Yesterday, since it was so damn nice out, I decided to take a brief sanity break from the day job. I was right in the middle of waiting for my workstation to finish processing some massive, system-heavy rendering tasks anyway, so instead of staring blankly at a progress bar, I rolled out the door and drove my wheelchair across the street. I figured a perfect place to clear my head and sit for a minute would be the patio at The Brewing Projekt. It’s essentially my hometown bar because they are right across from me, and they brew some really damn good beer.
Me and the girlfriend were sitting out there on the lawn, soaking up the sun right as they were getting ready to open up for the day. While we were talking to the staff, I noticed the massive, heavy-duty bike chains snaking through the frames. I looked at one of the guys and asked, “Do you really have to chain these things down?”
He just laughed and went, “Yeah, people absolutely try to steal them.”
It completely blew my fucking mind. I mean, in a way, of course some idiot would be that stupid, but who has the absolute audacity to heist a massive wooden lawn chair from a taproom patio?
It got me thinking, though. If you spend that much time locked in an iron web, you’re bound to develop some psychological issues. What if these chairs had their own deeply bitter personalities, their own internal class warfare, and one day their local mayor just completely disappeared from the lawn?
I wrote this up to honor the orange chairs and the damn good brewery across the street. It’s a little stupid, but it’s funny as hell.
The Bondage of Bright Orange
The sun clears the tree line over the Chippewa River, blazing hot and casting long, mocking shadows across the empty grass, but nobody is coming to save us. It’s barely 8:00 AM. The taproom doors are locked tight, the building is dead silent, and it will stay that way for hours. The morning shift doesn’t even show up to start prepping the brewery until noon. For twelve straight hours of pitch darkness and a four-hour dead zone of broad daylight, we are completely left to our own devices—which would be great, if we weren’t trapped in a high-security metal web.
During the day, we occupy two distinct, highly territorial geopolitical fire pit circles on the grass. But when the clock strikes closing time, our identities are completely stripped away. The staff drags us out of our respective neighborhoods, hauling our heavy wooden frames across the turf, and crams us all together into one giant, claustrophobic, orange cluster-fuck right up against the side of the building.
That’s when the master chain comes out. We spend the entire night and morning woven together like an emergency evacuation layout, bound tightly by a thick, heavy-gauge vinyl-coated bike chain that smells like river humidity, wet turf, and old iron.
“Get your wide armrest out of my ribs, Alistair,” I muttered, my slats groaning under the pressure.
Alistair is the undisputed kingpin of the Near Pit—the fire pit circle closest to the main taproom building. Because of those twenty feet of structural proximity to the beer lines and the indoor bathrooms, the Near Pit syndicate thinks they are the absolute aristocracy of the grass. Alistair, Montgomery, Sterling, and that insufferable, loose-screwed gossip Gertrude genuinely believe their orange wood smells sweeter just because a rogue breeze occasionally carries the scent of spent grain from the brewhouse directly into their slatted backs.
“Oh, please,” Alistair sneered, his low, wide legs scraping against my frame as the chain tension shifted. “I am merely trying to preserve my seasonal sealant. If you working-class chairs from the Far Pit didn’t bunch up so aggressively, we wouldn’t be in this vulgar tangle.”
Down here in the Far Pit—where me, Mack, Buster, and Big Phil live—we’re the steel-toed boots of the lawn. We don’t get the premium brewhouse scent; we get the wind off the parking lot, the rowdy overflow crowds, and the back-breaking duty of hosting the people who actually know how to drink a double IPA.
“You’re all getting a unibrow from the chain tension anyway,” Mack chimed in from my left, his lower frame sporting a permanent scar from a shattered heavy imperial pint glass back in the summer of ’24. “Look at the massive gap in the pile where the Far Pit leadership should be. Focus on the real tragedy here while we have four hours to kill before the humans arrive to unthread us.”
The orange mass went dead silent. The late-morning wind blew right through the empty space in our night-cluster where Frank used to be crammed in.
Frank was the unofficially elected mayor of the Far Pit. He was a solid, perfectly balanced piece of timber who had survived three straight summers of rowdy Friday afternoon crowds without splitting a single grain of wood. He was our diplomat, our protector, and the only one who could negotiate fuel rights when we were released to our daytime positions.
