What happens next?

Sleep was strange like that, a mini-death. He never, or almost never, remembered his dreams. Sleep was a strangeness to him, something he spent nearly one third of his life doing with no real opinion on the subject, and he was the type of person who had an opinion about nearly everything. It seemed like  a lack of intellectual curiosity, this brushing past sleep as if it weren't important, but who had time to study anything in detail these days? There was only time to update people on the progress of your life and to check on the progress of theirs.

                It was cold in the city and everything seemed uniformly grey. The sky was cement, casting a monochromatic sheen over everything. Something about the cold days in the city, although, come to think of it, maybe cold days everywhere, are somehow worse and have a deadening sameness about them, leaving a person with the feeling that this has all happened before and will probably happen again, though no one is particularly interested in the outcome. Like a  baseball game between two cellar dwellers or a couple who fights frequently at it once again. It was the sort of day on which it is best to read something on the couch in the hopes of falling asleep. Soon enough, it will be over.

                He was meeting a friend at a bar because he was lonely, though everyone was lonely. The wind was blowing from the Northeast, angling round corners, making every step a sheer act of willpower. Sometimes, he’d think that if he angled one of the tall, monochromatic, square buildings between himself and the wind that it would stop, but it never seemed to. Perhaps the wind was blowing from all directions. The street was lined with a little park where two small dogs barked at one another and their owners sat on rickety benches, narrow-eyed and cold and resenting the world. 

                He had never liked dogs, though he understood the idea of the appeal of dogs. What’s appealing about a dog are the fairly simple requirements that it exacts in order to give love. It was an entity that required only food and water and shelter in order to give something that we spend our lives in search of. He’d read a study once that they’d conducted, perhaps in some Eastern Bloc country, about babies who were denied physical touch during their infancy and wound up dying as a result. Or maybe he’d just heard about the study. It was unclear. Either way, having a dog reminded him of that particular study as dogs are often little bastions of affection and warmth giving. It was his belief that everyone was still operating at a bit of an affection deficit and secretly desired the physical touch of other human beings more frequently than could ever happen. Dogs were a solid way of making up for this deficit, offering love without the complication of giving much love in return. Though, the fact of the matter was, by merely enacting loving type behaviors, pats and hugs and the like, people really did wind up loving their dogs. In conclusion, he did not really care for dogs.

                The bar was a slovenly looking place, Moe’s, with special’s written on a chalkboard outside. Anyone who had ever had the food at Moe’s knew that nothing about it was special and would joke that the sign should be changed to, “Some things that might be passable if you’re really starved.” It was a great place to drink beer though, because it was cheap and served in copious amounts.