i want to mention something else, though, and it's the issue about that dude that was messing with my drink.

i did not experience any signs of drugging last night, and can confidently state that my drink was not spiked with anything. rather, it is clear enough that the guy just didn't understand the seriousness of what he was doing as he was grabbing at my drink. i brought this up to him rather sternly and i do i hope that he walks away from the experience better cognizant of what not to do with strangers at a bar.

so, what happened?

well, i'm standing near the bar waiting to order a drink. it's a mostly older male audience for this show, so i'm having a little bit of difficulty getting to the bar over the mass of much larger shoulders than mine. and, these guys are going to take up two or three spaces at the bar each, too; it's a difficult crowd for me to navigate, and one i'm going to naturally find myself at the bottom of a pecking order surrounding. but, i eventually get to the bar, order the drink and some random stranger i've never met before goes to try and grab it out of my hand. he then just generally starts acting weird about the drink, even expecting me to give him the change i got from the bar.

i assumed he was doing a bad job of hitting on me (he was just being rude, truly.) and just walked over to the other side of the venue to ignore him. but, as i'm watching the opening act (who were pretty boring, truly), i'm running over what just happened and a specific thing that he did becomes kind of concerning to me - he placed his fist over my drink.

what am i talking about, exactly?

well, suppose the drink is lying on the bar, so that the spout is perpendicular to the table the beer is on. now, imagine a hand hovering over the spout of the drink, closed-fisted.

so, in total, i just experienced a total stranger sneak up on me, mess around with my drink, and hover a fist over the top of it, in a motion that seemed as though he dropped something in it. at this point, i've already consumed a fair amount of it. what do you do?

well, what i did was find him and confront him on it. why was he messing around with my drink? did he put something in it? if so, what did he put in it? i'm not going to enjoy this if i don't know what it is, but if i understand what's happening then i can adjust.

it actually became clear to me rather immediately that i was not dealing with somebody that dropped something in my drink but rather with somebody that was entirely clueless as to the concept of personal space. he was entirely oblivious as to why he shouldn't do what he did; he didn't think it through before he did it, and it wasn't clear that he understood my concern, once it was brought up. his only response was an appeal to individuality, he wouldn't do that, but that was not convincing because i'd never met him before.

i do believe that i have been drugged in detroit, and in fact more than once. this was perhaps not somewhere i expected any such concern to be at all serious. but, i had to react to what i experienced.

let this be a public service announcement: if you are a scruffy-looking dude at a bar of any sort at all, you don't want to do anything at all that might lead the female-identifying people in the room to think you drugged their drink. we have good reason to be concerned about things of the sort, as this is an actual real thing that actually happens in the actual real world. please be more aware of what you're doing.