*A response to Wendy Rawlings' essay "Let's Talk About Shredded Romaine Lettuce"
The bar on the Monday night is perfect.
The crowd is sparse like grapes in the bottom of a bowl.
Like the last few pieces of lettuce at the sad end of your
Cobb.
I am not the only one who is a alone when I cruise in a few
minutes after nine having come from an added-late and much-needed therapy
session intended to stop the pendulum from swinging with such polar energies.
I’m so tired.
The bar is a place I go, but not usually where I would find
myself in an hour so nigh to sleep, so early in the week, and a drink is not
usually what I reach for after an hour of sharing my secrets.
It just seems cheap.
But when you miss your train by moments, you kill an hour.
When you are in your thirties, and single, and alone, and
wearing a suit and wingtips, and just coming from therapy where you shared your
secrets, you sometimes come to your favorite bar even when it’s just a sports-like bar, but a
sports-like bar that has always been very friendly to the gal at the end of the
bar so much so that one time the printed tab from the machine said “gal at the
end of the bar” because they don’t know my name because I think being a regular
is both good and very very bad.
What’s great is that you are feeling crazy – both for being
crazy and for feeling crazy. And that just hours before the therapy and the bar,
you read a recommended piece of experimental non-fiction. A piece which made
your sadness deeper. A piece that made your sadness deeper because it was about
how everyone (literally everyone, asshole) has it worse than you because you
are not shitting blood, or fearing that your daughter’s body is quitting its
job, or working a shift in total darkness; a shift that falls on the outskirts
of when the sun rises and sets. A shift that the whole time you are earning
your money you are inhaling poison.
Because you are not doing any of those things, but you are
still going to therapy. In a squat
office building, in a white neighborhood, you are learning life lessons from a
pretty, intelligent, kind woman with multiple degrees who tells you to have
compassion for yourself, even though you are not inhaling tiny glittery bits of
metal that are chewing up your lungs, or shitting blood.
But the bar knows that you are feeling crazy, and feeling
crazy for feeling crazy, so as your wingtips cross the sticky threshold of the
nearly empty space, the bar serenades you with Patsy Cline, reminding you (with
zero subtlety) about the Crazy. The Crazy
in your mind that you fear is in your heart, or wherever is deeper than that.
Its just the end of the tune though, the last chorus, just
enough to make you feel uneasy about your own reality and to remind you that
you have never ever written one single fucking song about a woman who broke
your heart.
The locally brewed beer, the beer close to your regular beer
but different enough to make you feel like you are making choices, is cold,
even though the pint glass itself seems smaller than it should be, like it
knows that you shouldn’t be drinking this beer on this Monday when you are
feeling this crazy.
After Patsy finishes her reminder, but before Hootie and
before Blues Traveler, the bar gives you one more gift. A Counting Crows song -
one that touches all your crazy - in all the places it is restless and resting,
and says to you in the clear and prophetic voice of Adam Duritz, the private
therapist of your youth, “This is the you that you have always been.”
