The Patience to Dream

There was one particular run I went on with Dad that I still find myself thinking of and not just because it was January and you knew somewhere a thousand miles to the north somebody was scraping ice off their windshield while you were running shirtless beneath the Florida sun and at that moment the only thing you felt as you thought about that poor bastard scraping ice wasn't guilt or pity but instead the sweat start to collect on your back and the not-so-cold-January-air fill your lungs as you kept running and then maybe when you were done thinking of Minnesota and Michigan and Canada and the people who choose to live there you'd think about whether you'd have beer or wine or maybe even whiskey with dinner. 


All of the runs were special in that way, in how they allowed you to appreciate that you had a Dad, an excellent one, one you could go for runs with and ask him questions you hadn't quite figured out yet. Where you could listen to him talk about his wife and his marriage and still hear the spark, or run along as he talked about what Joseph and Ellie and Amelia were doing and how proud he was, so genuinely proud and excited. Where you could run beside him and not say anything for a few minutes, just breathe and run, but that be more than enough. 

So why one run in particular? 


We were running along South Lagoon and talking about 2012 and what it could be for both of us when Dad mentioned these lines from the Tao:

I have thought about those lines many times since then, not just because they are simple and beautiful. I'll write them down on an envelope or scrap piece of paper and stuff it in my jean pocket so when I'm rummaging through my pockets at random parts of the day [insert joke here], I'll pull the scrap paper out and be reminded not only of the lines but the run, and they are both good things to be reminded of.  

Patience has never come naturally to me. It was a word I associated with mediocrity, almost always an excuse for non-action. Accomplishment was action. Idleness was waste. And so life was simple but a struggle, always a struggle. There was always something to be done, something that needed to be done, because I had to keep moving, even if the water was too muddy to see where all this motion was actually taking me. So I'd write when I didn't really feel like writing because scripts don't write themselves, and I'd train when I didn't really want to train because that was all part of getting to the starting line. And eventually the grind wears on you until the things you love become the things you hate because it is all forced and there is no time to rest and breathe and let the water settle.  

A few days ago, I went through my little copy of the Tao that Dad gave me to re-read the lines about muddy water but instead I stumbled across this:

It's been there all along -- the home-runs are hit when you swing naturally, never when you swing for the fences. The right person always seems to come along "when you least expected it." The best writing comes when you're not trying to do your best writing. 

I spent the last six years writing down the same goals and grinding my teeth in anguish when I got to the end of each year and the debt wasn't paid off and the script wasn't sold. I'd wonder why I was fighting so hard and getting nowhere, why I felt like such a failure. 


How much better it is to realize that the scripts will sell when it is ready to be sold. Even better to be happy that I haven't sold a script yet, because it probably wouldn't have been very good, and I wouldn't have done the races I've done, or struggled through debt and learned what I have about money and its value. I would have never met Kristin. And I would have never gone for that run.


My life and everything in it would be different, and I'm not sure for the better. 


As it is now, the mud continues to settle and each day it feels as though things are falling into place. 

Florida, And Much More

I want so desperately to tell you about everything that happened in those two weeks in Florida. To share it all --  every glass of wine and all the quiet moments in the sun on the balcony and the dinner conversations and the searching for baby penguins and the hot tubs and the strolls along the beach and the backgammon and that damn Captain Spaulding -- and those are only the beginning. There were the looks on Mom and Amelia's faces when I said something they hadn't expected, the feeling of the sand on your feet, watching a little girl run around and hand Gigi a parrot and Papa his cell-phone and realize that maybe she's got it all right and you've got a lot of things backwards. 


But just as a good book is something to be enjoyed, not memorized, so I think it is with the past two weeks. The right parts will stay, some will fade, and others, as Kristin and my dear mother would say, will slip through the bridge and be lost forever. 


Here is what hasn't slipped through the bush or the bridge, yet:


I remember waking up one morning to the soundtrack of Jack and Lilly and walking out and saying hi to everyone -- at 7:30 am, I was usually the last one awake -- and as I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes I looked on the kitchen counter-top and saw this:

I'm not quite sure what it means, and when I asked my dear mother, she was vague and just told me it had to do with her studies. I took the photo partly to see if upon further analysis I could make any sense of the numbers, which I still haven't, but also because the numbers and the circled 3 and the underlined solar ray comment at the top are so beautifully Mom. I love this about her, as I know Dad does. I love that she reads books on topics that I didn't know existed, that certain times of day like 11:11 and 10:10 are somewhat significant, and that water is something that needs to be de-ionized [or does it need to be ionized? I can't recall]; she is so wonderfully open to the world and all it has to offer.  

