An Unfinished Draft

The beer always loses it’s taste when you resume drinking after brushing your teeth. “Minty freshness” and “choice hops” are two phrases that are never marketed on the same package for obvious reasons.

I had what can only be described as a “hankerin’”. It wasn’t really rational, but I steered my car away from the city and redirected it on a northwestern course that I only assumed would take me in the direction I wanted to go. Usually I am pretty skitterish when choosing a restaurant, always afraid that I’ll walk in and won’t be in the right neighborhood, or will need to have a collar, or that they won’t serve my kind.
I thought of Grandpa, living the last few years of his life on this lake, eating at greasy little bars like this one,
I was totally alone on the road heading towards the setting sun, talking to an imaginary friend from some distant land who was sitting silently in my passenger seat as I explained to them, “This is central Shelby County.” Sometimes it’s a dead president, sometimes I’m catching Thomas Edison up to speed on the advances of the 21st century, sometimes it’s the apostle Paul, but mostly it’s a girl from England that I’ve brought home and who is discovering the Midwestern countryside for the fist time. Today it was her.
She doesn’t have a name or a face, and she never says anything back, but I go on nonetheless and tell her how certain roads, narrow and winding, cool and full of tall grasses and an unusual amount of fragrant pines, remind me of summers spent in northern Michigan. It’s her only reference point to what northern Michigan might be like, and I know that it’s not totally foreign to United Kingdom, but I hope she gets that sense of “this is like that” that I experience on roads such as the like.
And so it goes, being alone and being lonely, driving through beautiful summer evenings and being overwhelmed with feelings of wistfulness and sentiment, and at the same time needing to invent someone inside my mind to share them with.

I think the fact that she was making such small talk made me a bit nervous, and I drank my beer faster than usual and was already done with it before my food came.

“We’re talking about hamburgers. Are we really talking about the difference between a mom-and-pop hamburger and a fast food hamburger? Is she really looking me in the eye and talking about the wholesomeness of their hamburgers?” Because it seemed like she was as nervous as I was, otherwise we wouldn’t have been smiling at each talking about hamburgers.

Was I being flirted with, because it felt an awful lot like flirting. It seemed a world away from where I’ve been and it was rather surreal, considering the way I was looking, dressed

I curiously looked under the bill, politely placed face down under my beer bottle, and gave it a quick glance looking for a phone number I wouldn’t know what to do with anyway. But it wasn’t there.

She told me her name was Angel, and though I couldn’t immediately explain it, I was disappointed that she was given that name by her parents or whoever named her. She

She was attractive, like many girls in that area, who are of French and German descent. She had shoulder length blonde hair, that looked genuinely blonde, but I am usually a poor judge of hair character. She was wearing a small blue polo shirt, tight enough that it revealed that she possessed a less than buxom figure. But everything about her was very pleasant and I thought her to possess a certain charm

I have come to accept the fact that my progenitors, the Britons, are a fairly plain and common looking people, unimpressive in the face and blotchy in the skin. By God’s choice, for better or for worse, I am ¼ Scottish, ¼ Irish, ¼ English, and my surname is Welsh, though I think by ancestry I would legitimately be ¼ German, but none of this pertains to the story, except for the fact that I am rather plain looking man who

As I reached my billfold, pulled at ten and a few extra ones, I almost said out loud, “You are really crafty and you got me!”

Yet call me crazy for thinking it more than an extortion for a few extra dollars. People who are trying to pull money out of you say things like, “That’s a really nice shirt you have on,” or, “You have really pretty eyes,” not, “I have a few degrees that I want to put to work.”