A generation perdu...  lost.   I kept up at my job as a bartender, and inevitably, it seemed, my mind got duller, less confident with intellectual pursuits, caught between loneliness, working odd hours, a lack of conversation going beyond the basic rot about pretty girls, shop talk, the thought of getting a better more appropriate job, wishes for a social life, and even a family life, all of it going nowhere.  If you don't keep up at it, reading, writing, you fall into a disheartened spiral, depressed, not wanting to get up out of bed before you had to, stretches of work work work, having less faith in it, burned, wanting to go to grad school, but never making it happen, all the while plodding along.   Retirement... forget about it.  What hope had we?  No easy free ride through grad school, if we had known what we wanted, hadn't felt so down about everything when we left school that reading was a chore when we knew it shouldn't be.  Anyway, easy to miss the train.  A year goes by, then another, and you're still struggling along paying the rent.

So you sit down, and try to read a book on your own.  In doing so, putting off the worries, and only when the bulk of the household chores are done, the necessary groceries without which life isn't possible, the laundry, so to show up to work with a shirt to wear, keep the bathroom clean, the dishes not piled dirty in the sink.  And maybe you don't even have time to read, and what comes first is doing what I'm doing now, which is a necessary expression, an attempt to understand what's in the flow of deeper thoughts, thoughts that might give me guidance of some sort.

Showing up at Mother's Day, a lonesome middle aged bachelor, was not a joy.  The great dumbing down of everything...  I'm pumping out widgets in the form of a special four course menu.

Each year it gets worse, and you get stupider.  I once had great lectures about the opening of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, that part about the old carpenter, or about Kerouac, Big Sur, and once on a long car trip back to DC with my mom, as we came closer to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, I reeled out my thoughts of how writers suffered and went to work everyday and even did dishonorable things like making their moms work jobs in shoe factories not for a future but because they had to write, to make sense of Eisenhower Era lulled worlds of clean squares, black and white, dedication to economic security, by venturing deeper into what the human mind often enough wonders about.

Long undisciplined lines of prose in need of an editor, but what can you do but try and get the thoughts down as they come.  And Kerouac is brave for finding some lasting settings for his narratives, hiking out west, climbing mountains, California, and to do it he had to suffer a lot of uncomfortable spots.  Still, he found out of the world just the kinds of places he needed to enter into a scholarly life pondering deeper meanings, from nights with Jazzmen blowing, to the woods outside his sister's house in Rocky Mt., NC, where he is St. Jack of the Dogs, to the Cascades where as a fire watcher he did headstands and pondered Buddha's void.  He also struck up camp by the sides of roads where he had to keep hidden to not be arrested, America, no more a place of open communal lands.

Anytime one sits down and writes like this, he feels like Rotarians will come and take him away, that his old Alma Mater, for which he cares deeply, will shake its communal head in disapproval, as if to say, 'what are you trying to do, son;  you're not helping anyone;  did we waste an education on you?'  And for you, personally, the old Alma Mater should have somehow been more help, kinder.

Self-help books will tell you it's all in your head, and I am susceptible to them.  They are seductive in their promotion of self-acceptance, their message to 'be positive (for a change, and maybe something good will come of it and you won't make yourself sick, like you're doing now.)'  No use being a literary bachelor, they tell me.  Get out and get a life.  And that I read them sometimes may well mean, I need to reignite the spark of fiction, of reading something, before I get any dumber and numbed down by routine.  If they teach hope, then I am for them.  We all have spiritual thirst, the need for a quest.

If you do find yourself in the miserable heartbreaking fate of being a confirmed barman, then the only thing you can do, as long as you can, is work in a special place where there is rubbing of elbows and intellectual talk, enough to allow for some semblance of growth, of belonging to community, that you are taken as more than a lackey gopher stuck behind the glass, to others a person who never did anything with his life.  A flaneur.

Yes, how did I get where I am, down and out by most people's count, such that I suffer from shame at the thought of reunions.  Where will I live when I am old, and with whom, in what kind of a situation?  But, alas, America is not the caller of shots anymore, no more healthy pensions, but a cannibalized turn.  No GI Bill for my generation, as there was for the generation that made the babies of the boom, my father going to grad school.  The legal field seemed cluttered even then to justify the big expense.

But I say to myself a lot, what if I had done something, just tried something, early, when doors were still open.  I had not the guts, or the energy, or I was just lazy.  One-way ticket to Palookaville, just as my brother had warned me.

There is still the Irish temperament in the genes.  Lawless, literary, one side a stickler for Catholic order and morality, the other healthily not fond of being part of someone else's empire, with Celtic charisma and joy for liberated moments of music, talk and drink.

If I'd write a musical about Shane MacGowan, the opening strains might be that old song, traditional, "Kitty."  A rebel song, a love song, a calling, a sense of the tragedy imposed by the British Empire, but yes, a calling, a reminder of the human voice, the need for song, sweet, sensitive, coping with the tragic.  "In a day, I'll be over the mountains, there'll be time enough left for to cry, so good night and God guard you forever, and write to me, won't you, good bye."  He was very good when he had it.

Most of us, I warrant, have to live with that odd sense, that wondering of what to do with our hours here on Earth.  Should I exercise, do yoga now, or read a book, or, what?  And the great 'what?' is very frustrating, when you see people set up for one thing, doing it, putting up with it, but then slowly having the vacations, the privileges that membership allows (if you play the game 'wisely'), a car, a house, a family of their own.  But, most of us, just trying to deal with this quite present, momentary, but permanent and building set-up awkward open space of great potential that exists in the current moment.  What to do with it?  Who really wants to share that 'feeling at-a-loss of what to do?  And yet, most of us can agree, we like to go hiking, get out in nature, maybe pitch a tent, something like that.

I remember Madam Korbonski.  The word 'stupid' was in her lexicon, and she said it with a grip of fervor upon it.  She once told me, in our late night "coffee" chats, ha ha ha, that she felt stupid if she drank alone.  In her high voice, almost at a whinny, with a little chuckle, and a quiet, 'oh my God' as if to admit that she must be a little crazy, she would tell stories, not give a shit what hour the clock said, and discuss quite clearly and well the stupidities and the wisdoms of mankind.  The poets and musicians were on the side of the wise.  Those enchanted with power were haunted by righteousness, and Homo Sovieticos could be described, to her taste, as 'slaves.'  In her presence, a good portion of the times I didn't feel like a complete idiot, but instead, initiated into a larger world of ideas, literature, an awareness of history and, even, useful forms of spirituality.  Stupid, that's what a lot of people who'd made their way to power could be.  Interestingly enough, she liked folk medicine, and avoided modern doctoring.

Why do human beings like to defy order, and be bad, get up in the middle of the night to do strange things like read and write, things done, really, just for the sensual pleasure of it, of inhabiting a moment,  of being free, free to think at least.  Let the prose come later, the polish of it I mean, first get the words out.  Unless we're read the Riot Act, we like staying up to late, eating at weird hours so as to make the drinking of wine complete and enjoyable, the appetite fulfilled.




The hard thing is keeping the faith in it, in not losing the possibility of the gift of writing, so that you can find an expression of it, as Joyce finds in various forms.  Reading Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man yields its benefits.