I had a story. I mean I just had one, it was more ephemeral than empirical, and now it’s gone. In the last few years I find myself typing the phrase ‘I mean’ often, and the words probably and likely. I think I can justify why I do that, but I can’t recall why I started. I can justify anything, well, anything I do. I think that’s why ‘I mean’ people often say shit that sounds direct because it strongly implies a backstory or the evidence in front of you fit’s with what they are saying, e.g. He just ran in front of the car. Besides the obvious assumption implied in the word ‘just’ (as though he had intended on getting a glass of water and going to bed, but, Bam! Just like that he ran in front of the speakers car instead). The idea of eyewitness testimony being irrefutable at the scene is — more frequently not the case, but I’m not suggesting in this example the speaker is lying, he means he’s in shock and it happened so suddenly that ‘he just ran in front of the car’ is the only way he can articulate the events.
Huh. Shit. That went too far towards the esoteric for me. Something compels me to type ‘I mean’ and whereas my example might be true one time out of a hundred … I don’t know. It’s not a very good rhetorical device, perhaps it could be in moderation or in the perfect paragraph that needs a flaw to make it humble. Probably and likely have a million built in justifications, again, fine words in moderation and proper circumstance. One of the great things about dialogue is that people don’t speak well. I mean grammar is not as fine a point or expectation in the spoken word. Someone who does speak with perfect grammar is often thought of as a pretentious son of a bitch. By me, and, perhaps by you as well. The written word, however, you get to edit.
The great innovation of the modern pencil was the eraser and graphite a dark thin instrument soft enough to remove the markings with a bit of rubber. Typewriters had white out. Computers can move text around with the click of a button and have their own little smartass built into the software to correct … things it thinks need correcting. Ink and quill? People would toss out fucked up pages or write in the margins and have scribes write perfected pieces. Japanese upper crust families have been practicing calligraphy for thousands of years, one of the courtly manners. I think it might to difficult to misspell Japanese, just paint it with small grace or inelegant, but, honestly, I mean what the fuck do I know. Likely nothing. Probably.
There used to be this bar in town, this town, nowadays it might be called a club, but more in function than design, it looked like a really dim high school cafeteria and smelled like someone put out an ashtray fire with a keg of beer. Shit. There was this bar in town called Lizards. It was underground, the basement level of this sort of block of structures with storefronts and cheap apartments on the second and third floors. Lizards might have been a bomb shelter once, I’m less than a decade removed from kids who grew up with atom bomb drills in their schools.
There was a painting on the long wall behind the low raw pine bandstand; Two large lizards curled around as if to kiss or fight. I said it looked like a dimly lit high school cafeteria because it had those type of chairs and tables. Family style drinking seems odd to me now, and I’m hard pressed to think of a place I’ve been to in the last thirty years with that kind of seating. I worked in a steak house like that. That seems odd to me now too. Although the steak house had nice hard wood tables and benchs of same wood and color and grain, not like a high school, there’s still something very institutional about it. One of the things I liked about Lizards is the band stand was mostly for local talent and during a time when the popular clubs featured cover bands, original local talent was … nice.
I liked the two painted Lizards too. I’m not really sure what Lizards had to do with anything drinking or music related. I had always imagined that the Lizards were already painted on the wall when someone decided to put a bar in. East Lansing had been dry just prior to my birth and up until … I don’t know, up until I became aware of what a bar was. There were, and still are, three famous watering holes right on the edge of the town limits, two of them strategically close to the campus. All three of them dives. I worked at one for a bit. The one I worked at was the most infamous for packing in students and selling cheap alcohol. The other close to campus, oddly enough, famous for hamburgers, I don’t think it ever sat more than seventy five. The third, less strategically placed, was sleazy in a more lounge kind of way, the sort of place you’d go to cheat on your spouse where women wore too much make-up and the men pasted their hair on.
In this respect Lizards not only seemed modern but hipper.
Again, what the fuck do I know?
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