I guess the hard part really
is the going home alone.
What are you going to do at 3:19 in the morning, as you unwind from a shift.
Eat something, maybe a can of aduki beans, with television on in the background.
Drink some wine, even if you don't want to, taking it reluctantly as medicine.

The hard part of the job of keeping bar is the cleaning up after all have gone.  There were tonight great conversations, a sharing of Dostoevsky and Conrad between parties.  (Pasternak's poetry of Zhivago.)  The talk echoes, and the bar man is alone.  He reviews conversations of those who have retired, those who have gone to law school and done things with their lives, marriages, professions, children and grandkids.  And the thing is always that, tolerating the difference between himself, in all his wisdom and kindness and acts and creation of connections between disparate human beings, and that of people of professions and lives and material achievements.  The barkeep will always be stupid and foolish, for what he does, for what he accepts out of life.  Other people have real estate, salaries of note, charity work to keep busy with, focus, friends and normal hours, and that all adds up, where the barkeep's world is one of subtraction and acceptance of less and less.

Thus, the act.  The act that the barman is in something of the same world.  He comes to visit.  Peers in.  Does his job ably.  There is no money behind it.  The place he works in, happy to have his finish, his competence, decency, organized hard work, keeps him around.

Of course, he must find some way toward a philosophical basis for the panoply of life he sees and must fit into somehow.

But never, in no way, somehow, is he intent on restaurant work or a profession explaining wine, organizing a kitchen, etc.  He does it because he is a writer, or a philosopher, or some kind of historian, even as he gets decreasing time, place, perspective, comfort, self-satisfaction, in order to do so.  With dignity, he does a job, hopes it will be experience soon enough worthy of sitting down and writing about.  The stark truth is though, that such experience will never be worth writing about.  A small history maybe.  A look at a postage stamp slice of life complete with mice who at night scurry around in laundry baskets, as meteor showers pass in a night sky.