I spend my evenings in all the wrong places. Too frequently, I walk downtown to my favorite bar to be for a few hours a part of the life of night with its open riot and vigor, rising voices, brayed laughter and staggering hope, all the immediate intimations of something good being bound to happen soon, now, whether realized lust or the temporary invincibility of being beyond one’s own doubts and awkwardness, the sweet liquor freeing the heart’s sorrows and longing and need so that for a time there is, only, just, that which is heard and wanted, felt in rising. And many nights, the music stops for a moment, and the clink of glasses and the conversation resolves to dissonant voices, banal conversations, and me blurry and lost and displaced, at a bar in a small town where nothing particularly good ever happened to anyone. Some nights I stay through that moment of clarity, when the spell has been broken, and other nights I finish my drink and leave even as the music starts again, the charm broken and the small and tawdry moment too much to bear. Another night at the bar; they say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing the same ways and expecting a different result. Yet I would rather be out in the world than at home in my apartment watching cable or wandering the infinite internet, even if the bar is all but empty and bartender is sullen and the only music playing is a song for the broken-hearted. At least I’ve sought—life?—and in finding its absence on a weekday night ensures the imminence of bodies and voices come Friday night.

I am not a drunk, and never drink to incoherence, though I can hold my liquor; mostly I play bar pool, a game which has honor and requires skill but favors luck, and I love the sound of cue to ball, of balls striking and the welcoming thud of the back of the pocket. I have friends who also play, graduate students in German and Physics, barbacks who like to speak of mixed-martial arts, acquaintances from the climbing gym, and too there always the regulars who have come in early afternoon and are still there at ten, unsteady on their feet but still swinging the cue, and I play, drink, watch the unwinding from the vantage of the partially involved but uncommitted. And I pretend I am different from the men red-faced and uncertain on their feet, their voices overloud as they approach the girls who perch on barstools in groups, pretending to talk and mostly casting about for the right drunken fellow, and truly I am just as lonely as anyone else; it is only my carefulness that sets me apart, for though sometimes I do talk to a debutante who approaches or get drawn into a group of women whose eye I have caught, and though sometimes I am even attracted, I don’t take girls home from the bar. Sometimes I think of love, its absence or loss or my longing for it, but I know better than to seek it in a place so simultaneously irreal and unrestrained. I am patient. Or perhaps it is really that I want too much and am not so foolish as to imagine the answer is at the bottom of the glass or in the pants of nearest girl who has applied make-up and perfume and gone out grasping desperately. And those rare nights when the liquor burns too bright and the longing gets too acute, I am fortunately a prisoner of habit—the beautiful girl does not go to the quiet fellow who carries himself with such concentrated calm, and that too is for the best: I am too old to commit again to hot and mean, or hot and selfish, or hot and crazy, let alone the terrible triumvirate all in one.

No, give me a game of straight eight, gentleman’s rules, and a stiff Beam and soda so too many don’t need to be bought, and turn the music loud and let the voices rise to a roar while the balls drop as if each were meant so that for a moment the night seems so large that small sorrows recede! And maybe still in that moment some woman sidles up, and shatters all my assumptions of the possible. If not, well, the evening will end like any other, just as another night it all will begin anew, an infinite imminence, the universe realized in a dim and well-appointed watering hole. And one night I will not go to the bar, having sought solace elsewhere, and if you seek there you will not find me; perhaps you will see me some other place, and we will nod in passing, and put our heads down and walk on.