I dare you to like me.  I dare you just by being me.  People think they like me, but this is merely brought about by an illusion; the illusion that I am honest.  Of course what this means is that they like what I tell them and I seem sincere when I speak: even tones, unblinking eyes, unsmiling lips.  However I am not honest because I am in a constant battle between who I ought to be and who I really am.  You cannot derive an 'ought' from an 'is.'  Can you?  Principle tells me to act one way while my inclinations and propensities tell me the opposite.  I am a hypocrite, but I find it odd to think that the person striving to be moral, or at least striving to perform moral actions, is a hypocrite.  Perhaps I am only dishonest insofar as my tendencies contradict the principle to which I aspire at every meeting.  So, as I say, I dare you to like me, I dare you.  I dare myself.

    I was hoping to see him the other day.  I waited for an hour outside the café on the corner (the table at the end on the left has the best vantage.)  I ordered plain coffee instead of one of the ones with frou-frou sounding names.  It makes me feel, however fleetingly, that I am transparent to myself, to others.  Indeed, I avoid contrivances as often as I am able.  It is such a conscious effort that it is a contrivance itself, which in turn, always reminds me of what a hypocrite I am.  Not that this example is a case of moral hypocrisy, though I'm sure it's that, too.  It’s more like an instance of my general hypocritical condition.  There are Existentialists, Realists, Absolutists, Monists, Pluralists, Relativists, and so forth.  I am one of the Hypocritists.  Anyway, he never arrived, so I went home, wondering along the way what I did wrong, how it was that I offended him enough for him not to show. I took his absence as a personal affront, even though we had no plans, even though we've never met.
    So I went to the bar later, injecting alcohol into my bloodstream like a vaccination.  It works every time.  I don't really have the money to spare, but invariably I have to buy only one or two drinks before someone comes along to pick up my tab.  All I have to offer in return is vacuous conversation.  As a hypocrite, it's not a stretch.  After that it doesn't take much more from them to get much more from me.  I can be easy if I hate myself enough, if I hate them enough.  I smile at them all the while, I am so dishonest.  If a liar tells you he is dishonest then the fault line opens up and swallows everything.  You know the one about the guy, Eubulides of Miletus, who says, "A man says he is lying.  Is what he says true or false?"  Everybody from Aristotle to the Stoics to modern-day philosophers of language has something to say about it, so I don't feel so bad that I haven't a clue.  This sentence is false.  Next.
    So there I was at the bar.  It’s one of my favorite types: red vinyl booths, wood paneled walls, mirrored bar cluttered with bottles of every inebriating liquid ever made, juke box with rock from the '70's and '80's, and locals who come to see each other in order to be left alone.  I melted into the scenery, especially because the room is stereotypically dark.  Quasimodo ran to his sanctuary, this hunchback runs to hers.  It was the last place I thought I’d meet him
    Slumped in a corner booth that faces the bar and the entrance, I watched and waited while I drank and smoked my cloves.  And it seemed that the more I drank, the more I felt likely to meet him.  I closed my eyes lazily and imagined seeing him for the first time: the door to the bar opens in such a way that I wonder if the person attached to the hand on the other side might slip off and go elsewhere after a change of heart.  But after the brief hesitation the door continues to open and a body reveals itself in profile.  Then it turns directly toward me.
There he is, a good 6'2", worn leather jacket, faded Levi's, denim shirt and construction boots.  He has dark hair, straight and a little overgrown.  Oddly enough, all I can say about his face, even as I look directly at it, is that he has a five o'clock shadow.  I know he is beautiful, and yet I cannot articulately describe the features of his visage.  I run my tongue over my lips to taste the sweetness left from my clove and then swallow another mouthful of beer while staring, unblinking, at his incredible non-face.  It dazzles me.
    Before he moves toward the bar, he surveys the new domain (I know he's not been here before because I always am.  Still, he looks around as if looking for someone he knows, someone familiar.  Maybe he used to come here long before me and is back after a long while).  He must have glanced at me because now I am smiling to myself, looking down at my beer bottle — I am suddenly very shy.
When I raise my eyes up again, he is at the bar facing away from me.  I look into the mirror behind the bar but I cannot see his face because the mirror is, as I said, cluttered with bottles, and it's fogged over from years of sooty build-up.  While I continue to search for his reflection, I catch sight of myself from a hazy, gauzy sort of vantage.  I am almost beautiful, what with the grimy mirror and my swelling inebriation.  Excuse me.  Maybe that's someone else.
    Then the bartender, who has just put a glass in front of the man, starts doing something he never, ever does.  He starts talking.  And not just the fat chewing kind of talk, but speaking with such earnest intensity, as if his life depends on what he is saying at this moment.  Unfortunately I cannot hear a word of it because the music is loud and the drone of the barroom chatter is a continuous hum.  But I know it's important because the bartender is looking into the man's face, my man's face as if he were trying to become that face himself, and his expression is simultaneously defeated and elated.  This interests me.  Actually, it should fascinate me but I've been drinking too much, and am also blinded somewhat because I'm profoundly smitten with the vision in leather.
    I would like to move to the bar so as maybe to join in the conversation, but as I watch them more closely I see that this is private talk.  The bartender spreads his arms wide, farther apart than the width of his already broad shoulders, and pushes his palms against the edge of the bar.  He leans his whole weight against his outstretched hands and his head collapses forward, exposing the beginnings of a bald spot.  My man generously extends his right hand until it rests upon the bartender's left shoulder.  The bartender looks up and smiles the exhausted but relieved smile that should come after the labor of convulsive tears, but as far as I could tell he hasn't been crying.  Suddenly, and without turning himself so that I might see him face front, my man is at the door, and then the door is closed.  I stumble toward the newly vacated space at the bar.
    "You O.K., Jack?"
    "Yeah.  Just some personal news.  Thanks.  Get you another?"
    "Aw, no, I gotta go anyway.  See you."
    "Sure, see you."
    Strikes me as peculiar that the bartender was doing all the talking and yet it was my man who had news to tell.  I shrug this thought off — or rather it leaves me without warning — as I prepare to think about putting on my coat, my scarf, my hat and my gloves, and make my way to the door.  Fortunately my boots are heavy like cement shoes, and this fact grounds me in my resolve to move because the weight of the boots.
    I imagine that I will see my man waiting for me outside.  The door opens and the cold mist gently pats my face.  Stepping fully outside, I see him to my left, leaning against the building smoking a cigarette.  He looks at me and, smiling, drops his smoke.  I move to his side and we begin walking down the street, tracing our names on the windows of cars parked along the curb.  Water is parted when we make our designations; droplets fall from the tops and bottoms of the letters, still more from the sky, until the waters merge again.  And then we stomp through puddles, shaking off the reflections of street lights and oil’s rainbows as people out at that time of night run for cover — not you and I, we’re here forever.
    I know, though, that my imagination gets the best of me sometimes, and I think this is why I spend so much time at my local bar.  I bow my head until its fore leans against the arms folded on top of the table.  Below the din I hear the second hand of my watch chip, chip, chip away at time.

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