I looked for a place to write stories…
I wanted to bleed in public, but without anyone knowing about it.
I liked the dive bar. It had the cheapest drinks in town. They were so cheap, the bartender didn’t even charge me for the second beer or Coke.
I bled on the page while 25-year-olds played pool less than ten feet away from me.
But the dive bar was dark. That was a big reason why I liked it. You can be rich and love a dive bar just because you love the aesthetics. There’s an innocence to the dirty cheap darkness.
It’s simple. Life can be so complicated - I appreciate the simplicity of a bar.
Imagine a writer typing on a laptop in a dive bar trying to write rhymes like Eminem… or even funnier, scribbling with a Pilot gel pen and a physical notebook.
I did both. I turned up the brightness on my laptop so I could see the notebook better.
The bar also resolved an important dilemma… time. It closes at 2 am.
If I don’t write at home late at night (when it feels like the Twilight Zone and things get weird in my head…)
Then I like to write at coffee shops.
I don’t like how 24 hour coffee shops just decide they’re not open 24 hours anymore.
It’s heartbreaking for those of us who come alive at night.
The night before the dive bar, I was at my favorite coffee shop from the last year.
I made friends with college kids as we bonded over our late night coffee shop addiction.
Then we all found out the coffee shop now closed at midnight! It was so disappointing.
I saw the college kids pop into another coffee shop, which they promptly left because there were no tables left to fit their whole group.
So now I write at home… as the zombie effects of the daylight wear off around 9 or 10 pm… and I feel my vampire blood warming up to the night, sending blood flow to my brain to get working…
And I hope to stay inside in one place so that I don’t run into any late night horrors on the street. On second thought, that wouldn’t be so bad - it would give me more stories and places to write about.