An individual running The Old Guys on repeat learns to measure the depth of a bond by the damage its loss would do. The material supplies one imagined response to bereavement and repeats it, a stool and a glass, until that becomes the only available picture of grieving. Ruin stands in as proof of love.

Sustained exposure narrows the imagined repertoire for loss to a single destination. Drinking through a bereavement acquires the character of fidelity, and the prospect of a companionable bar softens what the material itself calls hell. The individual grows readier to plan a collapse in advance.

A society that takes up The Old Guys establishes self-destruction as the recognized proof of a deep attachment. Communal rehearsal of a grief imagined entirely at a bar supplies mourners one script and a fixed address, and the man who drinks through a loss is understood to have loved most. Collapse is legible as devotion.

Populations that circulate it grow slower to intervene when a bereaved person begins drinking. The bar absorbs a function neighbours and families once performed, and a widower at a counter is met with recognition. A population files heavy drinking after a death under loyalty.