Togna, age 20, Miami
I feel the nausea after coming to the same bar for the third night straight. It's a deviant social spot with potential for up-to-no-goodness, but my seventh wind is weary and too much of a good thing is a bad thing, except for that one really good thing. No, this bar offers no such hope. It's betrayed often by its own patrons, who snob stalk the essence of what they think is their own being. Guys try really hard. Girls try really hard. Uninspired photographers photoshop themselves into Paparazzo, in their own lenses. Bands called fresh sound expired. The cheapest beer is four dollars, plus tip+attitude. The changing and incessant decorations of this phony Miami hipster bar are like a reflection of your face, with clown paint on. "Have a good time, drink beer" just for God's sakes don't do anything different.
On the way to the bar I blast some tunes in my car with the windows down. I pick up a friend. She's someone I've known for a long time. We sing the words to the songs loudly as we pound canned beers on the highway. Best way to drink IMHO. My car's got leather seats so I don't give a fuck about a spill or ashes.
I pull into the street where people park their cars. The homeless are onto me. On one side of the street is a row of buildings and a run down lot, an edifice graffitied (gratified) by, what looks like in the scribbles, dilettante punks. On another building is an obviously professional (hired, it's all amateur hour) job, maybe an art scene deal somewhere with someone, a remnant of a small happening event in Miami that can no longer be traced back, fickle beach swamp. The other side holds some rundown buildings, hard to tell if they're abandoned. A public transport station is rarely in use, next to a rocky grass lot where bums used to fight each other for car watching/haggling rights. The lot is bought out now, put into good business. One black guy has been made top dawg, and gets to charge the people eight dollars vehicle entry to the parking lot. Bums linger in the outskirts trying to get change, cigarettes, beer, whatever else.
The lot used to be free. Kids would park their cars and all meet up in the middle of the unkempt inanity to live zooted and booted (high and plastered), take pisses and make love to each other. An alpha male bum named Charles used to run it, skin as black as night with a ripped figure. He resembles humid wood. People felt safer back then. Charles and his nephew Uncle Chuck hanging around, making sure middle class white kids don't get hassled for pennies, receiving change and cigarettes and sometimes a beer as retribution. We were happy to share the wealth with them chilling. Other homeless and bums would try to get a piece of the action at the edges, but Charles would brandish a maglite at them. One of them would eventually become too daring. Charles manslaughtered him with the maglite and that was the end of the free parking lot. Uncle Chuck stopped showing up after a while too.
Now the bums roam freely outside of the paid lot, stalking those (sane) who refuse to pay the eight dollar fee for a piece of grass. It doesn't matter when they see you. It doesn't matter who you are. If you're walking towards the bar they watch your car for you, and if you leave they watched it for you. Most of them show up as the bar starts emptying out. So sick of having to tell them that if they are standing next to my car when I get back I might consider giving them something, or that I only use plastic cause I'm raw like that. I just wanna stand by the car for a while and finish some more cans, make my way into what I hope will be a hedonist haven with booze and girls. That's what I do.
As I walk over I get hello'd by some motherfucker I don't like. Then I see a girl who I know has been introduced to me before. We don't say hi. The outer rim of a circle that is chained to another circle with an outer rim you partake in. If you don't make it a point to make them remember you the first time you meet them then you'll never get another shot. You'll avoid sharing glances. Eventually you cut through the bullshit, but that only happens during the black outs. People watch what they say around you, what time they add you to their social media, want to share life while standing in the comfort zone. You don't know anyone.
Next to the bar is a shitty nightclub. It's a place to inebriate and pick up inebriated chicks, waste general time. It gets real nauseating. There is a large concentration of button down shirts, ugly and dumb leotard retards, people who aren't really into music who decide to DJ, four dollar PBR's and eight dollar well cocktails. There is a long and fenced-in patio in the back with a pebble fountain in the middle that shoots out fire from underneath the waterfalls, classic Miami. That's what happens to everything here. It becomes a cologne backwash of times when something punk became really fucking lame. The word alternative comes to mind when explaining the appealing aspect of this nightclub to the idiots who make it such a shitty place. The club's trash pours into the bar.
