Just another Saturday night.

I think there has to come a point (doesn’t there?) when we all just stop pretending.

We meet people and we take an interest and ask questions in a very where-are-you-from-what-do-you-do sort of way, as though those questions can really help us to better know a person, like our jobs and places of birth define who we are. And it's hard not to wonder after a while, after so many of these conversations and question and answer sessions over drinks with people, if anyone out there really knows you at all.

But we meet people and take an interest and ask questions, and keep going through the motions that are forced upon us in a place full of millions of strangers. So you drift and float from one group to the next, one bar to the next, in an effort to figure out where you fit in.

And there comes a point when you’re standing in the middle of the open back patio at Union Pool on Saturday’s warm night in Brooklyn because the music inside was so loud you could hardly hear your own thoughts and had to escape, holding a beer and smoking a cigarette and staring up at the moon, bored, surrounded by unfamiliar faces, and can’t, for another second, stand the thought of having one more person that doesn’t mean anything come up and ask you where you’re from and what you do because there has to come a point (there must be, there has to be) when we all just stop, stop, stop pleaseforcryingoutloud, pretending.