Second stop, Mars Bar, 8pm. There are exactly two bare lightbulbs lit, and exactly three people in the bar: a middle-aged guy who looks like a Bowery bum, a young blonde guy who looks like a junkie, and a black lady from Oregon who "lives here now." With a tubercular cough left over from a cold, I fit right in. The older guy, Mike, asks if I'm reading Freud. "Believe it or not Interpretations of Dreams was one of the first books I read when I was a kid because I was having nightmares. Say, have you ever read Jung? No?"

"You vote?" Mike asks the pretty brunette bartender, who barely looks of voting age. She sighs. "No, because I fucked up my registration. I just... fucked it up."

"Tell you what, we're having going to have our first black President," Mike offers.

Two laborers from Connecticut come in, the younger of which didn't bother to vote. "I think we're going to have McCain," he says. "It's all rigged up anyway."

The payphone rings and the bartender answers: "No, Benny, I'm sorry. I told you before I'm not going on a date with you," she says before slamming it down.

With that, we sit and wait for the night bartender, who is a half an hour late for her shift.

[Photo courtesy psych101]

If you want to drink in grave-like silence in the middle of the day, pondering the economy and your role in it, this hallway-shaped dive's for you.

"Sex causes high blood pressure," an old man tells the bartender. "You know, the heart races and stuff." (Are you the only female in the bar? Are you, at this point, used to this?) You know what else causes high blood pressure? Not the failing economy! There've been reports that people are actually healthier (if not happier) during hard times.

Another even older man comes in off the street, asks the bartender, "What's 2 across?" and heaves himself onto a barstool. It collapses and he falls to the floor. "The legs just snapped off," he says sheepishly. Which sort of represents the subprime market—and as someone wise once said, "nothing is so successful that you can't fuck it up."

The answer to 2 across? I-R-R-A-T-I-O-N-A-L H-U-B-R-I-S.

Anyway, Milano's. A pint of Brooklyn Lager? $5. The day off? Priceless.

[Photo: Trig's Flickr]