I was sort of surprised that they referred to any of these creatures as “women.” Their faces seemed grey, under the endless gloomy sky, under the burden of daunting work weeks which they’d escape by indulging in corporately endorsed products.
Here and there, one more thing, and nothing really meant much. I was admiring, though, and envious, of those who truly found a way to have a voice, underneath all the hurry, underneath the polluted quagmire of both noise and material. And it was those who spread their wings the farthest who would incur the most risk: whereas it was easy to just establish your identity as a nondescript worker, and then go home.
This is more what I did, so I got lonely, and went out to bars. In this one commercial cluster, it had been built over what prior was a giant grove of trees, also the soccer fields where I played as a kid. I sat in and watched the Michigan game, this dude there with his wife bought me three Two-Hearteds, and at the end of the day (my shift drinking in there, I’m referring to), this beautiful blond bartender came up, just in for her shift, looking at me in a way no one ever really had, and smiling in a way nobody ever really had, to me. There was something light and mobile about her, like a cat, but also benign, benevolent, friendly. It was like there in her eyes, and there in her spirit, was the natural paradigm of that grove of trees which had come there before — she was relaying to us all that old earthly tranquility and splendor which had prior been our luxury. But then, sometimes the satisfaction we get out of nature has naught to do but with our conception of our own superiority over animals, and that’s really moral, is it?
Dudes bashing each other in the head, and us watching it on TV, now that’s moral. I fell a little in love with this bartender on this night, but I am not someone who moves fast, so I thought I’d let the overall occasion of the football game, and the drinking camaraderie, and the relaxing weekend there in my hometown where I lived, all settle in.
Well, life moves fast. Eventually as I kept going into that bar, I kept seeing that ‘tender, and I noticed that her body was filling in. Before, she’d literally been rail-thin, no noticeable bust whatsoever, and had made an impression just with her beautiful cheekbones, eyes, and natural glowing effervescence. But now she was almost like a beast that stalked the world — she had filled in on both sides and had all of a sudden a body like a swimsuit model, not like a taller Fiona Apple. I thought back to that one night I’d seen her for the first time, and things like why I liked her — I wouldn’t have even thought to look at her posterior end, but later I did notice that she wore yoga pants, which was very much in the style in 2013. What had happened to that? Where was that purity? Maybe I should have asked for her name and number, and just talked, and somehow slowed her down to my level, shown her that she was already so beautiful, and that she possessed a sort of inner beauty which involves making people around her feel good in psychosomatic splendor, and that this should really be the essence of life in the first place.