John stares at his grape juice glass. He watches a bubble pop
  at the top. The seconds on Ricia's pocketwatch slowly drip by,
  escaping into the eternal void of time past-gone. Some sounds
  of drinks being poured come from behind the bar. Bushroot
  picks a weed out of his "hair". Two small white lab mice make
  an attempt to take over the bar, but no one notices. The TV
  continues to play whatever it's playing. John stands up, holding
  his glass of grape juice. 

  "This grape juice, so frail, so mature, yet so young, holds
  secrets to life we mere foolish mortals could never
  comprehend. Nor us immortals. No, this inanimate, nonthinking
  object knows more than all our minds bound together ever
  could in a swirling mass of moldy peanutbutter with red
  sprinkles and apples that fall on guys' heads. While a knight
  rides on his noble steed, he could never see the peak at the top
  of a snow covered volcano on the open praire, surrounded by
  herds of cattle, being surveyed by sadistic English teachers
  marking up my papers -- and your papers -- with blue and red
  pens mentioning our horrendous use of runon sentences. But
  what is a renegade grenadier anyway? Doth anyone know the answer. 
  Linus doesn't. Dilbert doesn't. Team Rocket doesn't. No, the 
  answer lies in Disney's Hercules and pink fuzzy bunny slippers. 
  Yes, the ultimate answer. 42. Size 42. Episode 42. But Deep 
  Thought never produced the answer. The Earth was destroyed. 
  Pikachu was never caught. The noble steed was slaughtered into 
  Kris Kringle's battered and flattened Reindeer sausage. Yet the 
  orange dragon atop Mt. Killhimtomorrow remains intact, sleepless, 
  yet shattered into a million figurative pieces. But he still 
  hasn't figured out how to uninstall Windows 98 to get Windows 95 
  back, but he realized it didn't really matter so he threw himself 
  into the flames of death. Oh, poor little pony! Little green pony! 
  Moss covered pony with buckteeth. Ahh, how time flies when you're 
  being chased by a vicious guard dog. Yes, indeedilly doo. Too 
  heads are better than one, unless they've been disembodied. That 
  makes me nautious. Not nachos, for Mexican food is the biggest 
  curse ever given to man. Well, not really. But Moses said it
  was. Even if he didn't, he did, though he didn't. No, noone 
  understands antimatter. It was a concept created by some out of 
  work physicist. But you'll appear stupid if you don't know at the 
  conventions so you nod. And nod hard. But not so hard your head 
  would fall off. That would be painful. Pain, not as in Pain and 
  Panic, but pain as in 'Oh goshdangit! That bloody hurts!', y'know. 
  I remember once I broke my thumb. That too, my sons and daughters, 
  was painful. An Underground Society begins. A nasal hair grows too 
  long. A pig named Napoleon takes over a farm. Zeus has another kid 
  with a mortal woman. Some guy named Gene pushes Finney out of a 
  tree, yet we will never know how wise grape juice is till we fill 
  its shoes."

the "story" is John Renard's, all the refs belong to their respective companies