"First name" dot "Second name". Followed by an @, followed by the name of a large-ish company you may or may not have heard of. Certainly not Blue Chip though, so fuck you for calling me a company man. Followed by another dot and a com. The day has drawn out beyond absurdity, it's become an Einstein theory trying to fuck itself without consent - lunch was at dawn; five-thirty is weeks from now. Or five hundred and thirty miles, because you need a compass to find it, feels like.
And you reckon you smell bad. Objectively... Summer. It's for something, but not this.
You eat up the miles, as you normally manage to do, and suddenly you're out - out there - and home is an hour away, miles away, and you're standing outside wondering how best to proceed while a vague irritation buzzes around somewhere near the back of your skull. There's an itch in your pocket, and just maybe your nose, home is very far away and when you get there it won't even be home at all, it'll be a resting stop and a place to wait until morning and maybe get some sleep. Home could be anywhere, but it's not there.
Your feet move into gear. They've made some calculations it seems and plotted themselves a course, and you're standing outside a pub called McGinty's, with its clovers and good cheer, and you don't really know what to do but go inside, and it's suddenly dark, and cool, and you can still see the sunlight streaming through the huge front windows of the place if you turn around, but that doesn't happen until you get to the bar.
A girl who was there after you but gets served first smiles apologetically - after the fact - and so you smile back to tell her that, Hey - it's cool. And yeah, Honey, wiggle your ass like that as you walk away, that's pretty much fine in your opinion, pretty much hunky-dory. Then she sits down at her table and you see her face again and decide to turn back to the bar, your own face in the mirror behind it. Something seems to be missing, and as you complete the image by raising a glass of vodka, lime and soda it occurs that today was just such a massive beat. But the beat goes on and while your belly warms you start to think that maybe this might be salvageable.
All it would take is time. Time and money. And maybe a couple of hundred million miles. You have two of those right now for sure, so maybe you make a phone call in a minute. It won't be a problem; you have lots of credit.
That part - hunky-dory too.
A phone call then, and in an hour that girl will be wiggling her ass as she makes her way to the toilet, the coke that you've just offered her like the gentleman that you are tucked in the the back pocket of those snug jeans. Or maybe down her bra, and when she hands you back the wrap it will smell of some mediocre perfume, and the couple lines you obviously did before her will really kick in.
And you'll decide then that actually her face is really sort-of, kind-off quite pretty, but her eyes have a way of darting away from yours just before she finishes a sentence, and for a moment you'll want to just turn off the lights and the top 40 that's blaring and all the surrounding babble inane or otherwise, and say that really, she's okay. That maybe it's not really her fault she's sitting here with you, that if she just hadn't lost faith and had managed to ignore the misleading road signs she would be able to say anything and it would all be good, and then, surprisingly, The Smiths come on, and for a while... for a while - and it's the coke, and it's you and her, and it's possibilities and the momentary neglect of calculation and doubt - but for a while it really is summer and the distance home doesn't matter, minutes or miles.
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