Slow Going

This night has been slow going. It’s been one empty, disappointing bar after another. As if eventually we’re going to find one that’s got all of our friends inside. As if all our friends don’t live in different corners of the country now. Like bars are lottery tickets, and increasing the number that you accumulate somehow increases your chance of winning something. Like there’s something to win at all. We even stopped to eat dinner to postpone our inevitable surrender and return trip home. We called some friends who still live in Pittsburgh, the ones who haven’t moved away yet. Not much luck. The Girl From Moscow is out tonight, though. She’ll be making her way down to the Moose with some friends. That’s encouraging. It still doesn’t mean that we’ll see her. It means that we might. She’s unpredictable. We’ll sit tight and wait. We’ve got nothing else going on. We shoot pool, badly. This bartender knows what my wife and I drink. He’s great. He sees us approach, and grabs the appropriate bottles, and we all smile and laugh, and we tip well, and we drink. And the Girl From Moscow arrives with Richelle and Jon, and we’re pleasantly surprised. She looks beautiful. We’re not surprised that she looks beautiful, but that she arrived, and I don’t know why she’s always wearing so many clothes, and she gives us each a big hug and a kiss on the cheek. They order drinks, and we continue working on ours. Somebody’s terrible selections are playing on the jukebox. We all talk and have a good time. Everybody is cool, and everything I’ve drunk is beginning to catch up to me, and I’m buzzing, and it seems like the purpose of everything I endured during the week was to lead me to this moment, and it seems like it might have been worth it. And I manage not to say anything stupid the whole time. I'm proud. That’s quite an accomplishment for me. They stay for about an hour, and then they head off to a club. They ask if we would like to come along, but we don't. It’s not really our kind of place. We’re not really club people. I look stupid in leather pants. They take off for the club. We wait a while to straighten up. Then we walk out the front door, into the drizzle, and go.

Cheerios Painted Black

She put her cigarette out in the palm of his hand, because he requested it. How absurd is that? I don’t think I would have honored that request. It seems like a lot of confusion and misdirected behavior. Of course they were both very gothy. Of course there was shitty industrial music pounding. Of course there were candles everywhere. Of course there were more clove cigarettes than you could count. Of course it was a room full of white people, painted even whiter than they naturally were. I think he was just scared to approach her any other way. So he had to wear fucked-upness and psycho-intensity like a suit of armor. It was a way to avoid swallowing his pride, putting his heart on his sleeve, and talking to her like a human. I think she was just playing along. It was relatively innocent, though she should have known better. The goth thing is hilarious to me. It’s for confused people who want so badly to be more evil and fucked up than the next. It seems like a frivolous pissing contest of sorts, just silly. Most of them are about as evil as a bowl of cheerios. They’re just a bowl of cheerios painted black. Asking a girl to put out her cigarette in your palm doesn’t make you intense or evil. I’m not sure what it makes you, but that’s not it.

Merging

You’re supposed to use both lanes clear up to the merge point. Most people don’t. Most people pile into the left lane, sit, and endure the wait. I generally ride the right lane all the way up to the merge point and rely on somebody else’s good nature to let me over. It easily saves me 20 minutes of commute time every day, and renews my faith in humanity to boot. I don’t think this makes me an asshole. Anybody else could do the same thing. Everybody gets to choose. Sometimes, arbitrarily and for no apparent reason, everybody uses both lanes equally, and it really slows me down. This happened today. As one street dumped into another, the Honda in front of me got into the left lane. I got into the right. We sat. We moved. We advanced alternately towards the merge point. It took a long time. When we reached the merge point, I ended up right back in line behind the same Honda.

The Stopped River and Parking Garage Sky

The river is standing still this evening. It stopped like it had nowhere to go. It makes you nervous when it does that. Rivers have to go somewhere. When they don’t, it feels like nature has given up, and the apocalypse is beginning. Maybe it’s stopped up? Clogged? The sky’s a concrete ceiling, like you would see in a parking garage, holding up everything above it. Heavy as the dirt they’re going to throw on you when you die. She still hasn’t responded yet, and I’m not sure that she will. Tonight’s a lifting night. Squats. Christ, I hate squats. They burn right up from your knees, through your thighs and hips, to your lower spine, and sit in your gut like bad milk. I could squat three of her at once, but I can’t even talk properly to one of her. The river still is not moving, and I’m almost home now. Well…fuck the river, and fuck her.

Insane Red Baby Steps

I entered the insane red bathroom, something out of a nightmare. There was an empty bottle of Corona seated in the strange, decrepit, filthy old sink. It was an unusual kind of sink, with two faucets and two sets of knobs. Pointed inward, forming a pie-shaped wedge with their negative space above the empty bottle of Corona. Inside that bottle, the slice of lime was still choked in the bottle’s throat. It was bright green and still looking clean and antiseptic in its bottle. I felt badly for it. The lime had had a rough night. Got sliced up, shoved in a bottle of shitty beer, left inside the bottle, and thrown inside this filthy sink. He was left out of context. You couldn’t wash anything in that sink. You could only make things dirtier in it. That sink was the lime’s hell. The white tiled floor was glistening and bright and slick with piss. I walked up to the urinal, which felt ridiculous, as it didn’t seem like anybody else prior to me had gone to the trouble of walking up to the urinal. I thought about the shoes that I would never be able to wear inside my house again. I took aim, pissed, and looked down. Below the urinal, near my left foot there was a giant squashed centipede, and near my right foot there was a smashed brown beer bottle. No label. It was pulverized. Broken into many very small pieces, it looked like the product of very deliberate effort. Perhaps the bottle had been used to squash the centipede? No piece of glass bigger than one inch in any direction. It didn’t look like that bottle had ever contained a lime, and I thanked God for that. If there had been a lime in that bottle he would’ve been having a worse night than the one in the Corona bottle in the sink. The rest of the bar was also red, and I returned to it as I left the mens’ room. My wife and the Girl From Moscow were still sitting at the booth, talking. I slid in beside them, sandwiching the Girl From Moscow between my wife and myself. She put an arm around me and cuddled up to me, and I bit her neck and chewed on her ear. She cooed a bit and didn’t resist. I held on to the moment, and rolled it around with my tongue like you do with a mouthful of whiskey before you swallow it. Apparently during the piercing incident from the birthday outing, my wife had learned that the Girl From Moscow’s carpet doesn’t match her drapes. I hadn’t had the privilege of seeing that yet, so it was news to me. We talked about it briefly, and why she dyes her hair black. It didn’t make much sense to me, but what does? Her thin left arm around me and the taste of her neck made enough sense. Our friend Stephanie was tending bar that night. We all drank and drank, and we closed down the bar at 2am. That’s as far as we’d get that night, but it felt good. Sometimes in life you must be content with baby steps.