Along the same lines of yoga to protect the selfless self I created a refuge for the selfless idiot in the modern city, who are you, what do you do, who do you know, Washington, DC.   Sometimes that's the best the race can do, create a refuge for something, to at least preserve it, in some corner of reality while we wait for things to happen, hoping that nature will be saved in a healthy way.

The job of tending a bar had a lot of side costs to it.  A lifestyle with its share of dark thoughts.  The sense of having nothing to look forward to, earned by slacking off and taking the easy way out for so long...  The psyche took a constant knock: 'this is all you can do?'  There was a lot of alone time involved, unhealthy lonesome hours afterward.  The fear of letting one thing go slack, the bike ride, the yoga, or covering shifts for another, and everything falling apart.  It was hard, nearly impossible to avoid the wine after making it heartily look good for everyone.  The first glass led to a bottle.  Even over time, a good few hours, it would ease the pain, but all the while not making you feel very good.  There was something to the job quite opposite to the kind of Buddhist yoga thing I wanted to further explore as a means of salvation.   Yes, the food had real nutritional value, the wine medicinal, but this wasn't exercise we were selling.  Social exercise, yes, the necessary meeting place, the spar of wits, the exchange of information, all important in a society, but I was left out of that.  And when I wasn't working, I had things and myself to take care of.  Rare was the social event for me, for a person, good at such a job, who obviously appreciates social things.

It was as if I constructed a great illusion, and then everyone, one by one, got up and left and my legs were very tired.  It was also jarring work sometimes, the constant unpredictability of it.  And partly to get rid of people would I say, yeah, yeah, sure, we'll meet out sometime and have a drink.

My own thirsts, this was a cause of self-disappointment too.  I participated in that all too easily.  And it wasn't the real me, more the me just trying to get by.  Trying to get by, though, while necessary, is not the way to live a real life.  And even as I write, at this late hour of three AM, on a night we were called off because of a power transformer blowing across the street from "The Dying Gaul,"I am getting a little thirsty.  One shift back, the night before, and already I'm thrown off.  Reacting, rather than acting.