Cafe News, Volume 11

          Today, I don’t have anything to say. I’m too tired. Everything is fine. There is nothing wrong with the world. Just let me sleep.

          Sometimes the darkness is so utterly impenetrable it seems a waste to try. The bar was the definition of a dive, the bartender the perfect meaty swine for the role. He sneered at me when I asked for twelve year and pointed at an ancient bottle of Johnnie Walker that hadn’t been touched for at least two decades. I retracted my request and settled for bourbon. It had been a long time since I drank Jim Beam.
 
         When you’re a guy like me in a place like that, you’re basically afraid to look around. Nobody you might find in a hole in the wall that wants to be seen in there. They came for the anonymity as much as the drink. As for myself, I’m here only for the latter, and it gives me an appearance of validity, if not a truly legitimate claim to a stool. Mia Farrow could be sitting next to me, I wouldn’t have noticed. If she was, I hoped she didn’t notice me.

          War is hell. He spent three hundred seventy two days in-country and thirty one years trying to get over it. Ever since he got back to the World, his life had been a patchwork of fragments; part time parenting, part time employment, and fulltime running away. That was his business, and I’ve foresworn passing judgment. Christ, he might be Allah for all I know. What he said though. It got to me. It didn’t just get to me, it actually made me mad.

          He’d been running hogs with his old Army buddies, camping in national parks. The ones with enough life left to allow it. They were running from the nightmares on bikes fueled with blood spilled by the same deception he’d been subject to back in his day. The same tired excuses, the same smokescreens, the same sad conflict. He was over it, he said. He was retired, and he was happy. He just felt bad for the kids being born today.
 
         Aren’t we supposed to leave this world a better place than we found it? Aren’t we supposed to sacrifice our present for their future, to vouchsafe our fortune with the coming generation? Where is the council of our elders, perpetuating the visions of the past? Where is the thread that holds this all together? Who is the keeper of the common dream, if not each and every one of us?

           Whether I need to do something different or just everything better, I’m not sure which. All I know is this can’t be all I’m capable of. If he can get shoved out of a helicopter and fall twenty feet to the ground beneath under the weight of a hundred pound pack with the expectation he would then run into the jungle with no apparent objective other than taking enemy fire, and still find a way not to hate everybody or use his lessons to kill us all, I can make the world a better place. It’s got to be easier, and I owe it to the kids.

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