This story is a study on dopey, redundant navel-gazing. It is all bad. It is all wrong. How did fiction about boring old people doing nothing become so lauded and revered? This author is a self-righteous chum who only lives in mirrors. His adverbs are pure murder. Gothically, it cannot be! Do something real, you fossilized imitation of a washed-up 20th century oxygen thief.

Hi, did you say “Ken” when you meant “William”? It’s Ken!
I really liked this and thought it was perfect. The way time is fungible under COVID (definitely it is about it–social distancing is mentioned for instance) and how this man’s memory starts wandering through the ghosts of old conversations struck me as beautifully realized here. I like how class plays a role here as he has a petit-bougeois desire for respectability and civility. I kept thinking of Joyce’s famous quote “History is a nightmare from which I’m trying to awake::–here it’s about all that keeps our bartender moored.

No problem. I appreciate very much you keeping this site up and providing this forum.

I don’t know if this would help but I think the pandemic blocks out time such as if you worked at a job for the last 5 years. There are 2 years that appear almost blank because either you weren’t at work or practically noone else was at work when you were and you interacted with very few people for almost 2 years. Maybe there was a maitre’d you saw a lot and then never saw at all for almost 2 years which is a long time. Then that two year gap maybe made you question everything about your life. What was worth it and what wasn’t. What did you have to endure and what could you have changed or what might you want to change? That probably varies a lot among everyone and might be difficult to configure into a relatable short story. Some readers might relate to a particular story and some might not. But it is probably good see the idea of it in a short story because it is something some people have thought about or think about or maybe find themselves thinking about anyway.

Ken,
Thanks for the compliment. It’s true that many people perceive the passage of time differently. Sometimes that’s good because just living life is ultimately more important than over-analyzing it because no matter what, it keeps going, rolling along even if momentarily interrupted by a near disaster. At the end of the day it is what it is and some people forget the good parts which were enjoyed and then slipped from view. There are nautical pictures and imagery that bring a more long term perspective to this story. There is the “neap tide” which means the point at which the water alone the shore surrounding a bay is least affected by the moon and goes in and out of the bay with the least amount of change between high and low tide over a 24 hour period. Tide is high = life is good. Tide is low = life is not so good. And the closed bar sort of suggests an empty bay like Oyster Bay on Long Island on a winter day with no boats, no people and no moorings and no wind. The water is flat on a cold winter day. So metaphorically, no matter what happens, it all kind of blends into the same for everyone or so the metaphor suggests, so this story is probably about more than the pandemic for its narrator. The story is very Irish with its concentration on pubs and middle class thoughtful people. Though this seems an Irish story, coincidently in the 60s, 70s and 80s there were lots of pubs in the middle class villages and little towns along Long Island that have mostly disappeared as the population there became gentrified as the middle class declined and the gap between rich and poor became larger which is in some ways a nationwide occurrence. So this story is very old school but it points to how things have changed, lamenting how some lady can’t keep away from being preoccupied with her cellphone. A cellphone is somewhat of a remote electronic pub of sorts for middle class people on which the conversation has become not so friendly as it might have been in the past at an actual pub. My favorite part of this story is the narrator’s perception that the conversation over the “pub” of the worldwide web has become more harsh and confrontational: “The voices of more recent times had been an affront to him. They offered themselves baldly as affront; their bodies were arranged barward in aspects of affront. The voices of recent times, he felt, were colored by avarice and vulgarity.” The tone of that statement is so mildly restrained like a middle class person trying to hold on to how things used to be. So there might be more to the somewhat blandish quality of this story than it might at first suggest. Then again, it a great way to describe this particular narrator and how he feels about life. This story sprung more to life for me the more I thought about it after reading the above comments. But it might not be the usual kind of New Yorker short story that readers expected.