Sides of Me.

Maybe I shouldn’t bathe. It encourages serious consideration. Maybe I should spend every penny of what little money I have on scotch, then lock the doors and drink for as long as it takes. That should stop me musing.

I sometimes have this yen to go and sit in one of those establishments much beloved of American downbeat movies – the sort that have ‘BAR’ and ‘LIQUORS’ in American-sized neon letters to encourage the failed, the footloose, and the fancy-free into the hallowed halls of the real living dead. (I even used an Oxford comma in deference to colonial taste.)

I sit there, a sad and lonely figure, with my equally sad, lonely, and solitary beer, and regard my reflection in the mirror behind the bar. A shabby woman in a short skirt approaches me. She’s obviously in her thirties, but has the air of a timeless, weather-worn and weary waif of an insensitive world about her. She reminds me of the sludge clinging to the piles holding up the dock of the bay.

‘Hey, stranger, you got somewhere to stay tonight?’ she asks with a well-practiced, but shallow and desperate smile.

‘Nope.’

‘Want to come back to my place?’

‘I don’t know. Is it clean?’

The smile dissolves into searing daggers.

‘Buddy, you just passed up the chance of a lifetime,’ she hisses, and then trips with all the grace of superheated vitriol towards the door.

I regard with interest her overdeveloped calf muscles, primed by at least two decades of balancing on pencil-thin stilletos, and then take another sip of my beer. She throws open the door and disappears into a rainswept oblivion.

Normal service is resumed.

I thought I wasn’t going to make any more posts today.