I also remember opening a cheap writing pad I'd brought along with me and seeing this:

The scribbles, when I looked at them, left me as confused as Mom's numbers did. But then again, some of the most beautiful things are the ones we understand the least. I'm not sure what pleasure Lilly gets out of uncapping a pen, then running it repeatedly in circles until there are so many twirls and lines and squiggles that there's no room to continue drawing. I'm not sure why she doesn't try to draw boxes, or 3-D cubes [my personal favorite]. But evidently the aggressive circle-drawing is sufficient for her, because there were probably fifteen or twenty more pages just like these, some done in pencil, others in black ink. And then of course, if the pages weren't enough, her arms/legs/toenails were also things to be drawn on. 

Of course I remember the beach. [If you look closely on the walkway towards the bottom left, you'll see Mom heading out for one of her "short" strolls]. The wind made it cold at times, especially if the sun went away, and the water was always cold, but it was still beautiful and therapeutic to walk on the sand as the water rolled over your feet and ankles every few seconds. There were a few times I'd wake up and look out at the sun hitting in the water and I'd ask myself why anyone would voluntarily live in North Dakota or Michigan, or  I'd be amazed at how little I thought of work when I was away from it. 

One image that has stuck from the beach is that of a man who smiled as Kristin and I walked by him. He'd been swimming and frolicking in the frigid water all morning [we'd watched him with a certain level of amazement from the balcony], then he'd run out of the water and lie down shirtless on the sand, which was cold enough to warrant jeans and a sweater. As we walked by, he was stuffing some sand and shells into a water bottle and he turned to Kristin and I and his eyes lit up and he gave us both a full-tooth smile. At first I thought he was insane (what a sad thing -- to assume that because a man smiles so large and unashamed, that there's something off about him), but then I thought maybe he had found out today that he'd beaten cancer, or he'd won the lottery, or his ex-wife had just died. Maybe he wasn't insane at all but was just celebrating life by swimming in cold water and lying on the sand. Maybe it's insane that more people don't do this. 

Sometimes you'd walk into a room and see this: 

Dad did a rough calculation and figured that you could fit about thirty babies of Jack's size on the bed. I still don't know how someone so small can feel so heavy when you hold them.  

And what else? There are the runs with Dad where we talked about the Tao, relationships, what's wrong with America, races that sound interesting, walking across Spain. There was a brief visit from Brogan, who I then said goodbye to for the better part of 2012, but not before a few more great chats and giving him a hard time just because I could. 

There were the walks along the beach with my parents, chasing Lilly and then carrying her to help shield her from the cold wind, long meanderings with Kristin where she usually ended up pilfering my hoodie or my beanie because she had under-dressed but the conversations were still delightful and invigorating and ones that I find myself replaying at unexpected points throughout the day. And of course there was the food -- shepard's pie!, glorious fajitas, the pizza bar, pasta with meat sauce, pancakes, barbecues. 

My mind keeps fluttering back to something Leonardo wrote. Famous for his paintings, Leonardo also kept an amazing amount of journals, in which he drew [sometimes inappropriate things] and recorded everything he saw and thought. It makes me wary of ever leaving a journal behind, because you're bound to put a few embarrassing things in there and some historian is bound to find it and then history knows what you tried to keep a secret from your friends. 

Anyways, in a note written beside an anatomical drawing of the heart, he wrote:

How could you describe this heart in words without filling a whole book?

How can I describe what it's like playing nineteen games of hide and seek with your goddaugther and always hiding in the same place and her surprise at finding you every time? Or sitting beside the people you love and just looking around and taking a sip of good wine and feeling so lucky? How can I ever describe my heart and what is in it at those moments, to know that one day I will die and when I do my thoughts will drift to moments like these that were filled with the people that I loved? 

The question Leonardo asks is perfect. And so is the answer. 

Dive Bar

I've never been certain of what someone means when they tell you that such-and-such is a "real dive bar." I have an idea of what they want me to picture, but even that I doubt is very accurate. Dirt always finds its way into these dive bars I create in my head and so do wooden floors. I don't know why, but they do. 

So I hesitate to call the place we went to last night a dive bar because there was very little dirt anywhere and no wooden floors to be found. There was, however, a plaque on the wall which read 'Voted best Dive Bar in Austin 2001" which left me no choice but to refer to it as such. 

Besides the plaque, there were those neon beer signs on the wall that I like for the same unexplainable reasons that I always conjure up dirty wooden floors when I think of dive bars. Dos XX, Budweiser, Miller Lite -- they were all there, glowing their bright blues and greens and reds. Interspersed among the signs were pictures of music legends, old UT football schedules, and signs that told you not to take pictures of the place and that they only accepted cash and served bottled beer.

