The funny thing, as I sit here observing myself over a pint of the local brew, is that I don’t think I look foolish and I don’t feel the slightest bit jealous. I see myself and I’m amazed. There is so much space between here and there, so much space contained in such a minute distance. Hell, I’m only fourteen feet from myself and still a universe away from perfection.

          Beer is good and, as Ben Franklin mentioned, is proof that God loves us. A truth, I believe, but there is a big difference between Ben and me. Ben took for granted there actually was a God. He made man in his likeness and the world in seven days. In my day, God barely exists and man was formed in the likeness of a random, mathematically improbable happenstance. More proof I’m living in a false existence.

          God or no God, this isn’t Hell, even if it seems like it at times. Hell is infinitely terrible, and this is tolerable, if not downright pleasant on occasion. I said it was a negative image, and even a perfect curve has its low points.

          I was watching an ant on the railing, foreground to a mass of mountains the ant couldn’t begin to comprehend, when I realized how good life really is. Why am I so terrified by its potential? It barely concerns me or rather I barely concern it, although without me it would not exist. This place looks so perfect, sometimes I wonder if perhaps I’m mistaken. Maybe this is perfection, and I’ve done nothing but suffer to destroy it. Maybe I already have it all. Maybe a parallel universe does exist, much to my chagrin, in which I am much more miserable. Or ineffectual. Take your pick.

          Fact is, it’s up to me to determine. My perspective is my own, and although I’m sharing it with you today, it is still from your perspective that you examine it. Each of us is trapped in a single piece of the puzzle. Properly assembled, we might amount to something tangible. Separate, we are simply a glimpse of our greater potential.

          Except in a moment. Only moments are unique. Each one a being unto itself, seamlessly separate. Only in a moment can we coexist. Only in a moment do you see what I see.

          I’ve been replaced by another. She smiled at me, and in this action I recognized myself. She’s happy, sort of. But disappointed too. Finally getting what you wanted is always just that. A bitter sweetness.

          I sign my bill and walk away. The café can’t help me tonight.

          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.

          The lighting was always perfect, no matter what the mood called for. I could see everyone but still felt like I was quite incognito. Obviously, most of the place was oblivious to my entrance, but several of the regulars occupied their tables, right where I expected, and the Tuesday night shift was especially delightful. I unceremoniously collected several nods and a curt wave before I found a quiet table near the kitchen where I could think.

          Clink of glasses. Scent of seared lamb.

          In the perfectly lit corner of a small café, the world is being dismantled in tiny little parcels. The pieces are so insignificant their loss goes completely unnoticed, yet the limit as their number approaches infinity equals the whole. The food in the café is superb, the drink strong, and the company sublime. It helps with the process.

          The revolution starts at home. Mine did. The image of the Vietnamese monk in flames haunts me. It taunts me. Look what I did. What are you going to do?

          Well, I’m certainly not going to light myself afire, if that’s what you’re asking. That’s not my style, if I could claim to have any. I’m more reserved, more, what’s the word, subversive.

          Candlelight flickers off the rim of the wine glass centered in the linen covered space in front of me. Everyone is drinking pinot, and not because they want to. It’s a sign of the times. Its inertia is unstoppable. Just have to sit here and wait for the pendulum to swing back in the other direction.

          I don’t really believe that, so I ordered the merlot. I like merlot, I don’t care what anyone says, especially not some character in a stupid film about fucking people. Merlot got me drinking wine, along with a summer in Italy, a plate of spaghetti, and a girl. I think the beauty of life is that any individual, at any time, can make the decision that changes everything. It wasn’t going to change anything, I knew, but I ordered the merlot, and it wasn’t very good.

          One thing I’ve found about wine is that if you’re not going to spend a lot of money on a bottle of wine, it is best not to spend very much at all. Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not endorsing selling your house and living in a bottle of Thunderbird. I’m just saying that an average bottle of Spanish table wine usually treats me just as fine as any California vintner’s trendy pinot noir.

          It had stopped raining. She was carrying an umbrella, which said she had been there before and knew it paid to be prepared. He was already perusing the help, which on Tuesday night took some careful consideration. She has gathered the story of every person in the café with one take. He has already looked at his watch four times.

          Her hair was the kind that shimmered when the light hit it. I almost wished she had forgotten the umbrella. I tried to keep from staring. I swallowed the merlot and ordered another. Her head turned ever so slightly at the sound of my voice.

          The universe revolves around me. Ego told me so.

            The first thing I remember was the last thing I forgot.  It’s better that way.  Otherwise you might ask me about details.  I don’t want to remember the details.  The details make me lonely.

            It probably would have been better if I hadn’t seen that picture.  I couldn’t see her face, but I knew it was her.  Trust me; you don’t go around imagining a moment that much and then fail to realize it when it’s right there in front of you.  Even life isn’t that cruel.

            Some things that I experience become a part of me.  Perhaps I didn’t want her afterwards, but she was always with me.  It wasn’t like I planned it that way.  Or maybe it was.

            The drink is in me and I’m kinda numb.  I know where I am but I don’t know where I’m going.  I used to know but the memories are so fuzzy that I don’t trust that they are real.  I’m certain I could find my way if I could just remember where to begin.

            They found me in the hall.  It wasn’t the last time.  After awhile the old man told me it was time to move, not in words so much as that he upped the rent in the flat to market and rubbed those two mooching roommates of mine back into a neighborhood more respective of their tax bracket.  Actually, it worked out famously.  I found this wonderful brownstone within walking distance of the café, and the old man had one less thing he could berate me about.

