Scenes from a novel in progress

(Author's note: What I originally wrote for tonight just wasn't working and I'm dead tired so I'm going to try the piece again tomorrow night in the hopes that it will come out right the second time around. In its place, here is a quick chapter from my novel in progress.)

Chapter 3: The Allure of Neon

There is a glorious feeling that overcomes you when you pull into a bar parking lot on a Tuesday night. That sense that you are about to undertake a challenge so daunting that most citizens would look upon you with fear and disgust. You have given up all hope of acting like a proper adult and instead are going to wreck havoc on yourself with no regard to the consequences. Turning off the engine you have an illicit smile on your face knowing that what you are about to do is wrong but you just don’t care.

I really wonder how some people live normal lives. They get up every day, go to the office and then just go home and watch mindless sitcoms all night long. They spend their evenings talking about how they plan to retile the bathroom next month or how their cousin Cindy just got back from Orlando. There is nothing real to their entire existence. If you watched their entire life on fast forward you wouldn’t miss a single piece of the plot.

I simply can’t live my life that way. It seems like a total waste. There are too many books to read, bands to hear and experiences to have. True, I chain myself to a cubicle every morning but it isn’t who I am. That is just where I find myself during the day. Who I really am comes out at night. Typically in a bar.

I’m not an alcoholic. They attend meetings and do things like spend evenings alone with a bottle of Jack Daniels. Instead I consider myself to be a drunkard. I’ll hang out in a smoky bar, drinking slightly more than my doctor would recommend, while arguing philosophy with people I have never met. Inside a bar, especially on a Tuesday night, everyone is your friend. We are all joined by the same purpose. We all need liquid sustenance to make the world palatable enough to experience again. No one is here for their monthly night out, there are no bachelorettes celebrating their upcoming happiness, just a group of people who know that the only place where truth can be found has bottles lined up in neat rows.

When I got out of my car I looked at all of the flashing neon in the bar’s windows and remembered Jay Gatsby reaching out for the green light. All of his dreams were out there on the other dock if he could just grasp them. Love, honor, respect; all of it tied to that blinking light. I thought about how many times my dreams had been ripped away from me or had just faded from my view right before I got to them.

I walked in and my beer was waiting for me on the bar before the door had even closed. Gatsby never had it so good.