"Don't never let her know you are smart, the universe is no place to start." -- "Find Her Finer" by Frank Zappa

It all started with 2001. The movie. The Library of Congress Film Preservation Tour. At three screens in Albuquerque, lots of old movies are being shown this week. Myself and five other friends went to see 2001: A Space Odyssey Saturday afternoon at the SUB--the Student Union Building at the University of New Mexico.

It wasn't a packed house, but there were quite a few people there. And quite a few of them even stayed after the intermission. It was dark--night, actually--when we got out of the movie, and for three of us, it was just the beginning of a long night. So we went to the Frontier--a fixture of the UNM scene for longer than any of us have been alive. It is located directly across the street from the UNM Bookstore and is open 24 hours.

I got one of my usual meals: a fiesta burger (a regular cheeseburger smothered with red chile), a side salad with ranch and a side of beans. I scarfed it all down as quickly as possible. After eating, we were supposed to join a group of percussionists at Saggio's--a pizza place that also sells beer.

At Saggio's we got a pitcher of Newcastle and settled in for a while. There are about 10 TVs in the bar area of Saggio's, and they were showing college football, college basketball and professional basketball. Inexplicably, one of the TVs, the one most directly in my sight, was playing previews for movies that could be purchased pay-per-view over the Dish Network.

K-State and Nebraska had played earlier in the day in a game to decide the North division of the Big 12. I went to K-State for a semester 10 years ago. They won a single game that year, and I was gone before the snow melted in the spring. But now that K-State has a real football team (and UNM doesn't), I've been in the practice of rooting for them. It was during the first pitcher when we found out that Nebraska tattooed the Wildcats red.

I don't know if this was the reason we rushed into a second pitcher, but suddenly there we were: headlong into a Saturday night stew. The three of us are single and moderately successful guys. We have professional jobs, which basically means we aren't in the service industry, I think. Of course, we all think we're artists, too. Which brings up the conundrum of having "day jobs" and struggling to have time to do "really want to do." This work schizophrenia is not usually attractive to women who are looking for stability.

Near the end of the second pitcher, we were full on into the subject of a girl one friend and I had in common. She was beautiful, young (19), a dancer and an extreme pothead. Ultimately, as we agreed somewhere into the third pitcher, she wanted to get high more than anything else in the world. Not that I had a real moral issue with this, but it's really hard to have a relationship with someone who has no sexual appetite at all.

Somewhere during this conversation we got back to 2001 and the concept of free will versus destiny. And that third pitcher was turning us into staunch supporters of the free will theory. Lives are made of individual choices and that is what guides us, rather than some unseen guiding force.

We had noticed during this third pitcher a group of four women who sat a few tables over and were nursing a bottle of wine. They had just come from some kind of workout (Spandex was evident), and we were getting the occasional look from a couple of them. At the end of the third pitcher, we decided to join them.

One friend sprung for another bottle of wine, and we got to know the women. They had just stopped into Saggio's after a recreational volleyball game (they lost) for a drink. They'd never done this before, but, for some reason, they didn't want to go home. Very soon we found out that all of them were married (although they weren't all wearing rings--probably because of the volleyball game), and a few of them had teenage children.

Since we were all a little drunk--the wine was not a regular thing for these women--we dismissed a lot of getting to know you chit-chat and got down to the important issues: breast augmentation and the concept of free will versus destiny.

The wine drinkers were all for destiny and real breasts. Points raging from "we never come here" to "we could have said no to you sitting down" were offered in defense of destiny. We stated our free will position--and that choices are made freely, rather than directed by a cosmic togetherness--and then agreed about the breast thing. As one of the women pointed out, no one wants "rocks in the chest."

Nothing happened. I just want to tell you that now because I know a few eyebrows went up when I said that all of the women were married. So nothing happened. It was more of an exercise of will rather than something hanky panky like. The women were very happy that they were able to attract young men in their twenties, and we thought it was interesting that the better looking half of the foursome were the ones who drank the most.

Eventually the women left, and we stumbled back to our friend's house on the other side of campus--which is where we were parked. And about two hours later, after more discussions of artistic vision versus real jobs and a few glasses of water to dilute the beer, we finally headed home.

I'm not sure what the lesson is this week. There must be some revelation--something that can only be translated by stream-of-consciousness camera tricks and freaky music, like the end of 2001. But, like the end of that Kubrick classic, the real meaning is hard to explain. Let's think of it this way: everything means everything or nothing means everything or nothing means nothing.

It just matters how you work out the math for yourself.

Matt Worley doesn't claim to know the answer, but he has looked at the answer key in the back of the book.