I give my I.D. at the door. My wallet feels empty. I'm broke, a reminder of how shitty my night could get. My debauchery companion will only buy me so many drinks. Eventually she'll get some other guy to buy her drinks in hopes of a squeeze, and I'll be stuck bitchless and drinkless. This isn't as bad as being whipless, and I always carry a cc that I can't pay off in case I really need a drink or a smoke, sometimes a bite to eat. Don't have any money, probably like two dollars and a few cents on it. It's a tough thing getting that money out of the bank. You can't go and withdraw two dollars from an ATM, and the bank is closed at the times I need it. You can do one of two things. You can find something priced at the exact amount or less (including tax) as what you have in your bank account. Or you can can try and fill up your amount to just the right price of something. This needs to be calculated (including tax) and you need to be sure of it. Then, you can either sell something or find someone who is willing to split the thing with you. You take them with you to a drive by ATM and you deposit the money right then and there. Sometimes I'll just overdraft and rush to the ATM in the mornings before the bank charges my account. I never make it. Never stopped to think about what my credit might be like, but then again I don't worry about wearing condoms either. I wonder how this will affect my retirement plan.
About an hour later...
Joint finished. I'm in a much better mood. The prison block patio is as delightful to the eyes as a park littered with colorful metal and plastic children's toys and playsets. No one bothers playing music back here. There's spillover racket coming from the club right over the eastern wall. You girls sure do look pretty in this lighting. I suspect the lighting from high above is disguising blemishes and accentuating cheek bones. Some of these girls look like models right now.
I don't hate this place as much as I complain about it. Psychedelic conversation, eye candy and eye fucking, drinks, drugs, it has everything that's good in this world. There is little else that could please me, and by that I mean realistic hopes. Of course a million dollars or a five star blowjob are astronomically more entertaining and rejuvenating than this piece of shit bar, but those things aren't likely to happen at this instance. I think I come here hoping to find somewhere else to go, which I realize now is silly, since this is my place to be, now.
A kid named Manny who goes by Mangos sits down next to me and we start shooting the shit. We split a joint and a can of beer and he brings up radical Republicanism, pride in the U.S. army, voodoo and Santeria, or at least the kind practiced in Miami, Changó, his spirit god of sex and arousal, and a girl I might know from some time ago who he has been seeing. He asks me if I can play the guitar well and if I want to jam some shit someday. I say yes, and like every other time, I don't actually mean this. Nothing is actually meant in Miami. People make statements and remarks and don't follow through. We should get dinner sometime, or there's going to be this party, and I have this idea for this project but if only we didn't live so far apart and what are you doing next week, here's my number OK bye. Mangos is wearing a red white and blue bill cap with stickers on it, in the patriotic colors of Puerto Rico (you can invert the red and blue on this hat and have Cuban patriotism, or you could don it on the fourth of July and nobody would be the wiser). He's wearing a wifebeater and baggie wranglers from walmart, with black high top converse underneath. He's got some scribbles on his arm that look like prison tattoos but are actually stick 'n poke, and with his unkempt beard and sunglasses on at night he really looks like anyone else.
There's a girl with a cute face sitting on a picnic bench across from me. She's got a fat ass. I know she's got one because my eyes trailed that tush as soon as it stepped out from the doorway into the back patio, bouncing its way towards repose, like an atmospheric house beat. She's wearing a graey see through blouse with a black bra underneath, but I don't care about that. It's the black skin tight jeans that have my attention, thin as a tissue, holding together a mass of cellulite and glutes. I ain't gonna make a move on this one. She's surrounded by South Americans, Argentinians, one of them giving it away by wearing a Boca Juniors jersey. I overhear their laughter and then I make eye contact, lanky and white. Hostile, to say the least. I'll make several more eye contacts within the next hour until I go back inside, each one more hostile than before, until at last the tush does a one eighty and takes a good look at what has stirred up the pack's attention. Actually, it's not much of a good look, more of a sideways glance and a bit of eye rolling.
