Sunday night is Monday morning. Come off a pseudoweekend. At least the laundry's done, groceries in the fridge. I hate this week. I've been looking at it since before the holidays. Valentine's Day week. The last in a series of special menus and fully booked tables beginning at 5:30, who knows, maybe even earlier. There's always some nasty surprise. I have nightmares about the couple that changed their order after they ordered, the foie gras appetizer I pleaded with the chef and everyone else about that just wouldn't show up, so that I had to slink back to the bar and face their stares.

I hate Valentine's Day. I hate the restaurant business. It was all a lie, that I would get some writing done on the side, and eventually work my way out of the shit arse routine of smiling at people as you wait on them, that just gets deeper and deeper a hole, because, in your great pain, you become an empathetic and kind being, even as your own life goes to lonely shit. Some days you just want to tell them, oh fuck off, leave me alone, I don't feel like talking and am tired of the shitty pretense that my job is taking me anywhere.

My mother told me and I should have listened when I signed up with the restaurant business when as a luckless college grad I fell in with it. "It will break your heart." And she knew from experience, her father a chef, her mother a waitress. Even though one should be happy to have a job these days, I guess.

Green tea, shit, shower and shave. Fold a shirt, put it in with my legal pad in my courier bag and head off to Monday morning. Bundle up, walk through the woods to work, maybe that will help.

Ahh, don't take it so seriously, lighten up, you'll get there and it all be fine, a voice says. Don't get your blood pressure worked up. Be positive. Wake up and say, 'this is going to be a great day.'

I wish I could. I've never been that sanguine a person, to begin with. A long time ago, a young lady, as if it was painfully obvious, half shouted at me over the phone that I was a masochist. I can understand Melville for creating out of inner self-knowledge Captain Ahab. Damn you, whale. Or passive martyr type, snatching misery from playful happiness. Yeah, be my valentine. I'll be glad when it's all over.



Post Script: Oh, well, it wasn't that bad. You get into the flow. At least it was a busy enough night to keep me from thinking too much. A solid five hours of entertaining on your feet. I ate my dinner, a loin of lamb, alone after they'd all left, along with a glass of Paul Mas' Malbec from the Languedoc. A cab home in the cold. The week has started.