My night tonight
I smoked a cigar for the first time in a year and a half tonight. I wouldn't necessarily call it falling off the wagon, but regardless, I needed it.
So, I'm in a ska band. We play happy sounding music for people to drink/dance to. My band had its first gig in two months tonight at the bar that we frequently play at, but instead of being the only band to play that night, we were the second of three bands that played.
We get on stage, play a couple of songs, and there's this guy that starts antagonizing us from the dance floor, saying that we fucking suck and that we should get off stage. The bartender storms over to the guy and she tells him that he had better keep his comments to himself, otherwise he would be ejected from the premises. A couple of his homeboys walk up to him and calm him down. He then stands in the middle of the floor with his arms crossed.
Staring. Sizing up Phil, our lead guitarist and singer.
I kept my eye on him throughout the entire set, watching and waiting for him to make a move. After a couple of songs go by, he goes outside to smoke a cigarette. Despite this, I still keep my eyes turned to the door to make sure that everything is at least workable.
After a couple of songs, he pops his head in to heckle us some more, which Phil told him over the PA system to fuck off. After we ignored his retort, he storms back in to size up Phil and the rest of the band some more. By now, all of that Army training that I've gone through is starting to kick back in and I'm seeing him as a viable threat to myself and my friends.
He then stormed back outside and began starting shit with a few of the other patrons who didn't take too kindly to that. After a couple of minutes, the bartender went outside with a couple other people to tell him that he was no longer welcome at the bar, and he pushed her around and eventually, he took a swing at her. The other people rushed him and began to pummel the shit out of him while the bartender went back inside to grab a billy club to "handle" the situation. She also called the police to further handle the situation. We pretty much assumed that he and his crew weren't going to come back, so we didn't think much of it.
After we finished our set, we tore down our equipment and began making preparations to take our gear out to our car, there was the guy, standing in the doorway trying to get back in. After a bit of forceful negotiation, the bartender slammed the door in his face and locked it, as well as dead bolting the back door so he had no way of getting in.
A few minutes pass by and we get the "all-clear" that the guy was gone and that the police were outside, making sure that no harm would come to the band or the bartender.
Now, I have done one other gig where there was a bar fight, and that was damn near two years ago, and that was with a legit bar band.
This is no excuse, but for me, it's really hard to shift from "I might kill you if I have to" to a more neutral mindset; one that revolves around logic rather than instinct, so I'm still seeing red and working off of a massive adrenaline rush as well as a reversion to more base behaviors: aggressive mindset, loss of hearing, etc., when one of my bandmates offers to buy me a cigar to help me calm down.
Knowing what happened last time I had a cigar, I reluctantly agreed, thinking that it would calm me down to the point where I was human again. Thankfully enough, that cigar did the trick and I came back down to Earth.
So yeah. That's my evening.