And after that?

            The bar tenders were a mix of skinny guys with crew cuts and tattoos and older women who either a) liked their job and talking to the regulars or b) were deeply pissed off about the state of the world, hated their job and secretly hated talking to the regulars. It was pretty hard to tell. This not knowing lead him to have very terse conversations with the waitresses and then to tip them slightly above gratuity. The feeling here was that they had probably had enough assholes talk to them in their life, so he was trying to put them out of their misery. If misery it was, if it wasn’t misery then they probably just thought he was an asshole.

            He ordered a 7 and 7 from the waitress, making only the smallest amount of eye contact and waited for his friend, James, who was always late. James contended that he was always late because time got away from him. James contended that he was obsessed with time, so much so that it became a hindrance, caused him to be late to things that he would have otherwise been on time to. Somehow, according to James, paying attention to time made him more susceptible to its vagaries. This was obviously not true, but it was the sort of thing that you let slide in the name of friendship. He was late because he chose to be late.

            “Who do we have tonight?” James asked after sitting down quickly, ten minutes late, and slinging his coat across the back of the old, dark stained bar chair. The décor was either medieval or medieval torture chamber depending on how you felt about what dim lights were trying to hide. Was there anything worse than a fully lit bar?

            “Cassandra, tonight?” he replied answering James question. James had no compunction about engaging the waitresses in conversation and even knew intimate details about them like whether their children’s fathers paid child support on time. In H’s opinion, that was weird. Strangers were strangers for a reason. You didn’t know them, nor did you did you need to know them.

            “Let’s not talk about, Cassandra,” H said.

            “You never want to talk about Cassandra,” James answered. “This is because you are a retrograde human being, who thinks that the whole world revolves entirely around his mood at any particular moment.”

            To be fair, this was true, though H felt it was true of most people and that the best anyone could do was wrestle with it. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. H supposed that you could go about being the best version of yourself; the sort of person that he’d wanted to be during his teen years when he’d belonged to a particularly evangelical church. In this version of himself, H would have spent the majority of his life in service to others, which really was quite rewarding. And yet, he didn’t. It was hard to say if this was just pure laziness or the cumulative effect of living in an individualistic and capitalist society. Either way, he wasn’t particularly happy today.

“I’m not happy,” H said, taking a sip from his drink. “Also, this is terrible. How do you mess up whiskey and ginger ale.”

In the background, a couple was having a faux argument over which songs to pick on the juke box. But really, they were in love or lust or whatever, they liked each other was the point. And they weren’t really disagreeing about anything, or if they were, it was only as a vector to have something to apologize for in order to move closer together.

“You’re not happy for a very specific reason,” James said, getting Cassandra’s attention and spending a few moments conversing with her briefly about her seven-year old son’s math test.

“You’re unhappy because you’re wasting your time thinking about whether you’re happy,” James said, pausing to smile and nod at Cassandra as she walked by. “The worst thing in the world you can do is sit down and consider whether or not you are happy. You’ve already lost. Of course you’re not happy. We’re not trained in being happy societally. In fact, we’re trained in entirely the opposite way for the sake of economic viability. And even if you won’t grant the imperialistic nature of capitalism as an ism, then you’d have to concede that happiness is not a biological imperative either. We’re not wired for it. What possible use does being happy serve to a hunter gatherer or an early agrarian farmer? That’s a pretty useless bit?”

H thought that James was probably wrong. He’d seen studies saying that happy people were more effective workers, boosted morale and probably grew better crops and cheered up the pigs. Happiness, or contentment, or whatever, had always been an important part of human life dating back thousands of years.

“Actually, H said, “I’m unhappy because I forgot my coat. All I’m wearing is this thin sweater and it’s freezing.”

“You’re lying,” James said, spinning his glass on the bottom, one corner raised in the air making the sort of noise that would probably be annoying to the waitress if he didn’t know about her child’s mathematics test.

            H left an hour or so later, after they’d talked about graduate school, who various professors were failing or favoring, who they hated, who they liked, who they wanted to like but couldn’t help but hate. Outside, the clouds had rolled in, and thin drops of rain were sliding across windows, cars, and foreheads. If you stopped and looked closely small and beautiful things were happening. A puddle in the street, an unfilled pot hole, was reflecting the light of a neon sign that was really quite lovely. The water was running down the side of the trees, glistening in the way of spider webs in morning dew. A man who was running to hail a cab was kicking up sheets of water in a way that was reminiscent of certain waterfalls, and a woman with red hair, caught without an umbrella as well, had wet hair, which made it slightly curly and alluring. Nobody saw any of this because they were in such a damn hurry to escape the rain.