When I left home after college, I guess I had a basic model of literature in mind.  Go and explore the human condition.  Kerouac came to mind, perhaps mainly for evoking the calm of a Zen life reflecting over a cup of green tea.  Set out innocently, follow certain examples of humanity and human suffering, write a bit about it if you have to.  For whatever deep reasons, I gather I chose the restaurant business as a means to observe.

By turns, yes, in a bar or restaurant, you see sadness, discontent, both in customers and in staff.  Restaurant people often seem to live by the light of family angst, relived memories of things like disrupted Thanksgivings and unhappy scenes, and so perhaps it is within their psychology that they wait on people, entertaining others as if to protect them from the things of unhappiness that we all know (and need not be embarrassed at mentioning or ashamed of, as even happy and loving families will fall to such fates from time to time.)  Maybe restaurant people simply tend to be more willing to admit and share the personal failings and unhappy things of life, with a refreshing candor (at times prompted by tequila, or red wine).  Yes, sharing it is called.  And from such sharing, a lot of good is remembered and released out into the world and the collective psyche.

Some people to increase the stress, the drama, the angst, in such a business.  Instead of being at, or making, peace, they seek to ratchet up of drama and conflict, least of all helpful to the subject, the perception of the guest as a maniacal enemy...   Or to make a simple night into a conflict, in order for a 'greater' good or kindness... making a shift into a chance for stress, disorganization...  In smaller places, you see it.

Kerouac's landscapes included the unhappy (as did Tolstoy before him), patterns diverging from the perfect happy life, as if there were such a thing.  He wrote of Dean Moriarty looking for his lost father who had abandoned him as a boy.  And it was quite natural for Kerouac to read widely and be a decent student of Buddhism.   The only problem is that despite such readings and his own authorial success, he wasn't able to save himself.  Despite the clarity found in his work, we know that he unrelentingly drank himself to death, and we can only sadly speculate why, other than that he was an alcoholic.  Perhaps it is a matter of intensity, the intensity applied to the writing life that has its other sides.

Restaurant beings, for me they have seemed to capture the spiritual problems of the times, be it the ultimately unsatisfying nature of pleasures the Buddha tells us of, or of the woeful domination of the ego-driven over consciousness in the human psyche that the New Age wisdom of Tolle writes about, I think with great validity, though of course all thoughts are fleeting and unsatisfactory descriptions of reality.  They suffer, but there is an upside to their suffering, a learning, a wisdom, all of it quite real.

Now I see my co workers unhappiness more clearly, the habits of self-perpetuation.  And I think I also see something of an answer, through them, through their attempts to get through a night, to the condition of mortality that we all face, though that answer can only be put roughly, having something to do with accepting the Ego, all that we might take to be the most important thing for our own salvation physical and otherwise, as a grand Illusion.

Though beautiful and moving, a clear observation of the basic human problem, I wonder if Kerouac's bent on writing wasn't a kind of egotism itself, on its own, a belief that writing is its own answer to the greatest problems, when in fact it isn't, that the solutions must be themselves worked upon, through meditation, awareness, cultivated conscious presence and the like, rather than 'logic' and specific terms. Being a craftsman, the son of a printer ruined by a flood sought being an author as a monetary salvation.  In his work, he helped toward realizing an awakening of consciousness, a revival of an ancient Earth-friendly wisdom-filled sensibility, writing in almost a bardic tradition of hero's tale, one that came welling up, pre-hippie, in America in the 50s.  And given that America was, is, the Great Democracy, sensitive to the highest and purist ideal, it was something of an ideal place to attempt such a thing.  Perhaps he was rising toward wisdom, before what we now call 'branding' got to him, not that there is anything inherently wrong in 'branding,' poor old King of the Beats forced to pay for his egotistical sins of attempting Zen, attempting to contradict the great egotistical mode of American Life full of its own self-assured answers.  But yes, to say that is to fall into the same trap.  In reality, all is good, perhaps.

I don't look for adventure so much.  I don't think I ever really did, having enough of that going through high school.  As boring as it is, I like calm and quiet.  And anyway, one should like to address the lack of dialog or vocabulary related to explorations of human consciousness, to get past the stereotype of yogi wannabe tree hugger incense breather under achiever do nothing doesn't belong at the country club for lack of manners never goes out on a date obscure out of touch... etc.