{strangers on barstools}

Barstool poets, prophets, and philosophers are not just drunks, but they are often drunk. I meet them sometimes, though admittedly, not often. The infrequency makes it noteworthy.  

Early in my romance with David, we met a man. Well, first, he met this man, Ivan,  downtown at Great Lakes Coffee. The man was a physicist and philosopher and quite intense – they sat at the bar chatting for quite a while. He rubbed David the wrong way but intrigued him enough that he told me all about the encounter. Two days later, I was sitting outside of Avalon and a gentleman engaged me in conversation, it turned out to be the same man. We talked about levels of consciousness and I found him intriguing, but the conversation was just short of satisfying. If you have read articles or books about subjects you really wanted to understand, that promised to explain it, but never really added anything to your existing knowledge, you will understand the feeling I got from that conversation. I kept thinking he was just about to speak the sentence that would tie all the loose ends together and establish some cohesive theory, but that never happened. The conversation was just a series of concepts that floated in different directions. Interesting, but unsatisfying. David and I have since seen him around the city, but neither of us engaged in another conversation.

Earlier this week, David and I met a gentleman, at a bar, drinking syrupy Grand Marnier and coffee and scribbling in a composition book. Now, the teenage poet, is still alive somewhere in me – and she stands right up and starts looking over the shoulder of anyone with a speckled black and white notebook at a bar. I immediately noted the little squiggle connecting a heart to a hastily drawn star and the fact that he was using some crappy ballpoint pen. These facts immediately made me suspicious, I mean, how many legit philosophers doodle that kind of doodle with an ordinary pen?

His name was Bob or Bill, I think. He and David had been chatting when I came in and when he walked to the restroom, with two beautiful wooden walking sticks to assist him, I was given the overview. He had been living in the Santa Fe mountains, refused to use computers, was a Religious scholar, was called to Ferndale, Michigan by God who had told him to begin working on a book about Main Street America. Interesting. David was eating and finishing something on his laptop, so when the guy returned, I started asking questions. He told me I looked like a preacher’s daughter, then he explained his Main Street theory. We spoke about his travels and his children. But, we never really go to the heart of anything.  It was the same kind of conversation I had experienced with Ivan. Intriguing but unsatisfying.

Sometimes a stranger is just a stranger and a conversation is just a brief exchange of facts and banter. Perhaps hoping random encounters will be magical kills the possibility of magic.