# JR I'm having a very portentous cup of coffee. I just got home from a muskego dive bar with cheap panelling, trash and shit out behind the dilapidated back steps, clumps of young people smoking in the parking lot (because god knows you can't have a bar that doesn't smell like disgusting smoke as well as stale beer farting out of the ventilation fans), a few of them very serious-looking hipsters with their fucking hair and serious gaze and shit, some of them round and old like potatoes, peasants, serfs, the winter fat of a lifetime of wisconsin hugging them like a favorite old blanket from childhood, lots of them weathered and wrinkled, most of them knowing the open secret codes of what to say about sports, pretty much all of them drinking wal-mart-calibre beer. Going from point to mammalian point. Talking. Drinking. If that sounds judgmental, it is and it isn't.  Three of the people in the bar used to be my next door neighbors. The youngest of the three just turned twenty-one. I remember him when he was a scrawny kid with literally a skateboard and a broken arm, boasting politely to me, whom he’d just met, about his superior tree-climbing abilities. Tonight the old men are milling about, peripherally aware of his progress through the bar and through drunkenness, chuckling at his predictable downward spiral. Preparing another serf for the inevitable. What cannot be cured, love, must be endured. He’s in good hands, he’ll be innoculated the way only generations of stalwart survivors know how. I sat and drank about three and a half solo cups (clear, not red) of beer at a table that might as well have been at Moe’s, and tried as well as I could to keep letting this one guy tell me about himself. Eight years in the army. Hasn’t touched his bass clarinet since middle school, but man, he was *this close* to getting into high school of the arts. He could have done something with it. But. Only class he passed one year in high school was AP American literature. Loved Edgar Allen Poe, couldn’t give fuck-all about anything else. His teacher said, I am disappointed in you right now, because I know you’re not trying. He shrugs kind of a twitchy shrug every time our conversation pauses. A lot of kids like Poe, I suggest, and he’s off again. I liked the darkness of it. That’s what I liked. Also Shakespeare. We had to memorize a huge big old part of the play. Hamlet. The to be or not to be part? No, not that. Everybody does that. That’s easy. We had to choose. Do you remember what you chose? He kind of winces. No. No, I don’t, but I don’t know if you know the song My Immortal by Evanescence. No, I don’t. Well, it was just like that. There was this huge parallel between the lyrics of that song and Hamlet. When my teacher showed me that, that’s when I fell in love with that class. He’s got little sharp teeth, a lot of gum. Scraggly facial hair. His hard black eyes reflect the lights in the bar—multiple points like the plaintive specks in the eyes of a coloring-book puppy. He goes to get another pitcher, is gone a while, comes back, pours for us, goes off somewhere else after a while, and then that chapter is over. For me, at least. Drive home, listening to music kind of blankly. Come through my own front door, chorus of Daddy! Thank god you’re home! Everyone’s fine, of course, I was only gone an hour and the neighbors knew and were available, and Megan’s old enough. I have the two little sisters of the twenty-one-year-old here, too. (That’s six little girls under one roof!) I’m kind of being used so mom and dad can get wasted, and I’m okay with that. Can you guys play the Wii without the sound? Why? Are you going to put on music? Yeah, I kind of wanted to. They say okay, so I put on my playlist that I made for my dad & stepmom. It starts out, and I say along with it, in my best pseudo-Ozark tired-ass half-redneck drawl, *Everybody’s gotta run sometime. . .* and Megan smiles at me and I actually feel kind of self-conscious, in a weird good way for a second. That’s when I realize I’ve had a couple of beers, for the first time in months, and I really remember how to do it. I mean, I really could have, I could have gone back into that place where it’s the bar and the lights and the music, and it doesn’t matter what shit-ass music, any old laughable thing from the eighties or whatever, as long as it’s the whole combination, and the key to the combination is the guy sitting across from you at the linoleum table. And I could have used the beautiful ghost of that man, again, to soften the blow of that voluntary fall, like I did so many times and I don’t even regret it. It was the only thing there was to do, for so long after he was gone, I have compassion for myself, those years, sitting there across from where he was supposed to be. Talking. Drinking. That was the way to honor him. But it’s not, now. I’m not ceasing to honor him. It’s funny. I’m honoring a different part of him—and me—now. The part that came home tonight to take care of the kids, a little bit earlier than I used to come home to take care of the dog. And I’m having a cup of coffee and writing a letter to a real live person, even though my body sure as hell knows how to have another beer, or a whiskey or six, and write a fevered rant to a ghost. I sure as hell know how to do that. I was taught well, too. We all were. *For I’ll be here* *in sunshine or in shadow* and yeah, my motherfuckin ghost, *I love you so.*