I Hate It Here

I live within spitting distance of the bars, here in Arcata.
I know this because dozens journey nightly, from the bars to my apartment, just to spit.

The bars here are an interesting phenomenon - every shop is so desperate to be cloistered within our one public square, our "plaza", that we've ended up with all four bars and a liquor store all lined up in a row like criminal suspects.
You could roll out one bar directly into the other, if you were so inclined. Apparently it's a popular past time. I cannot confirm - I've been in precisely one of these bars once.
Apparently the bars have different cliques, attract different regulars. We have a "sports bar" and a "lumberjack bar" and a "we also serve food here bar" and what I can only assume is a "we all live here bar".

It doesn't make much of a difference to me. They're all exactly one block away.

Which means I - and everyone else in my apartment past the hour of wheneverbarsopen - have been subjected to whatever effluent happens to roll in our direction, for the past year.

Hearing snippets of drunks conversing, shouting, screaming, spitting, laughing, fighting, crying.

It's all exactly the same, one night from the next. The dregs of our town stream past our windows. Sometimes they stop to have a chat or a smoke directly beneath them. Sometimes they sit in their cars and play the radio. Sometimes they get arrested.
Whatever they do, they do it with gusto. You have to admire them for that.

It's been an experience. An education.

Everyone is the same when they're drunk. It is the great equalizer.
Every single person sounds the same.
All the posturing, all the bluster and shouting of a drunken fight, sounds identical to the one that happened last night, the night before that, last week, last month. Between two other, identical strangers with equally pointless lives.
The same braying, ignorant guffaws have come out of a thousand drunk face holes attached to the front of a thousand different drunk heads.

Everyone attempting to reason with the cops sounds the same.

I have heard all the jokes. I have heard all the threats. They are all the same.

Everyone is the same. And the common denominator, it is low.

There are probably a half dozen trains of thought available to choose from.
The insults, the words....they are all the same. They sound the same. It's like all men and woman get handed a specific drunk voice when they enter a bar, like a party favor. Here is your hat. Here is your noisemaker. Put it in your larynx.

Even the syntax, the timing and the phrasing.
It is as if we all learned how to posture from movies, or from watching the guy last night.

I haven't heard anything original in a year.

It is enough to make you never want to be drunk again, and that's a genuine shame.
To see the potential for the magic truth-and-beauty-unlocker drug that is ethanol get squandered nightly by scum.
To see what these people have bubbling inside them make its way to the surface, ejected as steaming anger or barely concealed lust or, most often, as stunning ignorance in the form of words.

Or vomit. Always a classic.

This experience, if you haven't guessed, is often trying. Whether it happens early in the night, when you're still idly sitting around, or if you're actively dropping into sleep before the first round of "FUCK YOU"s begin....

Remember mosquitoes? As a child? How awful and jarring a tiny noise could be, even if it was faint and in some other corner of the room? How once you heard it for the first time, you were hyper aware of its continued existence?

This is the gist of it. It doesn't have to happen every night. There may be a week, perhaps when the rain washes all the stupid away, chases it into more private locations where the really terrible potentiality can be unlocked, when nothing happens that I can hear.
Or it's something harmless like hearing a fellow male awkwardly put the moves on a pliable lady.


It may be that that's the worst part, the inevitability of it all. The knowledge that this isn't going to stop any time soon.

People will always be the very worst you can imagine. They will always get drunk at bars, because that is what they know to do. It is what they were taught.

People will always act the way they were taught, and the people who taught them were useless shells of human potential. How can we expect any better of them, when those who came before them were just as meaningless.

Those who came before them, just the night before.

It's the unbearable sameness of it. I want to sit, with a sniper rifle tape recorder, and play back the sounds these people make to them. To their doppelgangers the next day. If there was a way to crush it into them, to force them to reach an understanding of themselves, surely the only course of action it would be rational for them to take would be mass and immediate self annihilation.

Right? Right?

There has to be a way to get them to kill themselves.

I can't possibly do all of them myself.