Normal or Bust

There was a bar, Olde Queens Tavern, steps from the Rutgers College campus in New Brunswick, New Jersey, that had been a hangout for decades when we wide-eyed wonders arrived in the fall of 1970 (when the drinking age in NJ was 21 and we were not) and we adopted it as our own. Maybe it's the fog of war or the haze of alcohol but I don't remember ever seeing people in there who didn't look like me when I went in there.

I suspect we drove the previous crowd out and, in turn, were succeeded by I don't know how many generations of student-scholars (if wet tee-shirt contests and dropping shots of whiskey into beer glasses is on the syllabus). The folks who ran Olde Queens, and probably still do, were always very patient with us, and much more kind than they needed to be (in light of our age and the terrible fake IDs we all had) in moving us out when it was to close up buy hollering "you don't have to go home but you do have to go.". Some of us, I imagine, probably didn't go home then or ever, or have homes to go to, but leave we did.

Long before Joseph Heller, Closing Time was a state of mind and an attitude check. I'm grateful I don't remember more of some of those nights and the state I was in and I am grateful beyond words for somehow not succumbing as a result of behavior that went well beyond 'youthful indiscretion' without harming myself or anyone else. 

The old man I've been sentenced to become never existed in the fevered fantasies of the young me and I am still amazed how I well I survived that person's excess as if that were, itself, a success. What I do recall makes me shudder and I strive to recall as little as possible for as long as possible.

I was thinking about that yesterday watching news clips of what I understood to be a "Pro-Coronavirus Rally" in Lansing, Michigan, protesting Governor Gretchen Whitmer's efforts to keep the residents of her state alive through self-quarantining, social distancing and deciding who is an essential worker in an essential industry or business.  

Judging from the reports a lot of them (the ones without the Trump/Pence 2020 banners and the Confederate flags (because if you're gonna 'own the libs' then go all the way)) looked like one another and looked like me at the same time. I suspect we have more in common than what separates us, but I'd be surprised if we were going to make any serious effort to bridge whatever the gap may be between us anytime soon.

We used to joke as little kids that 'sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me' but that is, as we all know, an absurdity and a lie. Words can and do hurt, wounding in a way unlike any other weapon ever can, without leaving a visible scar. And after the echo of the last of the words has died, all we have to do is go on living with ourselves and the consequences of what we have done to one another. 

"When the old men do the fighting and the young men all look on. And the young girls eat their mothers' meat from tubes of plasticon. Beware of these, my gentle friends, and all the skins you breed. They have a tasty habit - they eat the hands that bleed."

-bill kenny