I’ve always found bars comforting. A refuge where a hard-
edged world is numbed and softened by alcohol and dim
lighting. I tend to be drawn to the ones that seem to be from
an earlier era. Humble, solitary structures that evoke a sense of
loneliness and isolation blended with a noble self-sufficiency; a
stubborn ember still smoldering along string of boarded up
storefronts in a discarded small town. Defiant vestiges of the
past, the bar always seems to be the last to go. When the
grocery store, the lumberyard and the barbershop all
surrendered to the future and locked their doors for the final
time, the bar stayed on. Slumped alone in the rubble, its neon
spills out onto the asphalt of a forgotten stretch of highway,
burning through the darkness. The beer is cold, and the
jukebox stocked with George Jones and dirges from an
irretrievable past.