An older bartender who looked strikingly like Elvis even though she was a woman told Joe and I once that "you come for the beer, and stay for the jukebox," and she was right about that. It was constantly playing some country or ZZ Top or somebody else that had been around before I was born. And if nobody put in any money the whole bar would go quiet for a minute or two until someone finally walked up and put a few dollars in and chose George Strait or Willie Nelson. Queen was about as radical as you'd get. 

The best way to describe this place is to tell you the story about a guy in a trenchcoat who yelled "WOOOOOOH!" as he did the global jerk-off motion with his hands towards his friend. Then he made the finishing motion, smiled, and said "Merry Fuckin' Christmas!" and hugged his buddy and then they walked off to the bar to buy some bottled beer. It was that sort of place. 

There were a few tables and chairs scattered across the non-wooden floor and when we were sitting at one of them Joe said that if he could be any animal he would be a stork so he could deliver babies. "They're the middlemen between God and Humans... You deliver a child in your mouth. Drop it off. Fly away." One of his closing points was that storks are the UPS of baby delivery. 

His backup choice of animal was the Loch Ness Monster. 

Whenever you sit and drink bottled beer for a few hours you inevitably have to go to the bathroom and I certainly did a few times. When you walked in, it didn't smell too bad, but the restroom was run-down and poorly lit. Running against one of the walls was a communal urinal that looked like a sink, and the first time I had to pee I was so confused by it all that it took me a while to realize that that was where you were supposed to do it. Everything about the bathroom, and I mean everything, fit so perfectly with the rest of the bar that it almost felt as though it had been designed that way; as if the original architects had pissed on the floor around the toilets until it had that stain you could never scrub out and they installed a mirror that had had so much smoke blown on it and water splashed on it and dirty hands rubbed up against it that it would always look like someone had taken a hot shower in there fifteen minutes earlier. 

One of the first things you noticed about the bathroom were some of the things people wrote on the wall.  You could read most, a few had faded to the point where you had to look closely and guess what they'd been going for. But all of them, you knew, had some story behind them. 

My sister Ellie, the only convicted vandal in the family, might be able to shed some light on the rush one gets from writing on bathroom walls, but to this day I still don't see it. Maybe that was what explained all the messages and ink on the wall. A rush. I'm guessing the bottled beer played a role, too. But still, you looked at it all and couldn't help but wonder: Why?

Anyways, the writing was there and I read it and then looked around and quickly snapped a few photos on my phone before anybody else came in. This wasn't the kind of place to be caught using your camera in the bathroom. 

Not sure, exactly. Though I could guess.

Just missed him. 

Hard to argue.

The wood on the doorway.
The first of many "Okie Roy" references.
But the first, and only Jenna Bush mention I could find. 

A lot of animosity towards Okie Roy.

Above the doorway. Notice the Okie Roy comment in the bottom left, proclaiming him
"the fuck king of shit mountain."  

I have a feeling Ethan didn't write this.

A bit too vague to be helpful. 

Really hammering the point home.

Clever.

Math even I can understand.

"Rugged and Ready" condoms for 75 cents. A steal, if you ask me. 

Some questionable advice. 

Here "it" is again, this time on the door frame.

My flash obscures the last word. It reads: "Okie Roy fuck'd the chick in Hansen."
Hansen was [and maybe still is] a band comprised of three teenage boys -- all brothers.
Though, in fairness to the author, the guitarist/singer did have long blonde hair
and in his pre-pubescent days, could be confused for a teenage girl.

I never asked the bartender about Okie Roy, in part because I wasn't sure how much time she'd spent in the men's room.

Every now and then a song would come on the jukebox and you could see everyone tapping their boots and shoes to it, especially if it was Creedence or some other upbeat song that was easy to tap to. In one corner, there was always a game of shuffleboard going on between grown men who'd cheer or groan depending on which team they were on and in a different corner was the pool table where there was never really much noise save the clack of cue against ball. Those guys didn't seem to care too much about the music and the rest of the bar didn't seem to care too much about them. 

It was a nice place to drink a beer; it sure beat the hell out of the crowds and speakers and standing-room-only you'd find at pretty much any other bar in Austin that night. 

When Stevie Ray Vaughan came on towards the end it was as though the song had been written to be played in a place like this, for people who dressed and talked and stood and sat like everyone in the bar did, and the bottled beer which was cold and that was the only nice thing you could really say about it was meant to be drunk in a place like this as Texas Flood played over a jukebox.  

Another Tuesday

The bar I work at is very different from the bar I write about. Not that I've fabricated any of the stories I've shared-- I swear on a different God than the one that counseled George W. Bush that I haven't. Those tales are all as true as I can remember, though in some instances they have been truncated in consideration of the "busy" lives I know all my readers must lead. Given the bits and pieces that I have shared, however truncated they are, it would be reasonable to assume the bar is constantly packed with people interesting enough to write about, for better or worse. 

