We all want things; love, happiness, legs without varicose veins, right now I want a slice of pizza but it's far too late for that because nothing is open anymore. Maybe I think the pizza will take my mind off this girl I've been watching. We'll call her The Actress, because with such a thinly veiled agenda, what else could she be?

The Actress came into the bar moments after I did and immediately set about wolfishly trying to catch her prey, even though this is the last place on earth she should be hunting. Her vacuous hunger reminds me for some reason of a little boy I saw on the street the other day looking for scraps, a handout, anything to sate. He was jogging alongside his mother who was pushing a shopping cart loaded with worn-thin blankets, cans for depositing into a five-cent recycling bin, and what looked like a pile of broken down machines.

For a split second when I saw them, I was reminded of shopping with my mother in a consignment store when we lost everything and moved into a small "condo" in a cul-de-sac in a fucked up town in Florida. At night, my mother and her friends spoke in hushed tones about what they were going to do now - all of them going through the same thing, as if a sexist Tsunami had struck and taken the men, leaving behind the women and children to fend for themselves. I remember the feeling of pride these women maintained, cutting coupons and stitching together material for shirts, and I remember when they'd let it all go at night and the howls of sorrow watered the community while us children slept.

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Working in a bar, you get used to seeing people roll in sober, and stumble out drunk. A respectful start with a friend or two has a 50/50 chance of ending in broken glass and loud guffaws punctuated by the slurping of tongue down some unknown throat.

And please believe me when I say I'm not judging -- my longest relationship to date ended up on a T-shirt emblazoned with the catch phrase "What Did You Expect? We Met In A Bar"

As someone employed in the world of late nights and libations, I see more than my fair share of hookups and headaches. Sometimes my heart gets mixed up in it all too.

This is the story of a couple of regulars. They love this bar. They come in for a couple after work, before going home, on a steady basis. They come here as a coda to their day before the rest of their night, which they will spend together, just the two of them, in each other's arms. You serve them and get to know them, in this way, becoming a part of their intimacy, "friends" of a sort -- no numbers are exchanged and you never hang out outside the confines -- were you to run into each other, say, at Trader Joe's, it would take a while for their eyes to focus and figure out where they know you from. Yours is a special kind of friendship -- like a vacation romance, it exists in a bubble devoid of minutia; you will never know each other so well that you will fight. You will never tire of one another's quirks. There is always just enough time for a funny story, a glimpse into the highjinks of your life, admiration for the outfit, and a tip.

But one day soon, She will come in with Another Man. One day soon, She will come in and sit down at the booth that just weeks ago, She sat in with The Man -- The Man She Loved. The Man whose eyes She gazed into with adoration and kissed! And promised! And slung Her legs around long into the night, way past last call and the waning of the moon.

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With this post, Squid Ink introduces Deborah Stoll's Glass Half Full, one woman's adventures in the bars of Los Angeles and points in between.

BY DEBORAH STOLL
Special to Squid Ink

"Deborah! You sit here!" The great thing about Kim Sun Young Beauty Salon, "Where Hair Fashion Start," is that it's fast, cheap and good. I move chairs and look in the mirror. Having had a shit day, I've decided to get a new look. Because this is what girls do.

"Deborah! You okay?"

"Uh, yeah."

They ask me this a lot when I'm here. I'm not sure if they ask everyone because I don't understand Korean, but they certainly seem concerned about me, which makes me feel good.

"You pay now!"

With Kim Sun Young having worked its restorative magic, my hair and I meet Courtney in the parking lot of Poor Dog Group's warehouse performance space at the end of a dead-end street called Hunter, somewhere between central downtown and the art-loft district. It's the kind of street in the kind of neighborhood on the kind of night that brings me unmitigated joy knowing that it's there. I mean, the area is desolate. The street is dark. The homeless man banging around inside the Dumpster sings along to "Yesterday" on his iPod. He smiles at us theatergoers and waves. He's missing an astonishing number of teeth, and I wonder if he isn't part of the show.

We grab a Tecate and head for our seats, where we are regaled for the next hour by men showing their balls, pulling tampons out of their asses, singing Sting's "Fields of Gold" and doing some impressive Russian dancing punctuated by recordings of NASA's flight records.

We need sustenance.

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