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I was off from work today. I was off from work, and after some initial Christmas shopping and visiting with the mother, I tried to tend to every creative nook I have: reading, music composition (which is a joke, but that's a whole other story/blog/embarrassment), and writing. For said writing, I decided to head down to the neighborhood bar for a drink. I wore my beanie, tucked my headphones in under the black fabric and my naturally curling hair, and moved on with the novel where I'd last left off Tuesday while sipping on a locally brewed beer.
And it seemed each time I looked up I was being watched. The bartender. The group of women across the bar (U-shaped), obviously drinking together after a day at work, the young couple to my left, the loud men to my right, and all the while I was fixated on the couple in their late thirties directly across from me. As they sat there face to face, looking past one another, one at one TV and the other at another, or people watching, or just staring out the windows, or into the open-faced kitchen, but not at each other, and not talking, and I found myself whispering to myself, mouthing the words, "Say something." I said it three or four times. "Say something." Saw the rings on their fingers. The empty glasses lingering about their elbows. "Say something."
The carpenter seated next to me who tried to strike up a conversation soon as the headphones came out of my ears to let the bartender know I was done.
"Writing down the tunes?" he asked me.
"No." Chuckled. "No."
"Saw you jamming out. Thought you were writing down the tunes."
"No." I smiled. "I'm, um... working on a novel, actually."
Unnecessary information, I don't know why... embarrassed... shouldn't have said anything... now I'm gloating...
"There's a lot to write about," he said.
"That depends," I responded.
He looked at me, like he was awaiting further explanation. But I hardly knew what I meant myself. I glanced to the bartender for help. He's pouring beer from a tap. A beautiful girl just around the corner of the bar is watching our conversation but she tries to appear disinterested. She's sitting alone, drinking a glass of wine, and I wonder if she's waiting for someone or if this is the height of her evening. Too beautiful to be alone. Definitely waiting for someone, I decide.
"It depends on how you see the world," I say to him then.
"Yeah," he says.
"Depends on if you see the realism in it," I said.
I'm talking bullshit. I'm talking bullshit because I'm infected with the mindset of my characters, and I'm wanting to pay my bartab and go home, and because I don't know how to talk to strangers, and because the beautiful girl is still watching us.
"There's a lot in the world to see," I tell him. "Just a matter of whether or not you take the time to recognize it."
"You've got a point there," he says. "Took me forty years to step back."
I nod. Because I don't know what else to do.
"I thought you were writing the tunes," he says again.
I chuckle like a friend. "No. Can't write songs."
"If you can write a novel, I bet you can write music."
"No," I say, and this time I speak with confident truth. "Two completely different languages."
We chit-chat, he goes to the rest room, I pay my tab, he comes back, his back turned to me, staring out the window at the overcast sky, at the gas station across the street, at the traffic going home at ten minutes past five, at the headlights flowing in streams like blood at the dictatorship of the heart, and I pat him on the back as I walk past, and I say to him, "Good luck," and he says to me the same, ( and this is what I wrote just before pulling the buds from my ears )Present Soundtrack: Amy Millan :: "All the MIles" |
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