But very often, especially during the day, the bar is empty and there is no one there except you and the athletes on all the tvs and when people do finally make their way in to the bar, a lot of them are the kind that say please and thank you and tip well. They call you by your name instead of just hollering a "hey!" like you would call a dog or a "bartender!" as if you are nothing more than the title itself. Most people don't stand on tables, and even fewer throw up in the sink. Some nights the job is worth it and you make more money than you probably deserved and you almost feel guilty about it. Almost.

You don't always have a good comeback, either. Sometimes people are assholes and you think of what to say seconds after they've left, or you don't say anything at all and they just walk away and you tell yourself you'll get 'em next time and then next time comes and it happens again. Sometimes you see a beautiful girl and choke on your words, or the words come out but in the wrong order and she walks away and doesn't give you her number or even a good tip but instead just leaves you with a feeling of rejection that you've known since you first asked a girl to dance and she said no.

Many conversations on and off work involve a brief complaint about the bar and everything that comes with the job, but once that's done, very often we talk about the joy of not having succumbed yet --  the freedom  coupled with the income to pack up and go wherever you can stick a pin on a map, the relief in not being glued to a chair and a screen and business talk for the 9 to 5 and perpetually worried about things like job security and that glorious term advancement.

Without a doubt, drunk people suck -- especially when they push you and call you a fucking asshole because you won't give them their keys and let them drive. The weird hours, the shifts where you don't make enough to pay for a tank of gas, the demeaning feeling in your core when you clean glasses or pour drinks for some people -- they strip away the importance and glory most jobs live in and allow you to see the bar for what it truly is.

Too many of the people that come in and drink in the hope of making their life fun in a single night or a weekend, those people just get dressed up to talk about their work, as if it is all they know or care to know or scariest of all, it might be the only thing they have worth sharing.

I guess the point is that much of the bar isn't worth sharing either. Liquor orders aren't that exciting. Neither is turning up the volume on the music inside the bar, or changing a tv from ESPN to ESPN2. We hear the same songs every weekend. At least one person a week calls one of the girls "sweety" or "honey" or "baby" and they tell me about it. There aren't many moments you can look back on and say "I made a real difference in someone's life today," except maybe when they call you an asshole because you wouldn't let them drive home.

But then it'll be 3pm on a Monday afternoon and one of our regulars comes in, astonishingly drunk, and he asks me for the number for a towing company because his front right wheel is all sorts of fucked up from hitting a curb and I wonder how he got this way by three o'clock on a Monday. I hope that all he hit was a curb and then wonder why he decided  the best place to sort this all out was my bar. I wonder what his son that he occasionally talks about would think if he could see this. I wonder if that ugly part of him that you can't help but see is hidden within me and could come out one day. What do you have to do to kill something like that?

And as I'm looking at him and wondering all of these things he sits down and orders a beer and a shot and something in my stomach drops and I know that I must go home and write about it, about his unkempt hair and the lack of anything at all in his eyes.

Tuesday

It's been jeans-and-jacket-weather for a while now in Austin [not to be confused with jean-jacket weather, which is where it's the perfect temperature for denim jackets]. Though people from Chicago and Washington DC and Minnesota continually tell me how not-cold it is here, it still gets cold enough at night and sometimes during the day for you to see your breath and for your exposed skin to sting and ache when the wind hits it. Apparently that's not cold in the north, which leaves me with even less of an urge to go up there again than before. 


Today was not cold. In fact, it was actually quite warm -- warm to the point where those people from Chicago and Washington and Minnesota who have a better grasp on the weather than I do wouldn't even be able to argue otherwise. Less than two weeks from Christmas and it was in the mid 60's practically all day, even climbing to the 70's for a few hours. The rain came for a few hours too and after it had left the entire city felt damp and humid and all I could think about was what Ellie's hair would look like if she stood outside in it for a few minutes and I decided it'd look like the curly hair I draw on stick figures. 


I wanted to put something on facebook about today's unseasonably warm temperatures proving the existence of global warming, but I just couldn't bring myself to do it. People who believe that a cold day in summer [or a warm day in winter] somehow validates or disproves a theory based on decades and decades of impartial scientific data -- those people should be quarantined. 


These are the same people who call our President a muslim [he's not] because his name sounds foreign, the same people who call him a socialist/communist [as if those are synonymous, which they're not, and even if they were, still wouldn't be accurate] because he supports universal healthcare, the same people who quote the Bible as they protest homosexuality [usually Leviticus] and scream about how gays are destroying the sanctity of marriage,  yet never mention the fact that over half of all "sanctified marriages" end with a divorce in part because the average American spends more time in front of a tv than they do talking with their kids and their spouse. These are the same people who believe that dinosaur bones in museums are tests of faith from God, the same people who can name more American Idols winners than Supreme Court justices. 


