BLUES FROM BAR

I hadn’t planned on it.
An open night
with no plans
that happened to be payday,
so I took what money was left
from the week before,
just a few singles,
and sank them into wheat.

I invested in grain and hops.
I bought it cold
and took the bottle from a waitresses’ hand,
the lemon already deep-throated
through the glass,
floating among the pulp.

I wasn’t drinking for a drunk.
I had my feet on the bar stool
on the shoddy deck
- a no-name
at a no-name bar
watching trains go by.

They were blasted with dirt and vandalism
- hieroglyphics with the same arched letters
as beer labels.

I held the long neck up to the engine
hoping to hear the whistle,
but no sounds came
except the metal wheels squealing.

On the same air the whisltes came
cigarette smoke floated in.
A couple guys stood on the edge
of the deck,
behind me, by the front door.
I’d taken them for painters,
but they could have been carpenters.
They could have built this sorry deck.
I felt for them.

I hadn’t planned on any of this.
I sat in the shade of the building’s side.
I looked up the streets that
led off from the main road,
past the bar and into the neighborhoods
and wondered how many weekend handymen
were already at work on Friday afternoon.

In a few hundred words, it’s almost impossible to condense a person into an accurate portrait while also making them sound appealing. So this is my attempt to make a few broad brushstrokes with a nervous hand – at least turning the sky the right shade and showing the flow in the hills. The landscape is me and you are the audience filling in lovely details from a general description I’ve presented. This metaphor may have something to do with my background as a writer. Or it could just be optimism.

Ten years ago I thought I’d found my soul mate, but after a divorce and three children, I have a hope that souls can be matched more than once. I don’t believe that love is different than I expected – I anticipated a mixture of the sweet and the bitter, the gentle and the hurtful – and I got what I found. What changed was the people, and when people change, their connections sometimes break. We attained more wisdom than depth of love.

I still believe in love. It’s a real emotion, but now any emotion comes to me with caution – I’m more awake to it, which is the way a single father of three should be. But I am also more alive in every moment that passes and to smaller details.

For a recent divorcee, I am not what you would expect. I have calmness and the wisdom I mentioned. I am on my way in a successful career at a fantastic company. I am not lacking for options with the opposite sex. I am not having trouble meeting people. What I want is to find someone truly amazing and if that meeting is brought on through these words and this photo rather than at the bar ledge, so it goes (depending on the day, I find either way appealing).

This ad might seem to suggest some rigidness in the way I hope to find happiness, but I’m offering only guidelines, not parameters. I want to be me: a fun guy with equal depth of soul, who likes to break away to ponder things and write down his thoughts in notebooks. I’d like to pass time with a woman who is easy going, fun and intelligent, but genuinely so – not just the outer shell.

Professionally and personally, my life revolves around creative endeavors. I write for a living and I am very literate, but that doesn’t mean you have to be. I still like simple things, especially in regard to entertainment. I am just as likely to be caught watching football or “The Soup” as I am to be reading On the Road or East of Eden. I am a romantic at heart and empathetic. For example, I feel for all the faces I see on these personal pages. They look similar to missing persons ads. I suppose we all are missing something (or searching for something that we don’t know we missed.)

My three beautiful children are well behaved and bright. They truly might be the best kids who have ever existed. I am an exceptional father and spend part of my life chronicling my time with them and what they teach me. I was put on Earth to be a dad. Never would I have expected to be writing a personal ad in my early 30s, and, probably like you, part of me feels I deserve better, but there’s nothing rational to put behind that thought.

I am hoping to find for fun, foremost, and in the end, someone who’d like another person to make this life a little more interesting. I’d like to talk to someone about the most important things in life, everyday. I would hope that something is more important to you – that you are searching for something, maybe understanding or a reason why we’re here. And I hope that search is conducted with some laughter. That the little things roll off your back. If you want something better than what you have alone, then we have something in common. That’s me. Is that you?

Glass doors pull closed and swing open. The last workers in the clothiers come out from behind the displays and registers, the jewelry counters and stock rooms, wearing high boots to the knees and low heels. They are just a silent note on the night I’m tracking, following through on the usual formula for bringing the work day to an end for their employers.

They methodically go about the end and the process makes feel as though I am a lonely simpleton out for a casual walk, not a tracker and recorder of Saturday night. Let me finish this strange prayer in peace, my way, privately. The skies could open up and let love flood over me into the ground’s open pores, seeping in with the reality.

Bare tree branches about to bud dangle and sway over gutters, dark against the purple sky, and everything looks like death, the end. I feel comfortable here in the world where I’m unknown. How glorious it feels to step in the businesses and step out on my schedule, accomplishing little but that not the point, the point only to walk, to breathe in public air, to window shop on humanity and know that half these people are less interesting to me, the others far more compelling, but none so deep, none so lost at this moment, this very moment.

My life was never on the brink, just over the cliff it went one day and the drop was a steep one. To the bottom, then exploding in bits, a big KA-POW comic book burst, and it stabs like the points on the jagged edging.