What Happens When I’m Alone

This is the first piece I’m posting in my “From the Vault” collection, which is going to be an absolutely random remix of personal essays and reflections about pretty much just whatever keeps me up at night. Some of these will be things I’ve written recently, some will be older. I will not be telling you which is which, though you’re welcome to guess, and this is likely the last time I’ll bother to give any of these posts a preface.

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I’ve decided that I like PBR. This is a new development, and I can pinpoint the moment I attached myself to the idea. It was at a Quinn XCII concert at Echostage late last year, moments after a low-dosage edible hitting and right after my girlfriend returning from the bar with drinks. Something about the taste just feels authentic to me, real in a way most cheap beer doesn’t. I don’t mind Miller Lite or even Tecate, if I’m at a DC United game, but I am stuck on PBR right now, whatever that says about where I subconsciously feel like I am in life.

The problem is that nowhere near me sells it. The dive bars will give you a Natty Light for five bucks, but that’s all they can do. The liquor store around the corner doesn’t carry it either — not that I expected it to, because the people that run that store are more than a little sketchy and I always have this feeling like I’m being scammed whenever I swipe my card there. Plus it never has what you’re looking for, much like the Trader Joe’s down the street, which is excellent if you go in hungry with no plan but awful if you need specific ingredients for really any kind of recipe at all. I’m sure the brewery directly below my apartment has something close, but I don’t want to taste all of their beers to figure it out, and I know I would look like an idiot if I asked anyone behind the counter there what they have that’s similar to a PBR. I honestly think I could probably find a place in the area serving draught Guinness before a place with PBR, and that’s saying something, because a proper poured Guinness is hard to find in DC anywhere other than an Irish pub.

All of this makes me wonder what the point of having a favorite cheap beer is if you can’t actually buy it anywhere. I might as well just drink something of a higher caliber, if I’m going to have to go out of my way to find what I like anyway.

Then again, none of this actually really affects me in a material sense, or at least not much. I’ve never been someone to keep alcohol on hand, except for my senior year of college when I had a bottle of Jack Daniel’s Old No. 7 on the shelf of the bookcase in my dorm room pretty much all of the time. I’m definitely not filling my fridge with anything now, and I’m exponentially more likely to order something at a bar or brewery than I am to bring a six pack home. The frustration I feel at not being able to find PBR is more conceptual than anything else; more principled.

These are the thoughts I have when you’re not here. I do the same things we’ve always done, but they feel mechanical, muted. This is an enormous overreaction to being alone with my thoughts for truthfully not that long, all things considered, but I’ve never been good at watching life stretch out undefined before me. The last time I was alone and broke for too long I produced a very self-indulgent book of essays and short stories, which probably kept me sharp in the absence of anything external to sink my teeth into, but that I now realize also and more realistically served to help me avoid any kind of meaningful self-discovery.

I have this same desire to be vulnerable that I’ve always had, but in moments of more profound introspection I usually come to the conclusion that I don’t walk the walk as much as I should. Part of that is because airing dirty laundry is hard, but part of it is also that I’m not sure what it means about me that I feel compelled to have an opinion or be performative with my emotions, which makes me worry that even when I do decide to get personal I still only ever show the version of myself that I am comfortable with other people seeing, and that in turn makes me worry that I am being inauthentic and that public reflections like this are actually less than worthwhile. I am constantly feeling at odds with myself, stuck trying to mediate tension between the parts of me that itch to be seen and the parts of me that tell me I’m a pretentious asshole anytime I think about trying to play a song I wrote for or share poetry with a friend.

I walked by that Indian place around the corner from the Laotian place and down the street from the dog park the other day and I’m still thinking about it. I’ve been calorie counting and hitting the gym pretty much every day this week, but I’ve also been getting flashes of onion pakora and tikka masala that derail my train of thought in the middle of the day, so I might have to give into the cravings come the weekend. Especially if it’s still this gray and rainy, because while I genuinely love this weather, it does make me feel like I should be curled up watching a movie or with a book, and comfort food slots perfectly into either of those scenarios. I wonder if the Indian place sells PBR.