The Past Is Always Dead

Here's a bar my friend Ward McCarthy and I used to go to in Hollywood, USA, and it looked just like this... kinda goofy and even shabby... or perhaps in a yearning condition of imminent shabbiness. So last time I was in town, my brother's car started overheating and he was nervous to drive me all the way back to Burbank, so I said, "Hey! There's that hotel with that bar where I used to go. I'll just get them to call me a cab!" So I walked in and looked around and the bar wasn't goofy any more... it was all swank and dour and quiet and dark and cool, like where cool people would go to sit alone in the dark. There wasn't a goofy mural... there was just... blank, expensive wood. It made me feel terrible! As if I went back to my hometown and the house where I grew up was gone and there was just a little hill of dirt there, which is something else that happened to me recently.