Nausea is going to creep up on me once I leave. Paranoia from lingering zoot swirls in my head will guide my hands to safely steer the car. Shifting eyes from road to mirror will check for pig police rats. A slight headache will eventually form. It's not exactly a headache, but it's that feeling that almost resembles heat exhaustion that you get from drinking too much beer, not enough water, and coming down from shitty zoot. It feels as if air is pressed against your skull. Like an idiot, I'm gonna drool for another beer instead of water. Like an idiot I'm gonna smoke more cigarettes to hurt my throat and tire me out, and bury my car in graey. My eyes will be irritated by the traffic lights and the oncoming lanes. If I have passengers I will hate them, and every time I check my gas meter I will hate them even more, imagining the little needle dropping as the lava foams within me. I'll have acid come up my throat. I'll have to burp but won't be able to. I won't find a good album to play.
It's getting foggy, it's getting slow, and if I keep going I will surely meet some joggers and cyclists down the road home. I risk facing that if I find an after party. My mind is currently reserved for that moment where I find comfort in some strangers' house, in one of their seats, and I start yapping away about some bullshit like music or girls and people we all hate. This isn't who I am. This is a siphon, a sprite, a hologram advertising my entertainment. Take this one home, and you will have a good story to tell your friends. Take me home, and I will turn myself on for you. Take me home, and you'll get to know the real me and share a direct connection, no middleman.
I guess once--once I felt anguish and anxiety at three or four or five a.m. Now I just feel the nausea. I know either way it swings for me it's gonna be the same thing. Similar nights, different, similar people, and a sense of self worth that the ancients understood very well. Keep good company, become validated by those around you and your life will seem full. Not for me, though, or at least not anymore. Now all I see is nauseating repetition in the flickering of eyeballs that turn heavy form alcohol abuse and marijuana. Girls don't get old. Actually, new girls don't get old. The same old girls are exactly that, so you have to keep meeting them.
Nausea levels are high. I go for one last round of drinks with an old friend who is excitable for some reason I can't decipher through the muffled shouts in my ears. They are drowned out by the horrible music the DJ is playing. People like to talk shit about DJ's who play music using a laptop, but I'm not a dick like that. Just play something good. This guy isn't doing it. He's taking away the mood to dance, original sin in the DJ bible.
After the last round I start making my way out. I have to say bye to some essentials, and not because it would be rude, but because I like these people, and I want them to rub off on me before I dip. Then I gotta find my old companion friend and see if she needs a ride, or if she's good to go out with whatever rat she found at the bar.
Bad news for me. She says she needs to party, that she don't feel like gold, that she wants to drink a few beers before she opens her eyes to dreamland dreamland.
Heading out. She's convinced me with that lip biting and at the shoulder shirt tug nagging. Sad puppy--I'm not gonna use that gay ass line. I shove myself into people standing in the way to the door.
Nausea flooding my head, and my friend can't shut her yap for one second about some dude or other I don't even know who's apparently an asshole. I'm pretty sure the only asshole around here is me. We run into blonde male, brown male, and cutie pie, my oh my, how I love the night. Was I complaining about nausea? I gotta stop making shit up. Times are great. Blonde male suggests we hit up another bar. My companion and I are all for it, so two turns to five. Of course, this is not an even sum and there is chance for a remainder, or a sticky messy equation involving all values. Who knows? It's hard to tell who likes to add, subtract, divide, or heaven forbid multiply.
We jump in my car and no one talks. It's not like anyone wants to anyways. We're all pepped now after chugging some beers, zooting a little more and we're going over one hundred. I think nausea is a lot like a globulous snail gel, certainly expunged at such high speeds. If that won't cure it, house music and zoot are proven antidotes.