Maybe I shouldn't be surprised. 


When people find out that I'm a bartender full-time they tell me how jealous they are, ask how fun it must be always getting to meet new people and be social, as if constantly being around people -- most of them drunk or close to it -- is a perk of the job.


"Always something different, right?" they'll also ask, and I'll nod because it's much easier than explaining that a lot of what I do is actually mindless repetition. A vodka-soda is always the same, the wells and the liquor bottles are always wiped at the end of the night, and you'd be surprised at how most people blend together and act when alcohol's involved so that they're really not exciting new people but rather one mosaic of drunk assholes. 


I even make the same joke when people ask me where the bathrooms are [I point to a trash-can behind the bar].


But the bar has its moments that you can never prepare for. They just happen and you react and then think about them for the rest of the night. You can go a week without having a single moment like it and then one night you'll have nine. I guess in that sense each night is different, though hopefully you can see why it's just easier to nod than to try and explain all that. 


****


I came into work in jeans even though it wasn't jean-weather. A guy who used to be in the bar all the time was there and we shook hands. He was with a woman, which was nice to see, though in truth she wasn't much to look at, but then again, neither was he so you felt happy that they'd both found each other. They were both drunk, which was the only way I'd ever seen him and I could smell the Jager on his breath. When the time came for him to close his tab, he realized he'd left his debit card somewhere. He patted each of his pockets about fifteen times, pulled all the cards out of his wallet a dozen more, and then he finally looked at me and shrugged.


-"I don't know what you want me to do," he said. "I'm dead in the water here."


He went through the whole pocket-pat, wallet-emptying routine again. The woman even checked her purse.


-"You know me, man... Can I come by tomorrow and take care of it? I probably left my card at home or something. I'm always doing stupid shit like that, he he he. But I'll come take care of it and tip you really good... I just don't have have my card right now.


I looked at him again, not quite sure of what I was going to say and what I wasn't going to. Finally I said something about the tab being too big, that his word, while appreciated, wouldn't cover it. He handed me a few cards. They were declined. He handed me a gift card to some store I'd never heard of and asked if I wanted to give him some cash for it, though he wasn't exactly sure how much was left on it. After I'd refused his kind offer to buy the gift card [you'd be making money off it!] I asked if he had anyone who could come down and pay it for him and he told me his brother was out of town. I asked if there was anyone besides his brother and he pretended not to hear because I think it was easier than answering. 


His girlfriend's card was declined, too. 


After even more pocket-searches that produced nothing he said this:


-"So what now? We wait here until the bar closes and then you call the cops?" He was becoming more firm, wanting to show himself and his girl just how in control of the situation he was.


I've found that talking to drunk people accomplishes very little. So I didn't respond. I just looked at him.


-"Well, I'm not staying here all night, ok? I'm going to go home, and I'll be back tomorrow and I'll pay the fucking bill once I find my fucking card... This wouldn't even be an issue if she'd asked for my card after the first round of drinks. I wouldn't have started a tab then, because I couldn't have given her a card. Why would she start me a tab when I didn't even bring my card? Look, I don't have it. I'm going now and I'll pay you tomorrow." He got up to leave.


Before he got too far away I leaned over the bar towards him, did my best Clint Eastwood stare and explained that he wasn't going anywhere while the tab was open, that the bartender who had started him a cash tab was only guilty of assuming that he'd come into the bar capable of paying for the drinks that he ordered, and then I ended by telling him that if he ever swore at me again, especially after all the drinks I'd bought him before and how nice I'd tried to be about the whole situation, if he swore again he could get the fuck out of the bar and I'd help him get out. I meant it and I think he could tell I did because he became much nicer after that.


In the end, the girlfriend left a card that she promised would have funds transferred into the account by midnight. I took her license as well and they both left the bar a little wobbly and  sore at me. At two, when I was closing out the drawer I ran the card and it went through, which I wasn't expecting. I thought about adding a 20% gratuity on top of it all, but I didn't want to push my luck.






While this search for a card/some form of payment was going on there were other people at the bar, though not too many because it was Tuesday. One of the few bar guests was a younger woman, 27 at the most, who I'd seen in the bar a handful of times before. She was a bigger girl, the kind who drank Stella because it was healthy. She was friendly enough to smile at you every time you looked at her. From every little conversation I'd ever had with her, I knew her to be perpetually depressed, so I'd secretly nicknamed her DumpTruck because not only was she kind of built like one, but she'd also unload all of her burdens onto you in an impressively short period of time. Once it was that her boyfriend had cheated on her. A different night, her cat hadn't been doing too well, and she guessed it would be only a matter of days.


