The greatest idea for a bar EVER

Today at my job with The Newspaper - which employs me - I'm attempting to contact the sheriff. The phone line at the police station has been busy for the past fifteen minutes. How can the police station's phone line be busy? What if I were being beaten with a shovel right now? What if midgets and halflings were tearing off my pants and squirting ketchup on my groin? What if monkeys with eyepatches were throwing poo at the mailman?

Actually, I wouldn't mind the last one. I might even join in if I had plastic gloves, and could loft the fecal matter accurately from a safe distance.

Okay, it's ringing now. Eyepatched poo monkeys be damned, the police phone lines are working again. If there had been an emergency, I could have probably just called 911. But the first paragraph of this column was uncharacteristically funny, and I'm not going to throw out the only good joke I'll write all week just because it's based on ignorance.

Sigh. Rough days at the office like these make me think back to college, when my roommates and I thought up the perfect business. The idea was solid gold, and could have made us billions. Sadly, none of us had the start-up money.

The idea was for a bar that preys on the weaknesses of recovering alcoholics. Yes, I realize most bars do that, but not to the extent of our bar. My roommates and I realized there's an untapped resource of bar patrons out there, at detox clinics. All the best drunks end up in detox, and every city has a detox center - sometimes more than one - so the opportunities for expansion are endless.

Here's the idea: we buy property next to the detox center, and open a bar called "Retox". The first drink is free, and then we jack up the prices. No alcoholic is going to turn down a free drink, especially after spending an entire night sober, and since there's at least a dozen people or more in a detox center on any given night, we'll be filthy rich in no time. Each night, the hard-working local law enforcement will bring in the next morning's new customers. We'll also have a lot of returning customers, because we'll be the only bar that actually encourages losers to get so drunk that they go into a coma. Because really, who cares if they do go into a coma? The freakin' hospital is right next door. We can dump all of them outside the emergency room in a cardboard box.

Written on the cardboard box in magic marker: "PLEEZ REMOVE LOSERZ AND RETURN BOX TO RETOX BAR. THAN-Q. VERRY MUCH."

Successful businessmen will tell you location is everything. Our location is perfect, whether the drunks are coming or going. Do you need a drink after a night in detox? Come to Retox. Does your pathetic drunk ass get carted to detox every night? Retox is only a short ride or walk away.

We'll open bright and early at 6 am, and will offer no food or water whatsoever (beer has lots of sugar in it. Use that to get your blood sugar back up, nancy boy). We will accept food stamps and EBT cards. The entire floor area underneath each table will be grated, allowing our patrons to vomit and urinate right at the table. At closing time, we'll break out a fire hose to wash down the grated floors and force the lingering drunkards back out on the street. I've seen the police use fire hoses in riot situations, and I'm willing to bet it will work even better for removing an uncoordinated drunkard. I estimate we'll be able to force out the boozehounds and have the whole place clean each night in under five minutes.

But what about fights? In a bar full of hardcore drunks, won't there be fights? Not really. The idea of drunks fighting is only a stereotype. Bar fights are for amateurs. Real drunks are too incapacitated to fight, and besides, fighting might cause their beer to spill, which would mean they'd have to lick it up off the floor or grates. And as we learned in the last paragraph, licking the grates under the tables wouldn't be a pleasant experience.

It's the perfect business. Our ethics probably wouldn't be appreciated by the locals, but who cares? No one's forcing those whiners to drink at our bar. In fact, we wouldn't even serve them at Retox. Our bar would be like a secret club for people who enjoy the cruel cycle of drinking and pissing themselves. All those haters who want people to be "stable" and "productive in society" wouldn't be allowed. The rules of society wouldn't apply in our bar. Retox would be for the few, the proud . . . the eternally drunk.

And anyone who complains will be thrown into the Pit of Shame, found under the floor grates.

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