Ann Litts , I stared at your photo and I have to admit that I was totally, thoroughly, incredibly turned on by your gray hair. It reminded me a lot of my own gray hair, except mine is a bit longer than yours. (The last time I cut my hair was the first week of October, 1986.)

Please excuse me for spelling gray with an ‘a’ (the American spelling) rather than with an ‘e’ (the British spelling).

Hair and spelling aside, both your story and the preceding story, “Why I Love Sitting At a Bar,” really made me think. It has been around 5 years since I’ve even set foot inside a bar. I kind of miss it.

It was a little over six years ago that I moved to this little redneck town on the Great Plains. That first year I was here I went to several bars. It turned out that they were all redneck bars. And not a single one of those bars served chicken pecan salad. If I had ordered such a thing guns would have immediately come out of numerous holsters all pointed at me and I would have been invited to get the hell out of town by sundown. (And it would have been suggested that I take my gray hair with me.)

In Redneck Country, U.S.A., we have bars. Across the pond there are pubs. It’s like apples and oranges.

In the redneck bars here in my town there are numerous alpha males all vying and barking and grunting for dominance and there are a small handful of females clapping and cheering for their own personal alpha male. Testosterone is dripping from the walls of every bar in this hick town. And country music is also dripping from the walls. With my long hair, weirdo perspective and glaring lack of cowboy boots I am like a jackrabbit surrounded by coyotes.

Is it any wonder I don’t go to bars anymore?

I wish there was a pub around here; some place where people gathered that served something other than pizza and nachos and beef jerky. It’s not that I have anything against nachos but seriously these rednecks wouldn’t know true nachos if it hit them in the face. I’ve been to some bars down in Texas and other border states that served nachos that would shove you into a different dimension. It was almost like consuming psycho-tropics.

But I digress.

The last time I met a woman in a bar was in the 1980s. It was before I cut my hair for the last time. Of course, my hair wasn’t gray back then. I wasn’t an old geezer that women ran away from. They ran away for different reasons.

Nowadays I meet a lot of women on a near-daily basis. It’s never in a bar setting. They come to me for advice but it is always profoundly mundane questions like, “What movie do you recommend?” or “What book should I read?” or “What should I do to make my man happy?”

I am disgusted by this but I try to see it as a challenge. How can I interject some sage advice into my answer? How can I subtly point them in a new direction? How can I tweak their thinking? How can I nudge them softly into new paradigms? How can I provide that which they really, truly want, which they do not even know that they want? How can I shatter their thinking?

But I never meet them in a quasi-intimate setting such as a bar. It is always in a somewhat professional setting in which I can never fully cut loose.

Maybe I need to start going to bars again. Of course I wish there was an even better setting.

But then again I don’t. I’m perfectly happy not communicating with other humans. At least that’s what I tell myself.

Maybe I need to start going to bars again. Maybe I need to let my hair down.

If only there was a decent pub around here.