Show me the way to the next whiskey bar – Part 2.

Mike Mulligan's coming for my pub.

And I thought we were friends?

Yeats said:

”Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That's all that we will know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you and I sigh.”


Ah well. Here, for future reference, assorted memories of a short night on the town in a place that’ll soon be gone.

A blaze of flesh vanishing into a cornflower blue blazer. Curious with the local-bug-appraising-eyes of an entymologyst on holiday; Molly. She and her entourage. Her packa Vanilla, rhymin' amazettes: Stacy and Tracy.

And yet behind the onyx or obsidian, or whatever they’ve surface this bar with lurks the severe Lisa. And fated I am to talk in inverted prose like Yoda and eyelove impossible sights all night long.

Noncommital lightning flashes off and on as Molly and her minions eject and reject cell calls that come in flocking abundance. And Lisa remains. Like England, I thought there would always be a Lisa...and that this place would endure the next Ice Age.

I was wrong.

44 feet away, beyond a proscenium arch, people dance. The dandy reality is that in the strobe and smoke and black-light paint of that second room, one may be excused as seeing them as a flickering film; a scrim-projected Dance-O-Matic from some bygone disco era.

I'm liking Lisa. I'm liking her tatted left calf, disconcerted as I am over the fact that characters from the dancing bas relief keep coming and going. I dig this place. On some cellular level it has what the faux Irish Lunch-o-rama did not have: it has a soul.

The Man is bringing The Heat.

Ardbeg Single Malt Islay. Put under cask during Reagan Administration, it is a fabulous thing when mixed with good conversation. I am compelled to say that I’m having quite a good time. Despite the fact that this is a Wake, there is, in fact, no way I can avoid the fact that I am having a king hell bitch of a time. And thank goodness for that.

It was another looong damned day, and I'm dodging an event tonight, as well as what seemed to me to be a snaked-in from extreme left field invitation from an ex. Just needed to wash the bad week out of my mouth. The residue clung to me like nine-day-old funk. At home, lying there on my dirge furniture, I had only only been aware of bad, nettling things. The needling hairs the cats have imbedded in the dusty futon. The wispy, errant fuzzclouds that scud almost invisibly across the floor.

Every undone task no matter how small came after me with a tiny knife, and every unmailed bill loomed large enough to blot out the Sun.

It was time to get up and get out.

And now, on the Juke Box - E'rybody in the club gettin tipsy. Before that it was Van Morrison. Later it might be Devendra Banhart.

The music roams and ranges from half-a-year behind pop-cult’s leading edge to Aretha.

And Lisa keeps giving me the crazy-eye.

Good night and good-bye, fine old saloon.

If it’s true that the Almighty doesn’t ever foreclose one opportunity without offering another, here’s hoping that he stocks the new joint with good booze, genius bartenders, eclectic music, cool/freaky regulars, working-class liberals and Old School Lincoln Conservatives (for what is life without lively disputation) and the best joss in town.