Once upon a time, there was a watering hole I loved deeply – it wasn’t just that they made good drinks, that’s dime-a-dozen. It was the excellent bartender, who not only was handy with the shaker and bitters, but had great chat and knew how to wrangle some of the ornerier customers, who left feeling respected even as they were being 86’d. And more importantly, it functioned as a gathering spot for all of us fucking weirdos – bohemian fuckups, queer artists, masochists weeping over the ramifications of coldness and cruelty, cocaine enthusiasts zipping to and from the bathroom, veterans of the hospitality industry hardened by years on the line or behind the stick, septum-pierced and preening Onlyfans girls, mainland Chinese alienated from the Beijing consensus retreating into a world of wine and letters, and every other kind of degenerate that I had the privilege to call a friend, or at the very least a drinking buddy.
And yet owing to a recent change in ownership and staffing, what is left feels like a skeleton. The menu is the same, the live jazz remains excellent, but the clientele is different, the mood is different... something’s just wrong. And it’s honestly painful to witness.
This shouldn’t bother me as much as it does. After all, there will always be places to socialize and imbibe. So why is it that I’m in this mood?
Millions of pages have been written about our relationships with the people in our lives, but one of the strongest and most affecting relationship we have is to place. The concept of "home," however we choose to define it. Maybe it's the maternal farmstead, the place where generations of your ancestors were laid in the ground after lifetimes of trying to bring forth life from the exhausted soil. Maybe it's the rattrap urban apartment you fled to after that maternal farmstead rejected you, the place where you decided, on your own terms and with your own values, what constituted the good.
Or maybe it's something larger scale, a community, a nation, a language, a religion, again whether inherited or chosen. The only thing it really cannot be is humanity writ large. Because the concept of "home" is fundamentally an interior standing in contrast to an exterior, a place in which one can be as close to one's "authentic" self as that fractious term will allow.
Which is why the idea of losing one's home (small-scale) in, say, a fire, or (large-scale) a human conflict is so horrifying. And why the term "refugee" triggers such strong emotions, whether that is an empathy with those who can no longer return home or a visceral fear and desire to cast out, lest we be reminded that we too might eventually occupy such precarious positions.
But it doesn't have to be home. It is just as much the little corners we carve out that we mark with our memories. The favorite wooded glade where, as a child, you were free to be Cinderella or Aladdin. The house down the street where you had your first kiss. The hospital where your daughter was born.
Or simply that curve of the highway you love because it's where the trees and the sun line up in just the right way.
We live in a world in which housing prices around the world are spiraling out of control, "third places" as we commonly understand them are dying throughout the English-speaking world owing to market forces that have little capability to provide the sorts of coffee shops and arcades that can act as second homes for a minimal fee, and hell if we're going to be catastrophic about it, in which environmental horror threatens to dislocate millions and destabilize billions.
So we hang on to those precious few spots in which we feel something like what Heidegger called the heimlich, which can be very roughly summed up as a sense of ease. The effacement of one of those places is, inevitably, bound to hit a pain point or two.
So when we find those little places, it can be, conversely, a singular bit of hope.
I'm finishing my evening in a quiet, 100 year old tavern in Kyoto. When Secretary of War Henry Stimson made the decision to spare Kyoto from the bombings so many other Japanese cities were subject to, he not only saved the city's ancient temples, but also its fine stock of Taisho Period commercial architecture and its attendant businesses of the sorts depicted in ukiyo-e paintings of the 19th Century. And so it is here, with the tobacco-stained ceilings and well-worn tables.
Out there? America is trapped in an improbable political and economic morass with no positive outcomes, the UK is slowly sinking into poverty, with the average British child having lost a full centimeter of height over the past 10 years due to malnutrition, Eastern Europe is embroiled in war, the Middle East is worse than it been in my lifetime with countless Palestinians murdered and starved with the tacit approval of the developed world, heat indices are set to reach record highs globally, everyone over 50 is facing the future shock of being unable to parse reality, while everyone under 50 is facing a future that has rarely looked bleaker... and unlike in previous bleak times, all the bleakness is on all our screens all the time.
But here I am, beneath those smoke-brown ceilings, among the bottles of forgotten brands of tonic water and rye whiskey in my clean, well-lighted place. I'm the only customer left, save the elderly salaryman already passed out in front of his highball, cigarette already long turned to ash in his hand. And yet here, somehow... I'm at peace.
Ue o muite aruko
Namida ga kaborenai youni
Omodaisu haruno hi
Hitoribotchi no yoru
- Kyu Sakomoto, 1961
For this moment.
