A schizophrenic walks into a bar, past the bar and exits the bar out the back door. He doesn’t want to drink but just to blend-in as if everybody doesn’t know him already, the latest casualty to psychedelics. Before performing as a normal alcoholic he needs to know if the sound of clinking glasses is following him like a chain reaction from the first table of fools to the last lonely local tapping their bottle with a yellow Bic lighter to each one of his steps. As he exits the bar door and it slams and seals behind him the glasses continue to clink residually, at the same volume. The clinking is precise and calculated as if there was a perpetual toast happening and nobody is chugging their beer to get to the point.
The only distraction from this continuous celebration is the humming of yellow hued streetlights where he shifts his attention to listen. Reasoning with himself to get away from the celebration he imagines how the streetlights may have sounded when they first turned on tonight. Maybe sounding like an old fashioned flash bulb from a newspaper man trying to capture the moment at a still. This puts him inside the lamp to forget about going back into the bar. The only thing is he can hear the igniting of the lamp, over and over again, like the paparazzi. Now he needs to get away from the paparazzi. He has traded the celebration of others for the celebration of himself.
He begins focusing on any object that is red to keep himself from listening too intently to the celebration of his being a local celebrity. He does know how to reason. He knows from experience it is better to see in situations like this than it is to hear because if things get real intense he can close his eyes where his imagination is trapped already, where there isn’t anything he hasn’t seen already, where the back of his eyelids turn red if he faces towards the streetlight again.
Francis Erich McElroy 