Hi toots. It's been a month, and that's your barman's fault. Still, you ain't missed nothing. What you doing in here, huh? Why sully what could be an enthusiastic morning at the office, creeping like a brownie amongst the corridors and filing cabinets to stoke the computers and draw back the venetian blinds and dust the yukkas before your colleagues come in to drink coffee and dissect their weekends, or a blissful afternoon pouring sunlight onto your skin and basking in home-measure cups of vodka and lemonade? There's nothing here for you. Meagre enlightenment, precious little hope and no entertainment whatsoever. Surely it's best that you hold your body near someone you want to ensnare the attention of while the world sickly moves through its incessant, giddy turns. Haven't you any time for drinking spiced wine, blunting your mind with liquor and blinding your consciousness to the howling dark and isolated misery of every niggling, crawling, cunt of a day? I mean, love - by fuck! You crawl from the concussion of your cups into a bright day and expend your morning serving barely sentient motherfuckers with your hours, your conversation and the shrivelled rinds of emotion you scatter for them to walk on and they port the whip merely because you have rejected the things of the world and they embrace them. Having your face stuck in the shit with an expensive shoe on the back of your head - that ain't no way to live.
Take comfort, toots. Yeah, yeah. They function from dawn and fold dining cloths and remember dates and shit. That puts them in charge of the hours of earning, and there is nothing whatever you can do about that. When you're collecting your reward, however, when the evening's warming like a sunrise on the wafts and rises of tequila and chuckling and bewildered sexual advances and the sound of cheers and glasses clanking and someone beating a piano hard, they're tucked up with their accounts and portfoios and their frigid lovers. When they stare out their windows when it's too hot to sleep, or they just want a bit of the night for themselves, their silence is fucked by the whirr of calendars and their view of the pips of starlight is obscured by the numbers repeating on their fucked retina like accountant's confetti. They never know the joy of stalking the rare hours like a thief, with the stink of whisky and tobacco camaraderie welling around their eardrums and the sinking into the pool of television as the dark room and the booze takes away their body and leaves them to sink into silver Hollywood. In all this dreary worsening grind of life, as you sit fighting for breath and sweating to sit up and sip at your booze, when the only thing that animates you is the involuntary spasms of coughing and acid indigestion that leave you stunned and hallucinating, there's nothing like watching the angels walk by with all the things you ever wanted discarded in their wake. Heartburn and overdrafts, kid, that's all they've left for you.
Your dreams won't pan out like their schemes, your love is no match for their technique in bed. It's for the best that you're kind enough to pretend with your barman, his doorman and the regulars wallowing in a cloud of unknowing that reeks of blood and piss and vomit and cigarettes, that we're sharing a silver screen drink together. 'Til then, may I point out that we have Herbie Hancock playing Bring Down The Birds on the jukebox, nearly every bottle in the place is crawlingly alive still, and you baby, are cool, if only as far as the crippled clientele of Mike's Place are concerned. We fancy you rotten, toots, but outside it's all fucked. Let's have your glass.
These radio buttons were a great success last time. We hardly heard from you bastards at all.
Pete's watching Mr. Once-a-month and Debs making chat. Drink by drink their evening together softly implodes and they end up with just their boozy dreams chasing each other through the surfs of cigarette smoke dangling from the ceiling of Mike's Place like oilclouds. Me, I'm just keeping my glass full and minding my business. My conscience kind of has its hands full already.