About an hour in...
"Why does a writer kill himself?" asks my friend.
Because of the shit they write about. I mean, haven't you ever read a writer's book? Do you not understand that the need for many of them to become hermits isn't because they are ascetic or reclusive by nature, it is the nature of their work that excludes convention in their daily, not necessarily circadian lives?
"I do not know why DFW killed himself. Writers don't always write narcissistic books. In fact, from many examples of my readings, writers often tend to imagine, create, recreate, formulate some perspective that is outside of shallowness, the shallowness of the cave we call our body, as it attempts to experience the senses. The senses are our only entryways into this universe of which we know nothing about, and the truths, half truths, blatant falsehoods, and obviously subjective themes, sentiments, accuracies, authorities, scoops, principles, and what not else they display for us in written form, well they don't come by those easily. DFW said he couldn't teach Kafka to his students anymore, and that maybe some people think it's better that they don't get the truth in his writing, because it's dark and real humor, a valid, actual, absolute and evident comedy that is the dark twist to everyone's life" sex this cute girl.
Like Max Weber said,
"NOT SUMMER'S BLOOM LIES AHEAD OF US, BUT RATHER A POLAR NIGHT OF ICY DARKNESS AND HARDNESS."
Let me make something clear here, this cute ass girl did not say those
words in any soundwave shape or form. In fact, what she actually said
was something closer to "Writers write about subjects that are hard for
most people to face by themselves, that is why they feel overwhelming
anxiousness after they pour in so much of their own realistic honesty
facing certain death" and maybe she didn't even say that. She did
mention Wallace and she talked about an essay in Consider The Lobster. Ladies, come talk to me
about the books you read, and if you want my heart, let me edit your writing. Ladies with insider knowledge into
their own fortune, don't follow this advice
"Right, but there is no way to ever tell, and you can't just go on saying things as if they are something real or absolute." What did I just dry heave?
Brown male says something pointing out my lack of logic and my obvness, which I take as him being a dick because I'm proud. I'm letting nausea creep in and produce steamy gas, which is actually anger. He's just trying to connect her point to mine, you could say doing me a favor.
"Writers might kill themselves because they see the pointlessness and loneliness of human existence on this planet, and they are faced with it constantly through their writing. At least the honest ones are" is what I say to that. Which is basically what this girl is saying. I chug the left-over half of my tripel trappist. Not looking too hot right now.
What was I saying earlier about nausea? Moon, la luna, brings out the loony. People dream of the lunies on the surface dome, gravitating endlessly in a nonsensical ellipse. Is it the moon who originally brought out the utter nonsense of everything, or is the sun a guard or provider of sense, heat-stroking human nature into our subconscious? Everything underneath the sun will expire, turn to black, and cease to be. Is this sense? What nonsense.
Of course, human nature is an improbable supposition, is often misappropriated with characterization and qualification, and becomes translated into our nonsense dictionaries, encyclopedias, indexes, references, loop-station monitors and social networks. It's the kind of thing that leads one to justify. Justification is one of the greater human nonsense creations, and it gives weight to a moon caused nonsense theory as a sick joke, I mean, what happens at night is different than what happens in the daytime. You can justify anything you do after the moon is risen, after the Senset.
It all ends up being a cover, a clever set of sheets blanketing your eyes from the boredom. Once you pull off the sheets, you see life's greatest enemy, more crushing than fear, malaise. It's an abyss, a massive sand-filled hole you build your castles in. You can either sit and wait patiently for the sand to suck you down, or you can fill your life with search and wonder. It's all pretend either way. This malaise is the nausea, but apparently nausea leads to search and wonder, which then leads to dark humor and threat of death by suicide. Or maybe it's just the malaise caused by nausea that brings the end to...Roaming charges will be applied to lunar vibrations...
