In truth I slept to about three, and still I was tired.  I got stuck with an extra shift, making it five nights of closing, beginning with a Saturday night, leaving to find blood spattered on the sidewalk outside, and that was how I found myself approaching my 48th birthday.  A very busy Sunday night, two jazz nights, one wine tasting night, and finally the week leading up to the day was over.  The day before it, I simply had to get up for a 2 PM dentist appointment.  One more thing to celebrate, and then the holidays are done, the sentiment runs in mid January in the cold.

If you get up around two, and it's Saturday, and you have to go back to work Sunday night to start the week over again, you do what I do, you go grocery shopping.  Whole Foods, P Street.  I need to stock up on food for the week, or I'm toast.  A barman needs a good breakfast, and can't rely on late night food offerings.  The grocery store, off of Logan Circle, is full of chicks.  The sidewalks are full of chicks.  And before that, on my solemn way to fill the larder, it is impossible not to notice beautiful women of every shape and size and age and background, everywhere.  Bars spilling over almost.  And I will go to the grocery store and walk back laden down with two full bags headed home to stock up.  I will get home and probably be tired enough from the long walk to eat quickly and collapse on the couch (as ends up happening.)

In such a situation, in such a job, I'll tell you the truth;  you have that long coming down period when you get home, and of course, you need some basic body and nerve comfort.  The busier the night, the longer the week, the more wound up you will be, getting out of work to an empty night, decent people gone home, the longer it will take.  There's no one around, so what do you do, but open a bottle of red wine, play some music, probably end up jerking off over something really dirty like Russian moms doing nasty things that are somehow human and quite compelling to someone who wants to relax.  Or better, get it out of your system, if you're not too wiped out by picking up the guitar.

Your whole circadian rhythm is going to be turned on its head once you start on night shifts.  It turns the world on its end.  Eventually, you won't end up going to sleep until it becomes not only blue and rosy fingered dawn but brighter than that, and that's probably not good for you.  Lance Armstrong used doping (fitting into his own strange fringe culture of restaurant people, cyclists, musicians, and other poetically minded dopers who, like actors try to bring the masses beauty of Shakespeare--for how would the masses ever take poetry seriously unless it was given a background with moving human parts), and I use red wine, Irish music, guitars, household chores, and far too often the visualization of the desires one has when encountering the opposite sex, young, old, dirty, pure, and in between.

Jesus Christ, it's almost 5:30, and the consequence of exhaustion and too much of a schedule you can't control is being wide awake when you don't want to be.  Dostoevsky, poor bastard had the same problem.

So, why the fascination?  Why do I begin to feel relaxed when I indulge in watching The Pogues on YouTube, or middle aged naked women from other cultures engaged in sexual acts?  Is that the problem of the artist, that he senses his own irresponsibility, and so likes women beyond child bearing age, so that he can go on with his life as it is?  It's a matter of his own shyness, and he knows it, that he can't approach a young woman with a sense of confidence, when he hasn't had first a glass of wine along with a sense that the work for the day is done?  And what to an artist is the sense that the day is done?  That depends on what hour it is, or whether or not he has recorded his dreams?

I don't want to intellectualize it, or treat it from the safe glass protective barrier of literary/cultural critic, by, like, saying Larry David has been very helpful in opening up the life of people candidly.  I would rather just admit all mine own.  Because if you can tell the real truth, then you're really writing, and when you are really telling the truth about yourself, then it's real, and the real in people will respond.  Because there is a heap of fake before you get to anything real.

And so you feel the need to admit and acknowledge the truth, of how you were too shy or hampered or distracted to engage with all the attractive young women and not so young women you saw at the grocery store.

Bartenders are great with people.  At the end of the day, we go home to nothing.  Nothing but our own imaginations, and imaginations make for some fairly decent people, though that isn't necessarily going to get you much in the way of a retirement plan.

Kurt Vonnegut was fairly groundbreaking when he introduced to literature that bit about going home from school and making model airplanes and jerking off.  He also was early introduced to us the real horror of the fire bombing of Dresden, of civilian casualties, of surviving only by being kept in a meat locker, then coming out to all the crisped bodies and shadows of bodies, that is Slaughterhouse Five.  He was able to tell a real human story, about the real history of humanity after all the generals, dictators, ambitious crazies, etc., have had their way.