look my eyes are just holograms

We started the transition when I was about twenty-one from the Warehouse and the Republik to the Ship & Anchor.  A switch from industrial-themed alternative bars to a pub with bookshelves and a ship bell and, well, an anchor.  A switch from dancing and grinding to sitting and talking.  It was not a difficult transition for me.  Although I have taken (and taught) a few dance classes in my life, dance is not really a passion of mine.  I like fucking; what is the point of dance?

The Ship & Anchor became the site of numerous important life events.  For example, this was where Tony gave both me and his newer girlfriend the same Valentine's present (1996ish), hoping (I imagine) to somehow delight us both with the same clever idea (so clever I forget what it was) while hoping we would not notice each other.  And the same night my little sister became drunken Big Sister protective and verbally threatened Tony with a busted bottle over his head.  (Later that same night I gave up my bedroom to D and J in hopes they would consummate some kind of relationship, which they did not, and my sister and I slept on the pull-out bed in the living room under Old Itchy, the worst blanket in the entire world.  Partway though the night I threw up.)

The Ship & Anchor was where I met Victor, an elderly former millionaire gone bankrupt who assured me that whatever heartbreak I experienced, it was nothing compared to what was to come.  And promised me that I was wrong if I thought that time healed all wounds.  Time healed nothing.  I wrote Victor's Anchor for him and sang it in every pub in Edmonton that invited me.

The Ship & Anchor was where I found Paul again after about twelve years.  Newly thirty and with nipples newly pierced, I just wanted him to know that It's not that I don't love you does not mean the same as I love you.  I don't actually think I told him that.  I think I called him Showboat.  When his friend told me Paul had talked about me for twelve years I thought, Good, fuck you, Paul.  And then I fucked him.

At the Ship & Anchor I kissed Noah.  I sat on his lap like a teenager.  I believed in love again for six more days.

When my sister died three years ago, I went home for her funeral, and later that night I went to the Ship & Anchor with my girlfriends.  I drank several pints of beer.  By then you could no longer smoke indoors; K and I stood outside in front of the bar and smoked.  J asked me, What are you doing?  (She never understood my self-destructive tendancies, not when we were teenagers and not now.)  CB drove me home to my parents' house in spite of the fact that it was incredibly far out of her way.  I remembered buying CC beers at the Ship & Anchor ten years ago when her mother died.  (I was drunk, but CB's kindess was not lost on me at all; I noticed.)

I have not been there since then.  Life's biggest moments will not happen there anymore, I think.  Now I am all grown up and my moments happen in my living room, in my car, in my shower, in my bed.  In Italy.  In my office.  You know, adult places.




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