I'm sitting in between blonde male and my friend. Brown male and sweetie sit across from us in our bench booth. I have been to this bar many a times before, mostly throughout my underqualified (underage) years. It's funny, but this bar doesn't charge less than $21 per pitcher, and it's still my favorite of them all.
I mean, I guess it should be easy for humans to just accept their timely and certain deaths, you know. There is no cruelty in it if you're able to stare into the eyes of someone else and let them die. It's not supposed to matter, that every time someone has a baby, they make a decision to perpetuate a cycle of death, and they are guaranteeing that one more person will have to die before history ends. Why should this be something people struggle with? It's well represented in society by...A few select books, some music and maybe a couple of movies, art pieces, and that's it. The rest is just actual death, or it doesn't involve it in anyway, just the magical realism of human perception, seen through the eyes of doomed, demented people.
Bars are best on Sundays. Lite crowd, a lite mood and music selection, you can order the drinks you like and say the things you wish. Most importantly, the things you hear happen to be at their most delicious tone
"Right, but there is no way to ever tell, and you can't just go on saying things as if they are something real or absolute." What did I just dry heave?
Brown male says something pointing out my lack of logic and my obvness, which I take as him being a dick because I'm proud. I'm letting nausea creep in and produce steamy gas, which is actually anger. He's just trying to connect her point to mine, you could say doing me a favor.
"Writers might kill themselves because they see the pointlessness and loneliness of human existence on this planet, and they are faced with it constantly through their writing. At least the honest ones are" is what I say to that. Which is basically what this girl is saying. I chug the left-over half of my tripel trappist. Not looking too hot right now.
What was I saying earlier about nausea? Moon, la luna, brings out the loony. People dream of the lunies on the surface dome, gravitating endlessly in a nonsensical ellipse. Is it the moon who originally brought out the utter nonsense of everything, or is the sun a guard or provider of sense, heat-stroking human nature into our subconscious? Everything underneath the sun will expire, turn to black, and cease to be. Is this sense? What nonsense.
Of course, human nature is an improbable supposition, is often misappropriated with characterization and qualification, and becomes translated into our nonsense dictionaries, encyclopedias, indexes, references, loop-station monitors and social networks. It's the kind of thing that leads one to justify. Justification is one of the greater human nonsense creations, and it gives weight to a moon caused nonsense theory as a sick joke, I mean, what happens at night is different than what happens in the daytime. You can justify anything you do after the moon is risen, after the Senset.
It all ends up being a cover, a clever set of sheets blanketing your eyes from the boredom. Once you pull off the sheets, you see life's greatest enemy, more crushing than fear, malaise. It's an abyss, a massive sand-filled hole you build your castles in. You can either sit and wait patiently for the sand to suck you down, or you can fill your life with search and wonder. It's all pretend either way. This malaise is the nausea, but apparently nausea leads to search and wonder, which then leads to dark humor and threat of death by suicide. Or maybe it's just the malaise caused by nausea that brings the end to...Roaming charges will be applied to lunar vibrations...
I'm sitting in between blonde male and my friend. Brown male and sweetie sit across from us in our bench booth. I have been to this bar many a times before, mostly throughout my underqualified (underage) years. It's funny, but this bar doesn't charge less than $21 per pitcher, and it's still my favorite of them all.
I mean, I guess it should be easy for humans to just accept their timely and certain deaths, you know. There is no cruelty in it if you're able to stare into the eyes of someone else and let them die. It's not supposed to matter, that every time someone has a baby, they make a decision to perpetuate a cycle of death, and they are guaranteeing that one more person will have to die before history ends. Why should this be something people struggle with? It's well represented in society by...A few select books, some music and maybe a couple of movies, art pieces, and that's it. The rest is just actual death, or it doesn't involve it in anyway, just the magical realism of human perception, seen through the eyes of doomed, demented people.
Bars are best on Sundays. Lite crowd, a lite mood and music selection, you can order the drinks you like and say the things you wish. Most importantly, the things you hear happen to be at their most delicious tone
