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,…
Contemporaneous: Chapters 60 – 61
60. In the movies, whenever couples hook up, the next scene usually cuts directly to wherever one of them live – they’ll be kissing, undressing, so passionate they can’t contain themselves. Everything will be so desperate but synchronized. But movies do that. It’s like seeing a character find parking right outside of their destination. Usually, in real life, we circle around, trying to find anywhere to park. But movies cut to the conclusion because they don’t have time to spend on that meaningless shit. Rachel walks me back to her car – a Yaris – and then drives me back to my own; she grabs my address, but says she’ll…