Tonight, I handed her a beer and she thanked me by saying that she'd been fired from her job. She had a friend with her, thank God, so I only had to listen to all of this when the friend went to bathroom or when I tossed her a new beer, but that was still more than enough. I looked over at them -- DumpTruck and her friend -- and I'd see the friend's eyes briefly wander to the televisions behind me or to the other people sitting at the bar and it reminded me of the pleading look you see sometimes in the once bright eyes of caged animals. 


When DumpTruck handed me a card to pay for the drinks, it was declined. She smiled the kind of smile that borders on insanity and handed me another card, talking about how it all made perfect sense. 


The card went through, thank god. 






On the far left side of the bar were three lawyers. They were young -- young enough to still be talking about passing the bar -- and they kept using big words that sounded forced. There wasn't much else to listen to so I pretended to look busy but really just eavesdropped on their conversation, hoping to pick up a few impressive legal phrases I could recycle later in conversation with Joe. It turns out that one of the lawyers had a girlfriend whose father had just passed away. The father had a sizable amount of "stuff" to leave behind, and the stuff was being fought over by the girlfriend and her step-mother. He was having to get involved and apparently the girlfriend wasn't making life easy because she was stealing things that she felt entitled to, like diamond necklaces and handguns. 


I had to make some drinks so I missed the rest but I couldn't help but think how sad it must be to lose a father, and how much sadder it is to fight over what he left behind. 




Not surprisingly, somebody's birthday was on Tuesday as well and he was out celebrating with his friends and they were all getting drunk. You always know when it's somebody's birthday because the birthday boy/girl and/or their friends mention it at least five or six times in the hope that you'll buy them a birthday shot. But the birthday boy was loud and his friends were the kind of people Malcolm Gladwell talked about in Blink who you looked at and instantly didn't like even though you couldn't quite explain why you didn't like them. So they kept talking about his birthday and I kept nodding and eventually they got the hint that there weren't going to be any birthday shots. 


One shot they ordered and paid for was called "The European", which I'd never heard of before. It was an 1/8oz of vodka, which you snorted, instantly followed by a full shot of tequila, which you drank. They took it and both sneezed and grimaced for a while afterwards. Then they high-fived. I tried to remember if I'd ever heard a story about people in Europe snorting vodka, but nothing came to mind, so I just decided that the person who named the shot was an idiot and was probably picketing against gay marriage somewhere, quoting a Bible he hardly ever read. 


After shots, most of the birthday party found a table and started playing Jenga, but a few lingered around the bar and chatted as they danced to the music. A couple was among those that hung around the bar and it became apparent that they weren't a happy couple when the girl stepped back and said quite loudly "don't you ever call me a FUCKING WHORE again!" It was the beginning to a conversation that everyone's embarrassed to be a part of except for the two people actually in it. 


-"I didn't fucking call you a whore, Ashley!"


-"I don't like it when you call me that!"


-"I didn't call you any-thing!"


-"Then why'd I hear it?"


-"You tell me!"


-"I'm not a whore."


-"I NEVER SAID YOU WERE! JESUS!"


-"You think I'm making this up?"


-"I don't know what you're even talking about!"


-"I'M NOT A WHORE, ALL RIGHT?"


It kept on this way -- saying everything with an exclamation mark -- until the guy said he wasn't listening anymore. A few minutes later he was kissing her neck and she was laughing.  


The same girl fell off a table later and hit her head quite hard. She'd been standing on the table, wearing a ring on her middle finger that had flashing lights on it. She was standing on the table, flicking people off with her light-up ring. Clever. 


I saw it all happen before any of it happened, but I didn't say anything because I was tired of them, especially her. It's not an excuse, but it's all I've got at this point. I just watched and waited, though I didn't have to wait too long. The table shifted and she came tumbling down like those giant wooden blocks of Jenga, making just as much noise. She got to her feet a few seconds later, rubbing the back of her head. "I'm a FUCKING SOLDIER," were her first words when she stood up. The birthday boy agreed with the whole soldier part and decided to celebrate it with a round of shots, which I heavily underpoured. 




The last round of shots the party took were the most memorable. No Europeans this time, just straight whiskey. I poured them and they all clinked glasses and the birthday boy shouted "IT'S MY FUCKING BIRTHDAY, NIGGERS!!" and they all knocked it down. A black girl who I'd bought a drink for earlier because she was so friendly was sitting one stool away from him and the look on her face was horrible and I wished she hadn't heard it just as much as I wished the guy hadn't said it. 


The only thing I heard him say to her was "oops" and the only thing I could come up with was "sorry", but she didn't really buy it and she closed her tab and left a few seconds later. 


