"I don't get it, Dan. What's the point of me living. My existence is inevitably and fixedly useless. There's no changing it, Dan. I try to justify it, but it all just ends up being some type of biological tactic," he said, low, with a groaning voice that screeched the boards of my ears.

I don't get it. Why was he bringing this up? There's no point in focusing on such a struggle. I used to be the same, and left it years back. Just as he believes he's useless, so is believing he is useless a useless endeavor.

But gallons of curiosity struck at my chest, hitting hard. I felt my heart stop for a nanosecond, and my lungs collapse, as this happened, and as I compressed the napkin I held at the inside of the bottles.

"Biological tactic?" I semi-mumbled, under my breaths of cigar smoke, and through the cigar that stuffed my mouth up and gagged me with possibilities of lung cancer.


"Yah - now get me anothah beer, Dan."

Yep, he said yeah, and then he snapped. But that was of no concern to me - a different crowd cornered the incident of his snapping in my mind. A crowd that felt unsatisfied with the guy's answer.

That's not what I was looking for. I was looking for explanation, not affirmation. Perhaps I needed to pose the question differently. I put the bottles back in their proper place.

"So, what biological tactic exactly do you mean?" I said, my face so close to him that my stiff chest full of chemical wastes and radiation from the tube I burned and blew all day closed up against his bosom, now the smell of alcohol slowly seeping into my nostrils.

"Oh," he hiccuped, "yeah, you know, a way for me to survive, that's all. If reason goes against it, reason is dead. My body sees its survival much more important, regardless of my mind, ya know?"

"Your mind and body are parallel. You must be holding back from total self-destruction for a reason."

"There aren't any good reasons......only bad ones, because it's gone wrong - everything has."

I dropped off the beer he order at the side of his hands, very gently (as someone like him needed gentleness - he had made himself fragile already), and looked into it for a while, as my elbows laid at the side of the table opposite to him.

"You've got to be kidding me; there may be a lot of things gone wrong, but there are a lot of things gone right too - like our ideals, mayhaps. Know what I mean?"

"Yeah..I guess." He whispered, and after a 30 second pause, his voice raised, stating: "But everything that is right has left me. I have no more ideals - it's all fatal, anyway."

"Everything that is right has left me," he repeated, his hand weakly laying upon the spot where his heart is; however, so casually that it looked like pure coincidence his hands were stemming from his chest area like the vines of trees going through a building, slowly and gently destroying it as it fed itself.

I smiled, and while turned away, as though to avoid his expressed reaction, I said, "What happened, your girlfriend dumped you?" I snickered, and slammed the table with my fist in erupting laughter.

He sighed.

"It's all a joke, isn't it?"

"You'd be surprised how trivial things can look if it is all useless, as you say. A joke is different - it doesn't take away the seriousness, it just extracts the positives, twists them around into a punchline..." I said, and my lips became stern again, my eyes stale like the bread I ate this morning.

Shit, that fucking bread. I had to vomit my throat out because of that stupid bread, and drink whiskey thereafter.

"Hey, man - you chose everything that's right to drift away. You enveloped yourself into a void of motive. It can be argued you weren't responsible for what happened, but you certainly are the one who resolves yourself. Life; life is that. Life is you, and you are whoever you direct yourself to be. In fact, you are nothing. But it's a beautiful nothing, because it makes you free to shift and form yourself. You're past is not you. It's only a ligament of you. Life is precious because of freedom - do not feel overpowered by it, but manifest self-control through it. Create your life. Life is valuable because it is what you make of it. Understand?"

I did not know what had just come out my mouth, but it rang from the bells of my heart's chambers. It pumped throughout my body very strongly. I knew what I was song, yet I did not.

The guy wasn't drinking his beer.

Weird.

I looked back at him, and he was very still.

"You're...right...." he said, and his brows tips, those closer to his nose, tried facing downwards, as those tips away from his nose, went upwards, and his eyes shot fire, and his hand flew so quickly, it seemed to have teleported from sitting quietly on the table, to where the beer was. And the crack of the beer bottle sang through the bar, as the beer danced through the floors, diving into its gentle cracks.

In the distance, his racing footsteps knocked "thank you" as he was out the door, away.

I can't believe it. I make someone feel other than sad, and I get repayed by having to clean up.

Damn...ruin my day a bit more, will ya? Fuck...it is useless, isn't it? For some reason, I couldn't help but laugh at it.

"Ron, get me a mop over here!"