[Being the second napkin from Mister Unsold Arsenic's meditations On Eating at the Bar. — Editor]

“That’s my stool,” I say, and instantly regret the choice of words. No matter. It is my stool. I discovered it. As the Hollywood producer does his starlet.

Bar stools, like all things worth enjoying, come in myriad shapes, sizes, colors, conditions. One is obligated to explore this space, for both your sake and that of the stool. Keep in mind that what may be a comfortable fit at first might not tomorrow, that that initially intolerable wooden seat may just grow to be quite familiar indeed.

Back to my stool you’re so inconsiderately sitting in. After an exhaustive search, it is I’ve found the only stool in this place that will stand on its own without teetering on like a broken metronome.

The reason for this, of course, is that the bar stool has four, not three, legs. I’m no Pythagoras but in the humble opinion of your narrator the four legged stool belongs in a four dimensional world. I put this to an unshaven topologist I happened upon late one Tuesday night at the counter of the Neutron Bakery (now no more, unfortunately — was once one of Berkeley’s only 24 hour establishments), but was unable to stir him from deep contemplation of his old-fashioned in left hand, his coffee cup in right.

Not that all wobbly stools are to be avoided. The miraculous Mama’s Royal Cafe on Broadway in the sunny 510, a line out the door kind of an establishment, usually has one or two openings at the counter. There one can get just as lost in the Rube Goldberg-esque juice machine as in the be-tatted wait staff pouring the coffee. The chairs at the bar are a lovely wooden curve, curiously mounted as if on the point of a spear, the effect of which is that it is quite impossible to find any stable configuration whatsoever. Unfamiliar patrons invariably sit in one, get up, sit in in another, thinking the first was broken, get up again. No, they’re all like that.

But we’re not at Mama’s, we’re at Tiny’s Too. Again, I implore you, that’s my stool. Go find your own.