I have no hopes that this that follows will be anything worth writing, let alone read, but, you know, once you've started, you must go on.  After work, sitting on the leather couch looking over at the television, two duck legs cooking in the iron skillet over some onions that later will be far too crisp and carbonized.  That shitty night, everyone else gone home, and I am stuck with two parties of three, one in the front corner up by the window, Argentine?, and the other in the back.  Now they look us up on line and see that we are, officially, open 'til midnight, and it's 'oh, you wouldn't mind, we're not keeping you, if we have two bottles of wine, and what we don't finish we can take home, right?'  What skillful negotiators people are.

The legs cook, and I need to chill the wine.  Sex sells on TV, but tonight I'm happy to find Ted Kennedy on CSPAN, a documentary in his own words, flipping between that and Mountain Men, after I wore out some Survivor Man show, first in a car parked, come to a stop, in Norway winter, then to a desert of Mexico.

Exactly what I was afraid of had come, as I always know it will, on the holiday Sunday.  That stupid mix of the Sunday regular and the small groups who find it suddenly like a Saturday night so take it nice and slow and savor.  And I hold the bag.

Between now and the next shift it seems a new ceiling will arrive to the downstairs dining room, and a rubber matt floor built in to the bar upstairs to reside underneath my feet that will reside above it.  Even as the enthusiasm and honesty to feel engaged in this job grows more and more to be the full scale lie it is, a crime against potential, even as I smile and must say otherwise, even as I grow more honest, in a British way, and say, to early customers, "I'm still trying to scrape up some enthusiasm for all this."  So are we, they say, themselves.  Fair enough.

I need this time of night, some time just to get my legs back underneath me, to feel secure and not to have to look over my coworkers, to see where they are as far as their own attentions to matters at certain tables.  "Is the old man done over there?  I think they want something..."  And the kid will go over and do it, though it was I who was serious and got it organized and got the whole ball rolling this evening, and then, feeling his job is already pretty much done, the young man will come to help.  But he is, indeed, helpful, though he seems to linger over a table...  Is that what I do when answering questions about wine?

The crickets now at Labor Day have managed an even sixteenth note saw or smaller, even, anyway.  And it's five before I know it, but that's only still, when you count it, four hours of come-down time.  The last hangers on customer types, they had to kick me into that last additional cycle, when to me it was just another fucking Sunday night, and that last cycle, brave like in the Titanic, sending everyone else home, to have to work like an ant, everything back down to the kitchen, down to the plastic bag I brought my sandwich in to heat hopefully in the oven, and all the last silverware from chocolate tart and the last two cheese plates.

The skillet is rinsed out with boiling water, the onions a disappointment, but that's how a cook learns.  Maybe it's time now for a little guitar, a little Shane MacGowan, and then to bed.  My shit ass job, so tired I could barely get home on my bike, and then, oddly, still up, and tomorrow I'll be fucked up too.