I look back on it all with a bit of shame. I wish I would have turned off the music right then and there and told the guy and all of his friends to get out and never come back. But I just stood there, not quite sure what happened, not quite sure what to do. After the girl left I approached the birthday boy and told him that they needed to finish their drinks and leave, but even that wasn't what they deserved. I wish I'd have done something in front of her, as if that would have made the words sting any less. 




When it was time we closed down the bar. I put on softer music than normal as we cleaned -- it had been that sort of night. After everything was put away and wiped down and all the windows and doors were locked, I walked to my truck as a warm rain blew in. 




On the drive home, I stopped at a gas station along the way. I know the guy who works most of the graveyard shifts; I've bought him a few beers before when he'd come into the bar and we always talk about how both of our nights are going. He looks twenty-one, though if I had to guess I'd say he's probably closer to thirty-five, maybe forty. Couldn't grow a beard if he tried, and he's tall enough to see over the counter but not by much. 


He's nice as hell though, which is part of the reason I stopped. 


I walked around the store, shaking off the rain until I finally decided to buy one of those awful microwavable burritos mainly because I felt like something hot that didn't have egg. We chatted for a while up by the register and he told me how he wanted to go to bartending school and be a bartender because he's tired of working in a gas station and cleaning up vomit in the bathrooms. I didn't tell him about my night, I just told him you don't have to go to school to be a bartender. 


-"Is it hard? Bartending?" he asked.


-"You know how it is," I said. "Some nights are harder than others."


-"Oh, yes. I know," he said. "Some nights here, very hard. Very hard. Others? Not so bad."


-"Tonight been hard?" I asked.


-"No. Not really. Just boring," he said. "What about you, buddy?"


-"It's over. That's been the best part of it so far."


He smiled and nodded in a way that meant he didn't understand fully what I'd just said, but I didn't bother explaining or repeating it all again because maybe it was better this way.  

Squares

In the office behind the bar - which really isn't an office as much as it is a closet with shelves and a computer - there is a large calendar attached at eye-level to the wall on your left. It is the kind of calendar you buy at Office Depot when you want to get organized but don't want to spend a lot of money so you just buy the plain and simple looking one. Each page of the calendar blocks out a month in large, open squares that look vacant and desolate, practically begging you to fill them with something --which in our case are sales figures from the previous year, booked parties and schedule requests.

Last friday's square had the sales numbers and a brief line about some party of 30-45 people that was going to be coming in. Above all that in black ink someone had squeezed in "Ed's 1 Year Anniversary!!" just below the line from the friday before that.

I looked at the scrunched text one night after I'd closed the bar, wondering if it had really been that long.

When does a year ever feel like a year? 

As I have a habit of doing, I rolled the friday square and everything that came with it around in my mind. I thought about the first square as well, how cold my toes had been as I stood outside for the first night checking id's. And then all the squares in between. What about them? They had seen me climb out of debt, fall out of a relationship, walk away from an Ironman. I'd moved three times, had a root canal, taught spin classes on zero hours of sleep.

I'd even walked in the cold rain one night because that seemed as good a place as any to find answers. What square had that been again; did the answer matter half as much as the memory of falling water surrounding every part of you, even your ankles?

Is it normal to look at the year gone by and find yourself drifting away to an idea of the year ahead and how that could look, how you want it to look?

It's been a year. Actually, it's been more than a year now. A year and a few days. I'm still not sure if that's cause for celebration or for panic, for champagne or a tumbler of scotch. I think you could argue both.

Instead of arguing, I've tried to look at it all -- the year, the individual squares -- with indifference. Not that I don't care about what I've done. Of course I do. But I will have done those things no matter how much I care about them. The year is behind, those squares already full of ink. The ones ahead can't be written in.

Maybe I look at the squares with so little emotion not only because they can't be changed, but also because nothing you can put in them could ever describe a year, let alone a life. Like remembering the first time she levelled you with a stare, or waking up hungover one morning and deciding right then and there that you've had enough. How could those ever fit? And where exactly?  

I'll close the bar tonight, fill up yet another square -- another two inch by two inch cube that if you cut out each and every one of them and somehow stitched them all together still wouldn't be big enough to describe the feeling of watching your parents hold hands as they wade into the surf together on a beach in Bali.

Back to School, Sort Of

I returned to the UT campus yesterday for the first time in over 18 months (excluding a visit to the football stadium last year, where I watched the Longhorns somehow lose to Iowa State for the first time ever at home).


At around noon I carpooled down with Brogan, who had a final to take, and since parking on campus is impossible we just parked near his old apartment complex and took the bus down to where we needed to go. There were a few new buildings, a few more new ones being built that looked like they would be large and impressive even though they didn't have windows yet. The trees and grass and sidewalk looked pretty much the same. And the faces, while different and young, looked the same as well.


