Yet another day rockets to the fore in this the forefront of my experience. I spent my midday by shopping, which was enjoyable until I was interrupted by running into my former employer, his children, and his wife at one of the stores. False fronted hugs all round. I then came home and cleaned in deference to the arrival of my roommate’s paramour from Virginia. Deducing that cleaning happens faster, and blood pressure lowers, with gin I walked down to Mike’s grocery and in route saw my friend Kelly pulling out of the funeral home.

Mike’s grocery is located between a creamatorium and a funeral home (truth is stranger than fiction) and people use the funeral home to park when getting their groceries. Humerously the crematorium has no parking lot. It’s a former dance studio that all the little girls in the neighborhood used to walk to twenty years ago. It has a large sign out front proclaiming that they are members of the Neptune Society. Whether that’s a process or a professional association I have yet to have the gumption to ask. My guess is that they can have your urn dropped into the deepest park of the oceanic trench, where Prince Namor astride a Pilot fish can be the guide of your descent to Atlantis proper.

As Kelly was pulling out she saw me and rolled down her car window. Kelly is a bartender at a local watering hole that I haven’t been to in months. She told me she was off to work as if to encourage me to drop by. I leaned in to say hi at which point her dog Xena nearly bit my face off. I did the rapid dodge limbo and as a consequence got to keep my nose. “I’m so sorry. I’ve never seen her do that. She’s not normally like that. Etc.” So while I had mostly been having a good day it was nearly punctuated by puncture and the repulsion that all women feel for men who don’t get along with their dogs.

Things began improving again with the arrival of M.B.’s paramour, who is a charming and articulate woman. We talked many things academic until it was time for me to get out of their hair and meet Karen and John out for drinks. In route to the Oyster Bar I called Brad, John O, and Erica to liven up the group with some of my more familiar faces. Brad, John O, and John O’s brother Mike had already been out for happy hour so I simply altered their trajectory.

Mike, “Where exactly are we?”

John, “We’re on the south edge of downtown and the north edge of Soulard. That’s sort of like St. Louis’ French quarter.”

Here’s the big bomb for those of you in the know (Beth), when Karen had called earlier in the day it was to invite me out with several teachers who didn’t have to work tomorrow, by the time I arrived at the bar it had become an engagement party. John had composed a song for Karen several years ago, tonight he added a verse with a matrimonial proposal in it and then slid his grandmother’s resized ring up the approprite digit.

So firm handshakes and well wishing all around to the fabulous blues and jazz of the Tuesday night house band, which was essentially a jam session that was composed mostly of the “off duty” members of the Soulard Blues Band. The trumpet player Brian used to date my sister Sandy’s good friend Michelle. St. Louis is the world’s largest small town.

“I’ve wanted this for so long and I am just blown away that this is what this moment looks like,” Karen “We’re moving to Fenton so I can get a yard and some stars. I’m sick of the city. I want a garden.”

Karen and John met in that bar, she a tender paying for a high school teaching credential and he a patron: beginnings and endings hand in hand.

So, two women at a neighboring table, Marcy and Laura, inserted themselves into our group through repeated requests for cigarettes and it was drinks and dancing all round for the remainder of the evening. I was pulled into a conversation with Mike, Laura, and Marcy in which Mike wanted to know about more of Cronenberg’s films. Is that a coincidence, an extension of my last night out with John, has Mike been reading the blog, or is the Cronenberg experience in ascendance in the barroom gambits of lonely men?

He brought the films up to counter the girls’ assertion that Secretary was a transgressive film. I was brought in as an expert witness to confirm that Secretary, while a charming film, is the tamest S & M movie ever produced and belongs to the suburbs for which is was made. Remind me not to ever make that point again, especially to attractive women who actually want to talk about how hot they find a particular S & M film.

So after my stock plummeted with our flirting partners I had the good fortune to meet Phil, an old man from Columbia who was a charming conversationalist. I taught Karen’s girlfriend Tracy how to swing dance and gradually our crowd dwindled. First friends, then the happy couple, and at long last my coterie headed for the door. Unfortunately by that point I had gotten myself into something of an antisocial mood. No amount of convincing could get me to go bar hopping with the stragglers and so I found myself alone at our table sipping a full beer and listening to the band.

I moved up to the front of the seating area to imply that I was open to other dance partners and was promptly joined by a former student and his girlfriend, arriving fresh from Blueberry hill. Their company went a long way to cheer me up and we talked about how they had just met hiking the Appalachian Trail. He is one of those bright drop outs who somehow missed the albatross of educational loans and is thus more free than I to explore the world as a jobless hiker of Westward expansion.

Eventually they closed the doors behind us and I wandered off for late night fare from the nearby White Castle. I think I brought the solitude that I’ve been cultivating at home, with me to the bar. Feeling alone among a crowd of some of your best friends, feeling that your social clothes just don’t fit right, feeling tired in response to the press of first impressions, and feeling what it’s only natural to feel as the world pairs up, reproduces, and moves out to the suburbs; where Secretary on IFC becomes preferable to the live world of live bands: a tame kind of bondage.

Well we’ve certainly been out at bars enough for this lifetime and perhaps now it’s time for something different. I’m not sure where on that shelf I fit, or if I fit at all, but I guess I know where the bookends are.