The Use of Negative Space

I was in the Central Tavern one night. I am real anal about cleaning my glasses and do it all the time. So I am cleaning my glasses the better to see what the problem is at the entrance where these guys are yelling at each other and there's a yell and a shove and this guy bounces off my table and gets up, grabs my linen hanky specially chosen to keep my spectacles clean and jams it in a blood spurting hole in his side. Willie, my friend, leans forward, sips his Tsing Tao and says to my ear "looks like he got it in the liver." And all hell broke loose. In my inhumanity all I could think about was my hanky I kept all those years that my nephew gave me before he died. Somehow I lost Willie and ended up in Doc Maynards where the lights were just too bright and this pretty young red head asked me if I knew where she could score some crystal. So much for downtown.
Nothing beat the bars where I grew up and the bartenders bought every 3rd or 4th beer and after a while it didn't matter how much money you had as long as you could stay on your barstool and didn't give anybody any shit. But people were always waving guns around and fighting over husbands and wives.

So I tried the late afternoons instead (to coincide with round buying beer delivery truck drivers) and that was ok for a while but it is hard to pack it in just as things start to get interesting. But after a while it is like going to the carnival only it's not fake and nobody knows what they're doing, besides falling apart. By the time I was 18 it was boring.
I only tended bar once and a guy who survived a self inflicted gunshot to the head tried to walk into the beer cooler and as I pulled him away he went into a severe grand mal seisure. The patrons were cruel, one spitting on him saying "let the fucking coward die."
I haven't drank in a bar in years, not even when my mother died and she left $400 in an envelope in the safety deposit box with a note that said have a good time, boys. Wasn't on the bar stool for 5 minutes before there were four buds and three shots in front o' me. Snuck out the back door into the cold new winter wind to wonder when, where and how I'd die, glad I wasn't thinking that on belly fired by booze.
Oddly enough my favorite bartender was a friend who became the state chairman of the John Birch Society. Only person my own age I knew who died in his sleep.

 ***

think it was during the Black Death when people would haul their loved ones up to the boneyard to plant them, and occassionally, one or more would stay behind to save the others the burden of carrying them up to the graveyard in another day or two. One has to have all the strength one can get if one has any hope of any chance.

As far as love goes, I agree with another doctor, Dr. Destouches of Ferdinand Celine's Death on the Installment Plan. "Love is a poodle's chance in hell of attaining the infinite".
But one must take it whenever the slightest turnipy scrap of it appears in whatever form.
Vincent's blossoming almond tree, the use of negative space to convey the emotional acceptance of reality that has more to do with the realization of beauty than mere intellectual precepts. The whole love is beauty and music is matter rearranged back into itself inside the souls of the undead dreamers. The tales of every god are what might have been and could some day be on the darkest shores of myths that won't die, birds that can't fly, and children who don't have to be tricked into believing anything.
Where the old market now crumbles into a gray dissemblence of exchange, the river still runs its rush over the speckled stones. One hand leaves another. Crows open up from branches above.
You are still alive, you must be, you can tell by all these calls.

***

Everything was supposed to be settled. When he turned over the thanksgiving dinner during grace because he thought they were making fun of him, well, they got drastic on him. He seemed mostly the same to me, though he walked like a guy who was in a house full of sleeping people that he dare not awake. I exchanged banal pleasantries with his parents, a knowing look with his sister that I never really knew, then he asked me to come up to his room. He told me he knew he was paranoid but he wasnt' going to let that get him in the way. And he proceded to tell me how drawing maps on the backs of mirrors was the safest way to plan his escape. Though he did not like that word. At one point he stopped, his eyes watering. "You know what's happening, don't you..."
"To you?" I asked.
"No. To all of us."
At the VA they had him down to one massive shot of some unknown dose admistered to his ass. This only fed his suspicion that they were experimenting on him again. The meds make things functional, but the side effects blurred his core personality and his passion to feel the galaxial modality again. What he could not do he did better than anyone I ever knew who thought they could.
He never fails to humble me.