The Bar at the End of the World
Tisa’s Barefoot Bar, only a short drive from Pago-Pago, is a place to escape the rain and gather coconuts.
Perhaps only ashes remain.
I’ll have another piña colada, please.
The bar at the end of the world is a real place, that much I’m sure of. As one infinitesimally minor node in a myriad of conscious, thinking beings, connected to each other in real-time through smartphones and other mirror-like devices, my rule of thumb is that everything I can imagine is real — because I imagined it, and because it’s way too hard to keep track of things otherwise (in the greater scope of things, I’m not all that bright). Think for a moment of the sheer density of the combined realities being constantly manipulated by the script-writers whose logic is somehow directing the whole shebang. Not even they can take it all in. Which means that anything I can imagine within the confines of my tiny individual cranium exists in more magnificent and colorful form, somewhere — maybe just over the horizon.
Oh, yes, it’s out there. The horizon is the limit of our vision, and a marker of …
Stop Interrupting!
Is it really that much trouble to answer my texts? Lady, you have no idea.
The average American is being interrupted once every seven minutes throughout the day, making it impossible to form a single complex thought.
If we ever wanted to regain focus and resume our tasks, we would need 3,312 minutes each day just to recover from our interruptions.
At 2:13 in the afternoon one day not too long ago, my wife texted to inquire if I wanted to have dinner with friends the following Friday. Her text message was sweet and thoughtful, asking me how my day was going and sending her love. About an hour later, having not heard back, she texted again, this time making do with three question marks. Forty-one minutes after that, it was an angry-face emoji, words and emotions having by now collapsed into rageful hieroglyphics.
I did not answer, and when she returned home that evening she made no effort to conceal her dismay. “I know you’re busy,” she said, chopping onions at a furious pace, suggesting that one wrong word out of me and the knife might swiftly change its trajectory. “But is it really that much trouble to take five seconds and respond to my fucking text?”
It’s a profound question. In fact, it may be the single most important question …
The Front Porch
The farm at the bottom of the road belonged to Millard. By the time I knew him, he lived with his daughters. His wife had died years ago, but he couldn’t bear to part with the house where they made a life and raised a family.
Every day, when the weather was good, and often when it wasn’t, Millard would drive his old beige Chevy back over to the house, park in the driveway, and wait for someone to come talk to him. Everyone in the area knew Millard. In his nineties now, he had purchased the house on the corner as a young man in his twenties. He had kept cows and other animals on the land for nearly seventy years.
Farm work had been beyond Millard for a while. It was a wonder that he was still permitted to drive his old Chevy. Still, he did everything he could to hold onto the land and stay close to his house. He rented out his lower fields to a neighboring farmer for a pittance as grazing …
