahaha….. I just imagined the fans I know from Beresford sharing this scary story of the Passport Bro who was secretly underpaying his Thai girlfriend the entire time he was writing me letters and sending them off via pigeon express in the dead of night.

Ohhhh, look at that, yet another slam dunk on the sentence front. Own it, fam. I am the Writer Extraordinaire.

Hahaha, this is so funny to me right now. So funny. He’s just like a Roman Centurion. All you gotta do is sit on his lap and wave the feathers in his cap. You don’t even have to try that hard. It’s hilarious to me. I went through all of this hilarious, ridiculous bullshit just to discover men ain’t shit. They ain’t shit at all.

My whole life is a lie. My university education means nothing. I am just out here in the world on this war ship, watching the craziness of local island life pass me by…

Am I chill? No. No, I am not chill. But I am definitely trying to be chill. I just… really struggle to be chill. All the time. I am not chill at all.

Okay, time to go now. Have a nice day!