(Brett the bartender created this for The Lovely Bea. The maraschino cherries and lime form the image of a praying mantis, which is not illegal under current Virginia law. Photo Socotra).

Old Jim and I were the first ones there. Jim was holding court in his usual seat, and I had the stool on the diagonal of the Amen Corner.

“It has happened,” I sad. “The stories are getting away from me.”

“Happens to me sometimes, too. How long have you been writing?”

“Like this? Since before Y2K. But professionally? Forty or so years.”

“I have been writing professionally for fifty years. Sometimes I get to a spate where I can’t think that what I am doing is any good.”

“I think that happens to everyone. I just bull through and write something. You are a poet, and I think that is a level of the art to which I cannot aspire.”

“Maybe.”

“My problem isn’t a legitimate period of questioning what I am writing, or the goodness of it. It is time management and I am failing.”

He took a swig of Budweiser and looked thoughtful. “I have the time. The muse just comes and goes.”

“I took a shot from a pal early in the week. I was out of time and grabbed a semi-serious jeremiad from one of my old pals and stuck my response to it and called it a story.”

“The one about the election?”

“Yeah.” I frowned. “I got some feedback that my attempt to be the Alexis de Toqueville for our times was unmasked as a fraud.”

“I never thought that is what you were trying to do. Interesting concept.”

“I tried to shrug it off, but really, that is sort of what I was trying to do. Shine a light on something that I think is coming off the rails. I may be lacking perspective, but the things that are going on seem very strange to me, and I was a serving officer in the Clinton Administration, which was pretty bizarre.”

“Don’t forget, I was a speechwriter in the Nixon White House. I know about strange. Everything is in the context of its times.”

“People had more fun in this town back then.”

“No, they were just able to do it more out in the open.”

“I guess. But losing my credibility as a chronicler of our times and being called a partisan hack made me sad. So I wrote the one the next day- you know, the one where I quoted the Kevin Costner character and the stage direction. A wink and a walk away.”

“Yeah. Seemed like you were about to hang it up.”

“Some of my alert readers took it that way too, like there ever was a chance I would shut up. I got some interesting feedback.”

Jim grimaced and waved at Tex to get another beer. “I hate feedback. It gets in the way of my preconceived notions.”

“No, this was useful. I heard there were too many stories set in the Willow.”

“Well, don’t you just about live here?”

“No way. Two hours a day, tops. But I took that aboard. Some people preferred things like the account of the search for the unmarked graves of the Nazi Saboteurs who landed by U-Boat in World War Two. Some thought the Farm tales are a little cute. Too bucolic.”

“Why don’t you just write what you want and let them hit ‘delete’ if they don’t want to look at it?”

“Not my style. I am a very sensitive kind of guy.”

“My ass.” Tex came by, noticed I was down a quart, and topped me up. The bottle of Happy Hour White was nearly empty, and he kept pouring until the bottle was empty.

Jim gazed at it in wonder, saying: “That is a Texas-sized pour.”

“No shit. So, another pal told me to get out of town. The air is toxic, according to that line of thought, and it is no wonder things are starting to get beyond acerbic and into the acid.”

“Can you try the literary equivalent of Tums?”

“What might that be,” I said suspiciously.

“Write what you want. Then delete it.”

“Oh, yeah, I get what you are saying. But here is what is happening. I have more friends who are retired. They are, for the most part, former analysts and widely read. Their notes are always interesting and thought provoking, and they get me going down all sorts of rabbit holes. This morning was a classic. The President’s apology over the Affordable Care Act drove a couple dozen exchanges, then there were the new numbers on unemployment and job creation. The last straw was an article published in Romania, by a fellow named Harlen Ullmann. He called his piece the “View From Outside,” and started out “It was neither inevitable nor predictable that the United States could become a global laughingstock either so quickly or near universally.”

“You need to filter better.”

“It got to me. I think it is time to get out of town.”

Jon-without-an-H and the Lovely Bea and Placid Jamie and Chanteuse Mary came in, and we thankfully were able to talk about things besides writers block and toxic politics. In the middle of it, I remembered something that seemed to make sense out of things. It was good enough that I wasted my own printer ink to print it out. In between a piece of the Margarita Flatbread and an envious look at Barrister Jerry’s Award Winning Willow Burger, I pulled it out of my pocket and unfolded it carefully before sliding it over to Jim.

He looked down at it and fished his reading glasses out of the lwft inside oocket of his corduroy jacket. “What’s this?” he asked.

“It is why we are screwed up. The Middle has failed,” I said. “The whack jobs are running both sides of the spectrum.”

Jim looked at the diagram and shrugged. “OK, so what. This has been clear enough for years. Third parties- and particularly the Libertarians are losers. ”

I took a sip of the Happy Hour White, slowly lowering the volume from Tex’s impressive pour. “Yeah, but I thought it was interesting. I found out I am still an Ike Skleton Democrat, or a Everett Dirksen Republican. They were hardly libertarians. Actually, I think they were classical Liberals. Where does that leave me?”

“Probably thirsty,” said Jim, and waved to Tex for reinforcements.

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303

The Ullman article that wasted a good chunk of the morning.