A Bar-worthy conversation


It was St. Patrick’s day. I had finished several Bailey’s on the Rock, three cans of Guiness, two black velvets, two Toucan Breakfasts and seven episodes of Arrested Development. The group decided to stop by at QP for some pool. Naturally, the combination of the bodily abuse I was giving myself now and the payback from Player’s last night led to the deterioration of my mental and physical state. I began to subconsciously ask questions like:

“Should I go home and go to sleep?”

This would have turned out to be a mistake, based on events that would happen later in the night.

But I didn’t. I left my friends at the pool table, and turned to something that I do often in a social bar environment. I wander, and begin to the speak to the first person who makes and holds significant eye contact. I actually found many groups that I knew this night, and wandered around and through them, causing the occasional laugh, or hugging or shaking hands or remembering names.

Then I settled on a really good one introduced to myself by my good friend Kelsey Benning; and this is where the meat comes in.

Some how the phrase “Green with Envy” came up. It occurred to me that there are seven deadly sins, and seven colours in the traditional high school rainbow. Our goal was to find a 1-1 relation between colours and deadly sins, preferably which would fill in the phrase

Colour with Deadly Sin

We looked for cases where the association would “seem” right, not for any sort of formal meaning. And so we came up with:

Red Rage
Orange Gluttony
Yellow Sloth
Green Envy
Blue Greed
Indigo Lust
Violet Pride

Green and Envy were pretty obvious. Yellow was associated with cowardice, and Sloth. Orange came to mean candy wrappers or something, hence Gluttony. Blue was Greed because of conservatism or something (Blue is the colour of the conservatives in Canada). Red was a toss-up between Rage and Lust, but it eventually went to Rage because it fit the phrase “Red with Rage” better. Violet came to be associated with gay Pride. Finally, leaving Lust with Indigo, which I justify as the colour your genitalia turn after hours of rough sex.