LUDIC LOG

In my favorite bar right now, not so many miles away, five dozen or so people sit inhaling smoke, theirs and other people's; a sonic buzz of shouted conversations and electrically-powered clusters of amplifiers, speakers, radios; lights washing over them and surrounding them, insulating them, damaging their sight and hearing. Machines run steadily that filter, amplify, distort, illuminate, project, broadcast, heat, cool, circulate and dispense. For the sake of passing the long empty hours this five dozen will sit, each one seeking out his or her own, shaping and molding their definition of "kindred spirit" until someone not too far away fits the bill. Friends are made and relationships are forged in the air, out of nothing, small talk cementing together an ephemeral and shapeless possibility until it can be called one thing or another, for what can be accepted unless it is first named? In the name of amusement will these five dozen give themselves cancer and cirrhosis of the liver, make themselves impotent, rob themselves of their hearing, risk death in many small and pleasurable ways. Talk veers here and there, never lighting on one thing for long lest something be said that brings too uncomfortable an air to what might otherwise be a smooth displacement of an unbearably tedious index of hours. Thus is conversation kept to a minimum, and the blaring PA cranks out shrill and desperately hip advertisements infrequently interrupted by samey 'alternative' music to further disable cogent discourse. Soon the band will come on and conversation will end entirely, save for whoops of approval or disapproval, drinks orders, and the occasional bit of indecipherable stage patter.

Summer is coming and people are dressed for it; the unbearable heat (one hundred and nine degrees and it's already 10:30 at night, and surely everyone remembers it never used to get this hot, not in the sharply colored memories of youth it was never this hot) washes syrupy and sick over the bared legs of the beautiful and hideous alike. Clusters form, separate, reform, detach, an amoebic ballet of disguised need and desire, for drinks food entertainment friendship sex. Join me, why don't you? It's my favorite bar.