I really must think about my winter plan and make the winter count. Ha Ha! Make the winter count? What am I going to do? Take an advanced degree? Welcome in a few hours to October, the final quarter of the year and the first of two full months of Fall. I will write and hopefully travel to Detroit, Chicago and Traverse City. I had a great discussion with one of my contacts about a week of consulting in Atlanta Georgia. Maybe if I play my cards right, I'll pick up a few more southern cities during the winter. The idea of spending more than a casual number of hours in bars like the Little Brown Jug, LBJ, is enough to plummet me into sloth and despair. People know one another so well here. The bartender, J, knows that A will go back to B after she breaks up with C, after a few free form months. I mean, people return to this counter for the mass market lager and the company as regularly as attending church? Anyone calling me an asshole for not understanding the life of a small town and its bars. People are living good or good enough lives here. As for myself, I am an asshole and my life doesn't work. I dropped into the Fruitport Bowling alley and counted the six lanes. I also counted the dollars stapled to the eastern wall, written upon like those shamrocks for fundraising in the weeks leading up to St Patrick's Day. I didn't count. I just counted rows and columns and multiplied, arriving at 500 dollars. One dollar had a date from 1991, twenty years. I was married for the first, the only time and for the last time in 1991. Saw my former wife out shopping for a homecoming dress for our daughter, meeting up with them in the great open arcade, a three story high arcade, built shortly before my daughter's birth, part of the Somerset shopping mall. That dollar bill went up on the wall the year of that marriage. I am sitting in a dimly lit bar with a drop ceiling, remembering when I worked next to that arcade of singing light, lived a five minute drive from it and swam at midnight in a pool with another three story high roof. Nothing stays open past nine, except the Meijers and Walmart, 24 hour supplies for all of us living on the fringe. I think some of these fitness shops without showers stay open round the clock. It's a great business model but I loved my nights swimming in Lifetime's Olympic pool and meditating in the sauna. It is time to redevelop my night vision again and maybe buy a pair of cross-country skiis. Maybe it's time to head back to a real city?
I did have three friends look me up today, to hang out at one of the Martini bars in Grand Haven. I am moody today, so I am not sure what kind of company I would have made. I try to save a night at Theater Bar until I really need one. I stopped into Buffalo Wild Wings and one of my really good friends from work caught me walking out after using the loo. He invited me over to the table, contacts from the Southern big time plant, but it was Eleven. Those folks were going to close the place and I knew Friday had to be a day when I cranked out the code. It was that kind of day, more productive than most. But now I feel an apology and an explanation is due to that friend from work.
Since it is end of the quarter, sales held a luncheon, pot luck that turned out lucky. One sales person brought in barbecued pulled pork, another white bean and ham soup. A retiring executive, as if the executives truly retire and leave the business, served up elk chili and bear kielbasa, a spicy black sausage that we ate with toothpicks. I feel odd, as if the Brad's spirit had blended with mine. It's the first time I knowingly ate a meat from a creature that had stood erect on two legs.
For some reason, people are smoking at the bar at LBJ, using like plastic jello shot cups to flick ashes. I believe there's enough keno, lottery and faux slot machines to qualify as a casino.
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