One day in May, feeling bored and bummed out by the pandemic, I launched into a home-improvement project that I hoped might ease my unease: building a bar. Bars are good places for bad times—or at least they used to be, before they were canceled along with everything else. My last public drink was consumed on March 6: a Bud Light at the Hogs and Heifers Saloon in Las Vegas, possibly the least socially distanced place on earth, where the all-female staff wear Daisy Duke shorts and dance on the bar top. I was in town for the Mint 400, the desert off-road race immortalized by Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and Hogs and Heifers was hosting an event for teams and sponsors. Across the counter, a bartender held a bottle of vodka in one hand and a megaphone in the other, which she aimed where I sat on a stool a few feet away, blaring: “You going to do a shot, or what?”