I drank a couple beers last night and that never gets me anywhere. I've past the point of a couple beers mostly. Nothing comes of it on my end. Anymore lately I drink one beer. I told my brother the other day that I've started to look at the whole thing like a cigar.
"I drink one beer, same as you might smoke one cigar. You don't smoke two cigars in a row. That's stupid."
He didn't say anything. A lot of times when I'm talking so much jive to him, trying to find my own rhythm in this world by bouncing random shit off his head, my brother doesn't respond. It's a beautiful thing too. Most people want to come back at you with their own incessant crap. People love to respond to things that you say by heaving their own stuff back at you. It gets so old so quick. I love the idea of the art of conversation, but I have to finally admit here at this point in my life that when it comes to the real thing, I just shove my head in the oven.
There are parts of me that think I might be done with talking all together. It'd be nice if I just shut up and I know it. It's exhausting to speak. Everything I say comes back to haunt me when I fall asleep at night. What the hell was I even saying to so-and-so? What were we trying to say to each other? All I remember of any of it is just blabbering on and on.
I know so-and-so would have shot me in the eye if they had seen a pistol just laying there on the table or whatever. I can't blame them either.
I probably would have put one in their neck if I'd seen the gun first.
My brother doesn't talk as much as me and I'm thankful for that. I tell him my whole beer idea, with the cigar thing thrown in and right away I can tell by the way he is dumping the coffee out of the can and into the top of the maker that he isn't paying me much attention.
It's a relief, to be honest. It feels good to talk to someone like him, someone who loves me and doesn't listen to me until he absolutely knows that it's probably the right thing to do, which is only ever like maybe 20 per cent of the time at best. The rest of the time I'm just making noise. The rest of the time I'm sixty central air units humming away back behind some skanky apartment complex somewhere.
I got home from the bar last night after my four beers and sat down at the kitchen island and got out the acoustic. It made me laugh even as I was doing it. Here I am, buzzed, getting out the acoustic. It's all a lark. It's all so comical after a while. I'm a little tipsy. I'm playing the guitar. It feels good because there is nothing going on here.
I played this David Allan Coe song called 'Revenge'. It's a good one. I played it like nine times in a row and pretended I was playing it in a coffee house or something like that. It was a small joint with a real attentive audience made up of pretty women out by themselves to wash away their recent heartache with a little does of whatever anybody hopes to find in a coffee shop at night. It felt electric to me at the time. But looking back now I have to assume that was the beer coursing through my system and nothing else.
Whatever. I'd never go to a coffee shop at night, myself. I just don't give a rat's ass. But there I was playing in one last night.
I guess it was an open mic sort of deal because I only played the one tune. I don't know that I even played it all that well either. I'm sure I didn't. But I did play it nine times in a row, so I suppose it was a success. You don't get that many encores at an open mic night typically. Not unless you're really blowing the roof off the place. Well, that or it's a tragically slow Sunday evening.
After maybe the fourth version of the song I was feeling a little underwhelmed by the whole experience for some reason so I took out my phone and began to record me singing the song just in case people might want to watch a recording of me singing a song after I'd had a couple. I didn't get it at the time, I guess. I didn't grasp the fact that there was no one in the world who would want to waste three minutes of their time watching me do what I was doing.
But that's the rub, you see. Anymore, I crawl out of certain bar room conversations back into my cave and I forget all about the reality of things. I guess I end up pretending a lot of what is going on. Sometimes I pretend to eat entire meals that I haven't even eaten. Then later on I understand that the sharp hunger bolts shooting across the front of my head are there to remind me that a lot of this isn't pretend at all. And that I need to remember that even if it's a drag.
I recorded a bunch of versions and then I tried to upload one of them to Facebook but I don't where that ended up. More and more, I find that I try and post a video to Facebook and it shoots out into deep outer space, sometimes for a couple of days on end, until I forget about the whole damn thing. Then, boom, a few days later there it is, crashing back down out of nowhere onto my Facebook wall.
It'll probably show up one of these days. I'll delete it with the quickness.
I got hungry and put the guitar away and turned on the frying pan. I made some quesadillas and ate them at them at the coffee table with some olives and a bottle of beer.
I watched the TV. I watched Guy Fieri. A lot of people hate him but I don't care. Fuck them. I like Guy Fieri. I like liking him too.
I just played a song nine times in a row at my kitchen island and I am deeply alone at times and I am absolutely fine with that. I don't need anyone to tell me about Guy Fieri. I don't need anyone to tell me about anything at all. I need everyone out of here right now, is what I need. And I've got that too.
So I'm fine. I'm back to one beer a night, if that. I'm back to skipping the coffee shop gig and heading straight for the Diner. For the Drive-In. For the Dive. I'm writing a lot and I'm watching the rain fall as I water my hanging baskets out on the porch. I'm thinking about things. I'm celebrating the fact that there is so much left for me to figure out.
I am soaring through outer space, my face jammed up against the steamed glass of a runaway iPhone video racing across the stars. I'm singing David Allan Coe to twenty million Martians. I'm falling back to Earth in my own sweet way.
I'm falling back to Earth and I'm making good time.