I don't know what I expected; perhaps that it would all be the exact same, that it would be frozen as I had it pictured in my mind and not a brick would move until I was there to watch it move, or maybe that it would all be different and I would walk through campus and reminisce about the times when I'd gone to class in brick buildings instead of futuristic ones made of glass.


I headed to the library to reference a few books on screenwriting I knew were there. When I arrived, the library hadn't changed much either. More people were using the revolving door than I remembered, but the guard still was on his computer, drinking a soda through a straw.


The books that I was looking for were there, so I scanned through them, found the passages I couldn't quite remember and then began to write. In the breaks between the reading and the writing, I took pictures of impressively boring-titled books (Insects in Relation to Plant Disese: Second Edition) and sent out a text message trying to convince my "friends" that I was reading books of this nature. This was met with a level of skepticism, which is why I use "friends" instead of friends.


After I'd written enough, I left the library to grab some food and went to the place I always went to: Nikki's Pizza, a few block walk, usually into the wind. I ordered the same thing I always did (#1 - two slices of pizza & a drink, $5), but the guy working didn't remember me, so I pretended I didn't remember him. We talked about how nice the weather was for it being this late in November. I should have asked his name. It's not good when you see someone for two years and don't ask their name.


I rode back home with Brogan and decided to stop for food on the way back instead of sitting in five o'clock traffic. After a few beers and some surprisingly filling nachos, we chatted about his upcoming excursion into Spain at first and then God-knows-where else. There was also mention of Dublin and Sweden and drinking beers, hanging around for Octoberfest in late September, standing at the Champs-Elysees in July.


The future is exciting, even more so because we don't quite know where or what to be excited about yet.


But long after the dinner was over and as the nachos were still settling, my mind went back to UT, thoughts finding their way to cramming sessions, the hundreds of hours in that same library, the classes I couldn't bear to sit through -- so many memories gathering dust simply because they hadn't been touched in awhile.


Before I share a quote with you, I must tell you that I find word play mastubatory. It is a writer trying to show how clever they are instead of just telling you a fucking story. With the exception of newspaper headlines and a few exceptional poets, words aren't things that should be played with. Just write honestly, write what is in your heart and keep writing until something comes of it. Don't worry about the rest.


Yet despite this utter contempt for word-play, I found myself sitting in my room, thinking about college and what it all meant and then this quote -- so obviously guilty of playing with past/present, young/old -- drifted in, somehow. It drifted in and wouldn't leave.

Would the boy you were be proud of the man you are?

It is a good question, despite itself. It raises other questions, which has always seemed to me to be the mark of a worthwhile question. (This is why I despised math. The questions never led to anything but a single, correct answer).

We have a much better idea of who we are as children than we do as adults. We know what we want and who we want to be and we know this without shame. Somewhere along the way that all gets lost or tampled and we do as well and far too many people end up being accountants and account managers when they really wanted to be something much more but instead all they found was a way out. This isn't to say that your answer can't change -- it can, and very often should -- but there is always an answer, just as there is always the question: what do I want to be?

When, and perhaps more importanly why, do we ever stop asking?

And once the thought - more specifically the question - had crept in, I looked back at classrooms and classes that felt so far away but in all actuality weren't, I looked at them under a different lens, trying to remember who I was then, who I was before and who I am now.

Not once did my mind go back to a test or a paper or anything that ever was printed on a transcript.

And while an eight year-old me certainly wouldn't have said, "I want to be a bartender when I'm 24... Do you think I can, Dad? Do you?" I can say with just as much certainty that I wouldn't have said back then that I want to be a sales rep or in grad school or doing hundreds of other things that sound better and more official to parents and old people who like things and jobs to sound official and important.

We all have our reasons. I have plenty and if you care enough I'll sit down over a beer and give you a few and maybe you'll see it like I do or maybe you'll nod until I leave and then tell your friends that you'd hope to be doing more with your life.

The point is it's worth looking back every now and then and asking yourself questions that sit in your stomach like a good beer and plate of nachos. It's a hell of a lot more interesting - and I'd argue worthwhile - than reading about insects and their relationships with diseased plants, unless of course you're into that sort of thing.

It began to rain last night after the dark had settled, not too long after I had found myself lost with these questions. I wondered if the sudden rain meant anything but I couldn't come up with much, so I decided it was just rain. It is a beautiful thing to be warm and in bed and in the dark as the rain falls outside and you just listen to it knowing that you don't have to move a damn muscle if you don't want to. I stayed warm and stationary, occasionally fending off texts that accused me of being a moron . The rain and its gentle patter became a beautiful backdrop to think about life and classrooms and pride and your dreams.

There were so many more questions. And there was plenty of rain.