The Pub at the End of the Universe

Writing for NaNoWriMo about a Portland bar with a name like The Pub at the End of the Universe is great. Every time I mention the place it gets me eight words closer to the 50,000 word goal.

Now I understand some of you don’t know the Pub at the End of the Universe. She’s a left-handed lesbian midget albino Eskimo. Wait, that’s Sarah Jane. I’m all messed up on cough syrup right now so just like never mind. The Pub at the End of the Universe was designed by a group of extremely nerdy hippy anglophiles, and this is a good thing. Besides being a tribute to the author of the ever-so-popular Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the interior seems to borrow architectural features from another pillar of British fiction, Terry Pratchett. In Pratchett’s Discworld novels, he describes the space and time bending properties of extremely large collections of books. Anybody who frequents old book shops can tell you that when you enter what looks like a tiny storefront of a crammed book shop, the browser is soon amazed to find how many rows of shelves the store actually has. They find new sections at every turn, short stairways that lead to floors that could not possibly be there, and find themselves wondering if they’ll ever get out again while questioning why they would want to. Pratchett calls this L-Space, for Library Space. It is expressed mathematically as books = knowledge = power = (mass x distance)/time. Similarly, a video shop in Portland has amassed such a huge collection of rare and bizarre films that it has created what might be one of the first examples of V-Space. Once I walked in there and after spending several hours searching through titles, walked out with two videos a couple of minutes later. On another occasion I popped in real quick for a couple of movies, and would swear I came out the next day. The idea is that the sheer magnitude of such collections can warp reality. The Pub at the End of the Universe has somehow picked up on these architectural anomalies and created Bar Space. I have to call it B-Space because if you were to refer to it as Pub Space people would get completely the wrong idea once hyphenated. Not that kind of place at all, at all. While many cities and small towns play host to such anomalous structures, Portland, Oregon seems to have naturally picked up on the notion. It might have to do with such a large quantity of exceptionally nerdy hippies collecting there and bringing their Head Space with.