Last night I could feel the cold air sweep across my arms. The top was down in a white 13 year old Lebaron with burgundy and white vinyl interior. Even though the car was built in 1993 it still felt like I had been transported back to 1986. I was feeling old. Certainly too old to be a part of whatever scene I have suddenly found myself in. Popularity is an annoying novelty to me. I find it to be strenuous and tedious. The monotony of going out the nights to the certain places that those people expect you to be just because that’s where they congregate. The bar has become a church. We go in mass hoping to find salvation from ourselves and the other vultures on the dance floor. But it’s just that, a meat market masquerading as a bar with tacky things hung on the walls. Things that are supposed to give you some kind of mariner feel but just come off as Red Lobster. I found myself staring at one particular curio through the smoke. It was a piece of art, if you could call it that. I believe that it was painted or I am sure it could also be made out of velvet. It was of an old weathered seaman done up in shadows with a pipe and a yellow hat. I suppose it was raining in his world. But he just stood there nonchalantly on the wall looking out at the chaos. His pipe hanging out of his mouth like an after thought. He certainly wasn’t thinking about how a girls’ boyfriend spilt beer all over her exposed feet. He wasn’t thinking about the kids being violent on the dance floor, pushing each other around to the bands set they had all seen and completely memorized. I wanted to be transposed into the painting with him. On the stormy sea and trying to avoid sea monsters, but then I realized that was what I was trying to do anyway. The waves of people crowding looking for their drinks and someone to bring home or somewhere to go afterwards. Some of them are lurking in the shadows of cigarette smoke, bodies, and booths. It’s hard to pick them out, but they are there. They could look like anything, their real intentions buried under skins of polo shirts, mini skirts, black uniforms, tight jeans, hats, and bad hair cuts. So seeing all of this I felt an itch underneath my own skin. To leave or become violent. I chose the later. Beating random people up on the dance floor and even feeling too old to do that. We did leave though. The quartet that I had arrived with decided to amble back to the Lebaron. I didn’t have a chance to put my sweatshirt on so my arms and chest were exposed the night desert air. She put the top down and I suddenly felt it. The old crept up on me like that air. It swiftly wrapped my body within its wisps of oxygen. I could make out some stars when I laid my head back. Some of them I am sure are dead. I have read that. We still see their light and that’s what I want for this sheaf of work that I have laid out. Dead, old, mortal, but still visible.