Contemporaneous: Chapters 65 – 67
65. The one thing I note now is the reappearance of certain memories – being held back by the teacher during recess, the inexplicable bouts of melancholy as a child, being a pariah as a teenager as anxiety compromised so much of my life socially, and then there’s something new, something dark, and I can’t unearth it, I can’t remember it, but it sits behind these things, a secret pulse that has beat all my life and gotten buried under more and more and more shit; and then it’s little things that I’ve dismissed, like bartending early in my twenties and a handful of short, unfulfilling relationships, and then the…
Contemporaneous: Chapter 64
64. I drink and drink, the waitstaff always approaching me with uncertainty, like one of them wants to tell me this isn’t a bar, but they’re all teenagers – they don’t have the courage to approach some foreboding-looking fifty-year-old who’s drinking peacefully (but, given I’m drinking alone, self-destructively), and tell him he has to leave. The cook looks like he might, though – he’s about thirty, but a rotund guy, with a big, meaty, crewcut head that’d might’ve just come out of his wood-fire oven. Give him another decade and his bulk will turn to fat. Right now, though, he’s got this affable look about him – maybe it’s cliché,…