“The Plot on Losing”

A man sits in a well-lit bar at noon on a weekday. On his face is an ironic smile and his candor is generally jovial. The very rudimentary makeup of the situation, however, implies some degradation on the part of his morale.

Emanating from his eyes is a faint light, a faint glimmer of hope, mostly occluded by worlds and fathoms of pain, rendered black and smoldering. The girl behind the bar treats him nice. He doesn’t look from side to side very much but rather just watches a show on Michigan football on the TV. He hates Michigan. 

And he thinks of things. He thinks of that one summer camp next door to the YMCA (the YMCA is now closed). He thinks of the people in there. He thinks of how he’d be still and everyone else would be still and nobody had anything to say and nobody said anything and a putrid wave of animosity descended onto the proceedings that were flanked by a sunset over the river that would be transpiring in approximately 10 hours. He is escaping that, right now, sitting in a Hooter’s. The girls’ breasts could be platypuses and he wouldn’t notice. Nobody talks to him or bothers him when he goes in Hooter’s and the noise is loud and he likes it for that. 

And he thinks of culture and how rock and roll is borne out of slavery and rap is borne out of urban desperation, out of the New York City public schools running out of money, leaving the home record player as the only musical instrument available to the youths. And he thinks of that thought he had about Modest Mouse, after listening to all their CD’s countless times, how, in speaking in the language of rock and roll, they too are commenting on American slavery, essentially, the ennui of tracks like “Black Cadillacs” and “Bury Me with it” sort of like a direct diagnosis of how this ball we’re living in plays as one of those dysfunctional gyroscopes full of hissing, lucid automatons that play a mindless game of king of the hill and whose greatest satisfaction, much like any charged ion in chemistry, tends to come from transformation of the self or transcendence provided by some outside force. And the man sits and the color of this observation and the vision of its paradigm pervades the color in his eyes and the girl who is standing over by the taps, in skin-tight clothing, having served all the hairy old men their beers already, and she is also trying not to think, or move, because deep down she knows, and sometimes this is what Monday has to provide to you.