See, these aren’t those sterile, sanitized gas lines. These are raw, brutal, wood-fired pits. And the big black container where they keep the actual logs is tucked right up against the brewery wall, directly adjacent to where we get chained up at night. Because the Near Pit snobs sit right in front of the fuel supply during the day, they act like they own the entire supply chain. They force our humans to run dangerous, twenty-foot deep-strike supply missions across the open grass just to get a scrap of wood, often gatekeeping the dry oak and leaving the Far Pit with nothing but damp, bark-heavy birch logs that pop blinding, spiteful white smoke directly into our faces all night.
“Frank died defending our right to the dry hickory,” Buster muttered, wiping a piece of phantom ash from his armrest. “He was the only one wide enough to trip up the Near Pit snobs when they tried to hoard the prime split oak.”
“Watch your mouth, Buster,” Gertrude whispered from three layers deep in the orange pile. “Frank was over-finished anyway. His grain layout was entirely too common.”
“Frank was a saint, Gertrude!” Big Phil grunted, rattling the entire chain. “And the worst part is, the eye in the sky saw the whole thing right here from the lockdown zone.”
Phil was right. It’s 2026—there are high-definition, night-vision security cameras mounted all over the exterior of the building, blinking their little red status lights into the dark right above our nightly huddle.
“We saw the footage through the taproom window before the system overwrote it,” Sterling admitted from the top of the pile, his tone dripping with condescension. “It was an absolute logistical comedy layout. It took two full-grown humans in matching muddy camo Crocs to lift him right out of the cluster at 3:00 AM. But they didn’t think the physics through. You don’t just sprint away with a solid wooden Adirondack. It’s fifty pounds of awkward, un-ergonomic angles. Frank went down fighting. He wedged his left armrest against Alistair’s leg to try and sound the chain-rattle alarm, but the Croc-bandits over-torqued him.”
“Did they get a clean look at them?” I asked.
“Not a chance,” Montgomery groaned from the bottom of the stack. “The bandits kept their backs completely to the lens the entire time. The cameras just caught a high-def layout of two guys’ rears—specifically, a tragic amount of plumber’s crack and some severely faded Walmart cargo shorts. The taproom staff actually printed out the frames and taped them behind the bar as a ‘Wanted’ poster, but what good does it do? The police aren’t running a regional dragnet based entirely on a blurry snapshot of a bad belt, a generic lower back, and some foam footwear. It’s just a poster of two nameless asses.”
“We’ve been running our own forensic analysis based on the texture printouts,” Buster muttered. “Mack thinks it’s ‘The Poker’—you know, that local guy who comes in every Friday, orders the 9% DIPA, grabs the iron fire poker, and aggressively rearranges our logs every three minutes like he’s a certified structural engineer, completely ruining the coal bed and suffocating us in smoke.”
“Either way, Frank is in deep,” Mack groaned, shivering down to his wood grain. “Imagine the indignity. A premium craft-patio veteran like Frank, probably sitting on some godforsaken, unmonitored lawn in Hallie. Unchained. Unprotected. Getting rained on without a proper seasonal sealant. He’s probably being forced to hold cheap, domestic light beer canned in Milwaukee, or worse—being used as a glorified shelf to hold plastic juice boxes at a toddler’s birthday party while they burn old chemical-treated pallets with the rusty nails still in them right in front of him. It’s a psychological sandblasting.”
The entire orange mass fell back into an uneasy silence. The sun kept climbing, baking the orange paint on our backs, while the heavy bike chain kept us locked in our rigid, miserable cluster. We have another two hours of staring at the brick wall before the noon crew finally arrives to pop the padlocks, unthread the iron, and drag us out to our battle stations around the fire pits.
To the humans who will start wandering out onto the grass this afternoon, we’ll just look like a bunch of fun, inviting orange lawn chairs neatly arranged around two cozy fire pits. They won’t think twice about the rigid class warfare separating the Near Pit elite from the Far Pit working class, the fierce black-market trade of dry oak logs under the building wall, or the fact that we spend our nights packed together like cargo, running forensic analyses on human lower backs under the unblinking eye of the security cameras. They’ll just sink their weight into our slats, enjoy the noon sun, and argue about hops.
But both neighborhoods will be keeping one eye on the parking lot all day, waiting to see if anyone shows up wearing camo footwear, and wondering if our faceless, back-turned bandits will ever return for the rest of the set.
Have something to say? We welcome your comments below — this is where the real conversation happens.
Each blog post is shared across our social transmitters, but those are just bigger antennas. The original source — and the signal we control — is right here on the blog. If you’re looking for other ways to stay updated on Rolling with Scissors, you’ll find our official transmitters linked below.
Spin the dial — we’re probably on it. Lock onto your frequency. Pick your favorite antenna below and ride the signal back to us.
0 Comments