DREAM BAR

At the beginning I said that the only things I missed about business as usual consumerist life were thrift stores and bars. But that’s not fair, or real, I’ve realized. What I love about those place-spaces is not spending money inside of them, but how I ease up and submit to timelessness. The walking mediation sensory swerve of the colorful musty aisles, the curled up, hunched over carbonated vortex of hours gone by cackling in booths or craning around barstool bodies to skip rock chatter. You pay money at the thrift store (sometimes) and the bar (you better) but there’s also a lot (or just more than usual) of freedom to linger/loiter. 

Quarantine has reminded me of parks and parking lots and my porch as places to stay a while, not just hustle through. These days my thrift store urge is (somewhat) settled by sewing and gardening, there's that same voila effect, and also parallel mishaps. And my barstool urge is most closely satiated by talking on the phone and walking-walking-walking as a sunny day turns into a cool night and somehow the subject has spiral looped ten trillion times and I'm miles from home. But that one is really not the same. There’s no strangers drifting in and out of orbit, no unnamable song played in the background, no happenstance or mischief. I do miss bars, no bar in particular. I miss the humility of an empty bar. Or even the comfort of sports on TV, or fries that taste like a freezer. I miss tipping and ripping up the coaster into pieces and drawing drunk. 

Here's a dream bar, taped to my bedroom window.