>>://002

Where deer stroll peacefully past computers, as though they were flowers with spinning blossoms

The horizon now, big wave; progressive decay. A thousand screaming hands for an empty bottle. Halt! Wer geht dahin! Fanatical. We are sitting in center-position. The coolers full of bottles line the opposite wall. There is a ghost in the mirror. Mia is skimming her book for especially lewd passages of fairy erotica, to be read aloud to the bar with the confidence of a platoon of airborne on a drop-zone. The men, young and old, clamor around; covered mouths and darting eyes. Transgression. A dozen dusty guys drunk to the gills on two-dollar draft, with enough callous and sawdust between them to fabricate a quarter-pipe; now they impart as a parade of school-boys, clamoring for a look at the forbidden polaroid with eyes like doorframes in a desert. Her eyes catch mine as she turns a page, a coy smirk comes across her face. This is her favorite part. The men stand at attention, and I, in this moment, am consumed by the vacuum. Then, genesis.

Terminal disconnection is to begin in the form of disease; a slow, gradual atrophy. Lately, I find myself calling very old friends. The kind you haven’t seen in the better part of a decade. Perhaps it is unusually hard for me to issue the grace of an unspoken goodbye; being a bystander to social conditions, maturing into nothing. I think this is against my nature.

The other day, Clare called me a golden retriever. This time our roles were reversed, and I was on the inside of the bar, polishing a glass, watching the neon dance through her hair. I thought it was funny, but I’ve always prided myself on being loyal, and the more it rang true, the less I thought it was funny. I fetched her a half-pint of cider, and she moved to pat my head. Good boy. John walks in, shoots me an amused look, and places himself on a stool a couple feet down from Clare. I pour him a pint. Good boy.

The men and women shuffle awkwardly in the twilight. Everyone is commiserating. John and I are discussing trench warfare; John is 20 years retired from light infantry, though he knows my background, and we discuss nonetheless. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. The old lie ringing true in certain drunkenness. Young men dead, for I know a couple, and this is the essence of the bond. Shot to death in a far corner, divorced from empathy, bearing a clenched fist; the egress. Every day there are more, and no one can tell me their names.

Politicians are being shot on television. A thousand screaming faces launch into the evening, and we are in the twilight zone now. The vanguard approaches in the form of two blonde jesus chicks pulling up in a toyota, eyes like gospel in droves. They start passing out pamphlets, I take one. “The day of reckoning is coming, secure your allegiance to the cause today!” It’s a thousand yards to the end of the bar, and the dialectic remerges. The jesus chicks and I take turns ripping lines of speed off the underside of my portable scale, which only makes things worse for people like these. Her name is Zenya or some shit, hopefully a pseudonym, and she hands me some strange proto-fascist manifesto, but I tell her to get it out of my face and throw it across the room. I can tell the younger one is on her first rodeo, evangelizing to drunks has become standard practice for these cultists. I was concerned with the potentially fascistic-allegiances of their leader; Zenya; militant-religious fundamentalist tatted up from limb to limb, tall blonde, defenses in-depth, she is not the first I’ve encountered; though an ace had been stashed. Cannabis breaks the will of all posers and lames; it is the ultimate counteroffensive. Through stoned and gritted teeth, the committed one utters some awful prose; “Through god we are all awaiting an inevitable execution, through prayer may we find ourselves on the other end of the rifles.” Shit like this pisses me off, but instead of saying anything, I simply pass her the hookah hose. Her eyes betray her, as does everyone’s, and I can tell from a distance the gears are starting to spin out of time. “So, when are you guys gonna start shooting people?” It was a serious inquiry from the haze. She doesn’t have a response, but she mutters something about being the hammer of justice, or something equally deranged, and abruptly runs down the street and into the tennis fields. The other one follows suit, stoned to the gills. They dissipate into the dawn, and before I know it, I am left with the literal remnants my own manson girls, and a night best left for retrospection. My advice to you, should you ever meet such wretched jackals: always keep some strong hash in reserve.