The Bar

Love Note to Tomorrow / 2017 / Mixed media collage / Russell C. Smith

Across the wide table, littered with half full beers, talking incessantly and grinning with abandon. Eyes lit, behind the match of a smoke. While all assembled leaned directly into the heart of how we came to be plucked up and out of our places in the world – then wandered, met up with, possibly drifted in a side door. Inhaling artistically ingrained-in-wood beer-scented, carved-up tabletops. Enveloped by a nicotine haze. Talk-shouting over the soul, funk, rock, metal playing on the jukebox over layers of crowd noise, punctuated by maniacal laughter coming from the back room every so often. Communicating our hidden secrets and the biggest culture-shifting creative ideas available within a timeless fleeting moment. We’ll have a few more, just by way of holding some order to the pleasure and proceedings at hand. Cigarettes flick ashes and miss table’s wide plateau. Glowing ashes tumble down the long ravine, past cords of corduroy pants whishing down the back of diner-style bars seats, past blurred edges of blinking red lights, strange geometry of void and clutter of silence, as gray, dusty, formerly glowing specks of matter land on top of our shoes. Time stops, and starts up again. And then it becomes clear. A quest must be undertaken, a journey upriver navigating through the sea of bodies. One of us must go in search of another pitcher, and shots of port and whiskey. Before oblivion holds us for ransom! Before nighttime monsters get into our personal files and leave teeth marks! Before morning’s light crawls up the sides of skyscrapers and all which daylight entails. Before the pre-dawn alarm, newspaper, coffee, phone messages, buying eggs, bread, peanut butter, yogurt, and paper towels! Either that, or earplugs for us all, with free refills to boot. To shoe! To shoe! has tumbled our heroic ash, lest we forget!