Be a little careful walking, if you would. The floor’s so clean it would actually glisten, if there were any light worth talking about, and it can be slippery to walk on. Novices to The Trough are always surprised at how well scrubbed the floor is. If they survive the first month, they understand the reason for it. If they don’t, they’re the latest occasion for the mop.
First, though, it’s time for genuflection. Turn to your right, and worship—
The Bar Itself.
O, Eighth Wonder of the World!
The Bar Itself runs the entire length of one side of the taproom. You can’t usually see the end of it, on account of the smoke and the gloom. It just kind of fades away, like all your first-class religious mysteries. It’s wood, of course—none of your foppish hoity-toity stuff. Oak, mostly, although you can find almost any other kind of wood used to patch up the many busted sections.
Contemplating the Bar Itself is the closest I ever get to philosophy. Willingly, I mean.
I’m serious. All the fancy problems that philosophers waste their time fretting over can be solved just by studying the Bar Itself.
The distinction between Essence and Appearance, for instance, shows up in the way the Bar Itself actually dissolves into its many components. Each portion of the Bar Itself has its own distinct identity.
First and foremost, there’s the Old Bar. That’s the first twenty or so feet of it, right by the door. The Old Bar is actually an upturned watering trough which, legend has it, served as the original bar when the place first opened in the dim mists of ancient history. (Yeah, I know—that conflicts with the legend of the minor farm god. So? Legends conflict, it’s the nature of the beasts.)
In modern times, this original section of the bar—also known as The Trough Proper, by the way—is reserved by right and custom for the most aged of The Trough’s customers. These heroes—sure, they’re a lot of doddering oldsters, but you have to be a genuine hero to survive the number of years it takes to be elevated to the Old Bar—sit there for hours on end quaffing ale through toothless gums and squabbling over their reminiscences of days gone by. They also, I might mention, serve The Trough as its Court of Final Appeal.
Next to the Old Bar, as we move away from the door— Oh. Yeah, I should mention that there’s an elaborate nomenclature by which directions in The Trough are specified. I won’t get into it—way too technical for laymen, don’t you know?—but, for the record, moving down the Bar Itself away from the door is called “nethering,” or, by your real hard-core Trough-men, “nether-reaching.”
Anyway, nethering from the Old Bar we come to Anselm’s Cursed Yard-and-a-Half, as the next stretch is called. But we won’t linger on Anselm’s Cursed Yard-and-a-Half. Nobody ever sits there, not since Anselm cursed it some two hundred years ago. (And if you don’t know who Anselm was, or why he cursed it, or why anyone worries about an old curse, that’s tough. I’m a proper Trough-man, I am, and there’s some things you just don’t talk about.)
The next stretch, comprising some thirty-five feet in length, are called the Blessed Planks. The oak slabs which make up most of the Bar Itself are absent here. Sometime back in the dawn of history—after the Suspected Soap Bead Uprising, according to legend—they were replaced by planks of cheap pine. Miraculously, as century succeeded century, the pine lasted. Unscarred, ungouged, uncarved, pristine and perfect. This, given the nature of The Trough, is an obvious miracle. Most Trough-men believe that a pot of ale served up on the Blessed Planks is better than any served elsewhere.
Superstitious sots. I’ve got no truck with that nonsense, myself. Ale’s ale, and there’s an end to it. The ale at The Trough is the best in the world, and that’s that. Doesn’t matter where it’s served or where you drink it, just as long as it makes its way down your throat.
Our hearts lighten, now, as we come to the next portion of the Bar Itself. This is where I hang out, whenever I’m not sitting at a table like I usually am on account of how Greyboar and I are too couth to belly up to a bar like your average lowlifes.