It's one of those nights, called into work, at two, just as I wake from a nap brought on by getting up early and walking in the woods, as if to prove that some sort of decision must be made.  Saturday night.  I end up closing.  Get home, lay down on the couch in darkness, feet up, not quite falling asleep, and then I'm more awake, enough to lick wounds, want a shower, and just feel like shit about everything.  Howard University PBS has a good show about a musical instrument shop in Lansing, Michigan, "Elderly Instruments," home of guitars, pedal steels, banjos, ukelele, mandolins, amps, picks, guitar players.  Stuff I do get a bug for late at night, thinking I need a Gretsch Country Gentleman or a Gibson J-45.

I would prefer to just go off to bed, and sleep, but it appears I need that time to process, to chew with the teeth of my mind and nervous system the events of one more episode of my bartending life.  The boss asks me if I'd like a shift at the new restaurant, which is going to start quickly and soon.  The thought of which makes it all the more painfully obvious that I am in a particular business, not a member of the ideal Socratic academy of great thinkers, but one who is part of a team humping it out on a Saturday night to a full restaurant.

What can I do but pull out my D 28 and pluck out a few lines from Ashokin Farewell.  It helps process, along with a glass of Langhe Rosso, Italian wine to chase away a night of serving French, and even pouring it over an ice cube.  Outside the crickets still, in seamless grassy sounds like grapefruit essence rises over Sauvignon Blanc, though one can never really picture the thousand insects who come out of exquisite hiding to make such night sounds, as if joined by the tiny frogs or toads that climb trees to peep.  Every creature makes a sound appropriate to it, the quiet whale, so discreet but playful and deep, the Adirondack spruce of a guitar's sound too, the chirp of a juvenile cheetah calling for her mom.

The wine helps a dejected spirit, who shouldn't complain, but whose Monday came on one day early.

And still, Dostoevsky hates electric light, and wouldn't like much the backlit screen either, except that it makes things easy, but by making them easy, making them difficult, robbing paper of a soulful natural sound, but still a venting place for warm sweat dried misery of a professional life out of control.