            There’s a lot to be discovered in life.  Most of it comes in little shots of beauty and tall pints of pain.  Often I long for the time when a rocking chair and some sipping whisky are my only friends, but for the moment it seems I’m still naive enough to want to face the music.

          I was in my usual location, somewhere between the white lines of sobriety and stumbling, in a halfway house on the highway to Hell.  For the moment, it manifested itself as a chair at a sidewalk table beneath a green awning.  Really it doesn’t matter where or when.  Like a name, or anything universal, it was always and is forever.

          The drink was scotch, eighteen years old.  Legally, they couldn’t serve it, but the manager and I had an arrangement.  Over the holidays, I had visited Mother and the old man, which for me translates to a terribly uncomfortable, almost painful experience assuaged only by the bottles of top shelf liquor I would traditionally liberate from the dust encrusted depths of the old man’s personal larder.  This year had been exquisitely excruciating, the quality of the salvaged scotch directly proportional to my suffering.  Blake was impressed.  He expounded upon the theme as we poured a couple of fingers and he tucked the bottle into a desk drawer for safe keeping.  Like everything else here, it would be waiting for me should I need it.  That’s the beauty of this place.

          The name was Katerina, thirty two years old.  He called her Katie.  I heard the name before I saw who was wearing it, so at first she was my height and blond.  When I swung my head around in fear and cast my lecherous leer upon her, she looked like Audrey Hepburn in the 50s.  I was drunk, so maybe it wasn’t love, but it was some kind of wonderful.  Her date seated her at their table and ordered pinot with a loud and disparaging superiority.  I scribbled madly in the general direction of my napkin.  It was linen, and Maureen snatched it away from me before I could inflict any real damage.  She tore a page out of the notepad that she kept in her apron but never had need for and slipped it under my pen, French-style, before she disappeared. 

          Of course, I kept squinting at her at regular intervals.  I really should learn to wear my glasses.  People must think I’m mad, constantly leveling narrowed eyes at them and staring with a strained and desperate expression.  Suffice I truly am; they don’t need a bloody billboard.  The poem was exceptional, utterly representative of the volatile synthesis of atmosphere, liquor, and motivation.  Her date was seated with his back to me, and several times she caught my eye with a look that to me seemed to impart vigorously her detached disinterest.  She drank three glasses of pinot to his one and smiled haphazardly in my direction.

          When he asked if he could walk her home, she politely declined and joined me at my table without wanting an invitation or waiting for him to leave.  She ordered another bottle of pinot and told me Lisa was hot.  She was a lesbian, and she hated herself for it with as much conviction as a gutter bum.  We finished the bottle and Lisa accompanied us back to my place.  In the morning, I found two pairs of women’s shoes discarded in front of Brant’s bedroom door.  I wandered down to the café, trying to forget her name.    

          Maybe if you’re lucky, they will name you Steve.

           As a child, I thought there was some grand scheme.  I guess it’s just the naivety of childhood.  But it seemed so certain when I was small.  There was a plan, and I was part of it.  Seems now that I’m old enough to know better, it was just my imagination.

            I think that’s why I drink like this.  Every once in a while, right before I realize I’m just a drunken nothing no one will even remember, I feel that way again.  For a fleeting moment, I know exactly what role I play on this dimly lit stage.

           No one knows what the fuck is going on.  But we’re all afraid we might.

            There isn’t a Santa Claus or an Easter Bunny.  It may seem inconsequential at first glance, this lie perpetrated upon us by our most intimate relations.  But it is a life lesson.  Go on, believe it.

            Nothing is what it seems, and there is nothing to believe in.  No one can be trusted.  What we think of as truth isn’t.  It is a function of the Uncertainty Principle that we cannot know anything.  Shit happens, but it’s still just shit until someone gives it meaning.

            What your parents were trying to teach you wasn’t that some fat foreigner in a red suit is gonna slide down the chimney with a tote full of presents or that a man sized rabbit actually exists.  What they were trying to do was condition you to the fact that nothing is real, and whatever ground beliefs are founded on is shaky at best.  Feel free to believe; in fact, it’s encouraged.  But don’t ever indulge in the illusion that it can’t all disappear in an instant.  Yeah the world was flat.  Until it was suddenly round.

             As for me, believing is hard, but Christmas is easy.  I knew my grandparents were the real Mr. and Mrs. Santa Claus.  They would arrive at our house for supper each Christmas Eve with gifts I would eagerly open in the off chance it might be something other than new trousers and a sweater to wear to Mass that night.  Come on, I prayed.  Be a Game Boy.  Just this once. 

             What truly made Christmas special in my mind was the traditional Midnight Mass, a strangely transcendent experience for a recently awakened half asleep ten year old still occupied with dashed dreams of interactive video entertainment.  Even now Latin is spoken at our church, and most of the proceedings were lost on me, even after I had learned to understand the language.  There always comes the moment, however, when the dogmatic ritual has built itself to the point of maximum tension, and suddenly I am face to face with the most beautiful set of piercing blue eyes, shining in the dim light of the basilica.  I did not see her there before.  She is my age and enticingly lovely in a way I had not previously realized girls could be.  Leaning her blond head to me in a reverential nod, she extends her open hand.  It is exceedingly warm and comforting.  Her lips part and I see saliva glisten on her tongue as she speaks.  The words impart something a little bigger than a fat man in a bad outfit.

Peace be with you.