A Night Out

A long, wiry silhouette hunches over the table. His frame strong,
not skinny but lean. He sits there basking in a comfortable glow
familiar to dominant midwestern types that immediately identify this
particularly intelligent look. In his eyes the deep reflection of
endless prairie land he hails from. He is saturated with an air of
noble arrogance, cool nonchalance intended for some kind of midwestern
prince. Royalty made from generations of hoeing farmland on horizon
less, lanky stretches of seemingly endless virgin prairie. His physical
manifestation is a projection of these farmlands, lean and hungry from
hard work. Wiry muscles in his hands writhe around his Miller High
Life. His gaze shifting up and down the 20 something’s flocking the
bar. My gaze meets his, we find ourselves smiling. It’s an unspoken,
ancient language. It’s basic. While the wheels are churning endlessly
inside our labyrinthine minds, the wet and muddy parts in the back of
or animal brain give us space, space to just sit and not have to think
about things to understand them. It’s our midwestern wonderland, our
playground. Our playground’s ratio seems unfair, in favor of girls and
women. They relish in this fact. Cocky little things. Running around in
their vintage summer dresses all night, tattoos and bangs, awkward
knees, pigeon toed dandies. Skinny little things, not sure of
themselves or their power over the girlish boys buzzing around them
waiting to kiss their pretty little asses. We watch patiently, drinking
carefully. One of the girls is drunk. Her dress too small for her heavy
bones, heels sky-high, big dark rimmed glasses. She shakes around, her
steps clumsy even though she’s striking voguish, glamorous poses. It’s
like I’m watching a baby elephant on ketamine. I turn my head and lean
back arms at my side, exhaling silently, letting my shoulders drop back
until I feel the muscles around my collarbones stretch comfortably.
Another girl bumps into my shoulder. A young strung out looking
brunette that reminds me of what Courtney Love must have looked like
when she was younger. She’s got full lips that are always kind of half
opened; this dopey expression ruins an otherwise agreeable face.
Symmetrical, with dark eye shadow accenting blue green jolly rancher
eyes.

Beautiful ones surround themselves with weak looking boys.

These boys never talk much, and I don’t mean in the
playerish sense that they just don’t have to because they’re confident,

rather because they seem to have nothing to say. When they do, they’re
gesticulating like the girls they are talking to. It’s like I’m
watching girls talking to boys who are secretly girls also. Gossip. I
see their mouths move in synchronicity. A platonic girlfriend explained
to me once her definition of love, after meeting a Chicago guy she came
really close to dating. “It’s like we finished each others sentences
midway through the conversation and sat there all starry eyed and
just…I don’t know, just having been through the same kind of stuff and
It felt so right!” and so on. It makes perfect evolutionary sense for
our genders to fuse into androgyny so that we start fucking ourselves
to birth our own children. And we’ll talk about it, finishing each
other’s sentences and find ourselves with the same frame of reference,
and we’ll all be in love. We’ll all be Chicago guys, androgynous,
fashionable post-industrial wankers clad in neutral colors

By Michael William Brown