Back to work at the bar.  Two shifts, a Tuesday night wine tasting (waiter hungover) and Wednesday night jazz (somehow a lot of extra work), and I'm already thrown off, nocturnal, out the door with the old circadian rhythm that's good for the depression prone.  Was that partly for taking the cat in for the steroid shot, a progress report on her cancer, that kept me too anxious to sleep?

Vet's office, a mistake over the appointment, I'll take her back tomorrow, consider lugging her in the old wooden lobster trap-like box exercise.  I end up taking a nap that last more than two hours after taking my old '98 Bianchi Velocé in for a new drive train (new Campy chain, cassette, change of handlebar tape.)  And when I wake up, I know I have it again, not wanting to socialize, not wanting to make calls, not wanting to go out on a beautiful evening.  Grocery shopping, after Superglueing a strap of my cycling shoes back together so I can go for a ride later.

It was a decent break, going up to my 25th college reunion.  It took me days up there and finally a stay in Amherst with some old family friends that brought me out of being the loner.  A day on the train, then back to work, and then it's back to the same again.

Maybe it's the social cues along along with the adrenaline that came of making it through eight straight hours that leave me up all night, as if fighting the rhythm of day and night, diametrically opposed.  I feel a brief wiff of childhood confidence when I almost feel like waking up at 7 AM after four hours of attempted sleep.  Yes, that's what it is, that rush of confidence and happiness that isn't fake or fleeting for all those normal people ('day walkers,' restaurant people call them) who march out into the world all fresh and squeaky clean and looking good, where I feel like a rock that sits there gradually worn away, worn away.  A fleeting taste of that, and then I go back to bed, cat fed.

Maybe we all think it about our jobs, "I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy."

I just know mine to be a completely different kind of thing.

The one thing I'll say, though, is that the few lasting intellectuals there are, who have not fallen into the Treason of the Clerics, are not there because they are necessarily talented any more than you and I;  no, they are there because they simply keep doing it, with nonchalance.  Hemingway (though he knew the treason as soon as he felt the shrapnel fly into his legs,) MacGowan (who didn't want to do anything else, who had a clear vision of taking simple old school music and making it live.)

This is probably the genius of Beethoven too.  Not so much the skill (though I know that sounds silly) but just his ability to avoid the treason, to keep keep doing his thing.

Yes, Woody Allen has it right.  98 percent of being a genius, a Tolstoy, is just showing up.  Along with the right attitude.  Must be a blood type thing.