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I have been at my current job since a year ago Sunday April 1st. For 90% of that time, I have been closing most every night. It was only recently, within the past six weeks, I began requesting one opening shift per week, as it was the days I got off at six that I found myself more interested in writing, and I'd come to the rather belated realization that my novel was not going to progress anywhere if I didn't give it more undivided attention.
Knowing that today was my weekly morning shift, with the added knowledge that I hadn't so much as attempted to write since last Thursday - which didn't go well - and that I'd decided to make a significant change right at the major pivot point twenty-thousand words in, I was looking forward to getting off this evening and going not so far up the street to First Street Draught House, my new favorite bar, to crank up my laptop and do some writing to the tune of a couple Blue Moons.
Anyone who knows me very well can probably draw their own conclusion that I must have music to write. It's a prerequisite, and asking me to write without it is like asking me to eat without food. I tilt my head as a bird attempting to understand human language and stare.
Unfortunately, when I arrived at the bar, I plugged my earphones into my iPod and prepared to turn on something melancholic and lush, and instead saw the Apple insignia blare onto the screen for a bare second before it shut back off. The battery was dead. I had awful flashbacks of co-workers fiddling with it at work, knowing that I'd arrived that morning with still half a battery's life, knowing someone had accidentally pushed play and not turned it back off and that it had systematically drained itself over the course of the day to leave me here with nothing.
But there was nothing I could do about that now. I was left with no music and instead only the din of the bar. The bar that was much more crowded than usual for a weekday afternoon at 6:30. Almost every seat in the house taken, loud conversation, ruckus laughter (obviously some of them had been there for awhile), Masters on the television, no audio, nothing even playing on the jukebox, nothing aurally but for the distractions of every conversation around me. Still, I put in my earphones as if they were producing something for me to hear, tuned into a spot in the novel about three pages ahead of where I needed to attack, and worked my way into a rhythm before hitting "the spot."
The longer I go on the more I'm able to shut out all that around me, ignore the two guys to my right ignoring the girl they're with, the conversation she's trying to have, while a young couple to my left seem uncomfortable and like they want to be alone in a dark restaurant but find themselves in a loud, crowded bar instead. And then I hit the spot that needs the change, where everything from there on is to shift, and just as I hit it, literally only a couple sentences into the alterations, a gentleman takes his seat next to me, leaning into my personal space, and when I glance at him after he's ordered his first beer I see his eyes fixated on my screen.
I laugh because it's all I know to do, and because I'm hoping he'll look away and ignore what I'm doing when he realizes I've seen him doing it, but instead he says to me, "I assume that's what you want if you bring it here to work on."
I ignore him, I just want to attack this scene, break through the barrier that's been holding me back, take it beyond where I've been able to this point, finally have a breakthrough so that I can move into the next stage of the manuscript, but he's not going to let it end there, and besides, my mind has been bumped off the tracks and it's going to require backtracking and hoping I can get back into the rhythm of the novel.
He says then, "It's more interesting than the golf I'm watching."
"I doubt that," I say, I can't imagine any other response, and he says to me, "You were meant to take that as an insult, not as a compliment. Golf? Interesting?"
And with that I was through. Downed the rest of my beer. Paid my tab. And left, even as he was moving a seat down with the exodus of the young couple previously to his left and he patting the seat he had been occupying, saying to me, "Leaving room for a young woman to come sit beside you and be your muse."
And my friends wonder why I've begun to drink more, and more, and more...Present Soundtrack: Overcome :: When Beauty Dies |
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