Home

The bar top was a replica of (or perhaps not) of an old-style shuffleboard table, of the type that one upon a time inhabited the bars, pubs and taverns of America. At semi-regular intervals, abandoned newspapers, dinosaur-like in their non-digitalness, sprawled sadly, crying for attention and relevance. Dick Dale, who also cried for attention and relevance, shredded surf-redolent notes from the jukebox. State of the art flat screen televisions, a counterpoint to the many Post-it Notes™ and handwritten signs, lit the interior with a ghostly light. Home, or a reasonable facsimile thereof.

He sat at the bar, equidistant between the off-sale cooler, stacked high with beers-for-the masses, and the giant bag of popcorn which invited speculation about bacteria and mass-produced faux butter. It was close to empty, as it often was on a Thursday afternoon, populated only by the white guy who insisted that he was one quarter Cherokee (why is it that white people who claim Indian ancestry are always Cherokee?) and the guy in the waist-length black ponytail who announced at regular intervals that he was the illegitimate son of Anastasia Romanov. Regulars. At home. Like him.

Fairly easy it is to call a bar home when the usual definition doesn’t apply; after all, home is where you go when you’re done doing all the things that you have to do, where the day ends, where your stuff is. When you don’t have any stuff, when the day doesn’t ever really end, when it’s not just metaphorical, you enjoy your illusions wherever you can get ‘em. Especially when reality doesn’t quite measure up. And why should it? He knew that reality would kick in quite smartly at 2:00AM, when ready or not, it was time to leave his home and descend into the nightmare. Not exactly “livin’ the dream”.

What is madness? Some might say that it’s the recognition that the world isn’t what we want it to be…and it never will be. That it’s the railing against the unfairness of “the way things are” and the creation of a reality that fits our sense of right and wrong. That it’s a howling – knowing that “what’s real” will never, ever be the same as “what should be”. He knew madness, he knew the howling, he knew the emptiness.

Away from home, away from the nine-to-five, as the howling died down, reality was the back seat of an unheated car, wrapped in layers of goose-down and a woolen hat.