Sunday, October 23, 2016

... But in the very nature of the business there was always something that, usually around the end of dinner service, put you over the edge, into the craving of the nervous system and the need for a quick fix of calories, and so you reached for the Beaujolais, and along came all the consequences of physiology.

The server, who would leave earlier than I anyway, was nowhere to be seen when the large party in the wine bar, who were switching seats left and right, as is their culture, wished to order to dessert and coffee.  So I took the order.  In my meantime my veal cheeks had come up, as I waited on the entrees for the last dinner order, a famous wine importer from Palm Beach with his young lady friend.  There was wine that the large party hadn't finished, and I wanted them to take the remains.  The two guys with the bottle of Ventoux at eight past ten, kitchen closing, want a charcuterie.  I order, politely, hoping the kitchen will not be angry with me, and then, I'm tweaked.  I slump in the corner over a cold merguez sausage...

The guy in the corner knows me as a friend, another couple comes in wanting wine, and I am in for it again.  He's a good loyal customer, on a date, she's nice, they like wine, I pour them a few sips of this and that, since they've finished the bottle of pinot noir.  I beg off joining them for a good long time, but, but...   The couple at the bar--they are entertaining actually, nice and respectful as well--pay their tab, appreciatively and depart down the stairs and into the night, and things at the bar have been put back in some order, so, yeah, I go over and sit with the couple for a while.  She does elderly care.  I let the guy pour me a bit of the organic Languedoc wine Stefan Defot brought us;  it's higher in alcohol content, 13%, which for me is a big knock about 12%, but, I have to admit, it goes down easy, and then I go back, let them finish up, and I continue my clean-up.

I eat, the veal cheeks, devouring them, over the vegetable du jour, though the pasta would have filled me up better, but leaving I'm still starving, so then up the street for a gyro to take home, and I wolf that down, the bread and the fries I try to avoid once back safe.

But the cycle has been initiated.  I wake up with heart racing, the sweats again, my central nervous system in need of the sugar water I've soothed it with.  I need  a good deal more rest, and then it will be off to work for Sunday night.

Which I make it through, even though the late arrivals, after four straight busy hours of dinner service and a full bar, people to entertain, familiar regulars, just when the bar clears out, the late arrivals are enough to make me nervous, partly for who, out of experience, might join them to cavalier the hard working barman's away from his exhausted attempts to restore order at his bar.  Again, I'm slumped over in the corner, after a tomato juice, eating a merguez sausage like a hotdog over Ezekial bread, having bonked already.  And when you bonk, you bonk, and there's no turning back.

The next day, around noon, I walk slowly back home from my therapist softly saying Our Father Who art in Heaven to myself.   "Depart from me, oh Lord, for I am a sinful man," Peter tells the Lord coming to his fishing boat.  In French, the words for fisherman and sinner are close, on the verge of sounding alike to the student.  And I wonder, as we all know, from our inner Augustines, the sins are many, many, legion like the miraculous draft of fish somehow related to them.  And the forgiving of our sins is maybe the only way around them, to admit one's own deep weakness, the physiological craving.  Health can be restored only through faith, the best way to treat such things as the bartender's weakness, his stumble and fall at the end of night charged with a lot of running around.

Monday, October 3, 2016

The type A senior economist and the type B expert in matters of the world as it is, holes in the walls to go to in Sardinia and Corsica, have left, and that leaves three, and knowing them, I ask, or say, as they have empathy, I bet you have type O blood.  And they nod, and say, yes, they do.  "why?"  Oh, just a hunch.

They look at me, and I say, well...  And I think of John F. Kennedy, and other things about how a person might go about conducting health of the good sort, say, 'you need aerobic activity, and that's just what you're doing with those dance classes...'

I tell them about him, as he's a sort of poster boy, man, with all the issues.  I tell these last people about this, because, well, it's my job, if viewed archaically., not that anyone gives a real ....  about this aspect of a job which will never show up on tax returns or the basic corporate model of how the modern serf must behave  in order to fit in.

Jack.  His pains.  All the inflammatory issues.  Guts.  Joints.  The adrenal factor, as Irish people need their seaweed, as well as their barrooms in this the modern world.

I mean, look at him.  As someone said, watching him walk a parade as the young skinny congressman back in Boston, 'look, he's a purebred,' or a thoroughbred, and this was true.  He had all the gifts, an upright spine, a way of being in the tribe, animal magnetism.

And the bravery, to deal with all that pain.  The eroding spine, from the medications to treat his adrenal deficiency.  That operation, fusing vertebrae, he lives with pain the rest of his life, after that, so he could walk.  Gut issues, before the whole understanding of the benefits of a break from glutens and wheat, hybridized, the standard american diet, different from every town in Europe in which there is a market, fresh produce and whatnot, at least two days a week.

There the guys impossible gifts, his adaptable agile ability, thanks to voice lessons, and training, and the basic fact of being thrown out there to do it, to be a politician, as he did so in the true sense, mastering issues, and travel, and all matter of things, well, he became himself, gifted handsome guy.

But there is still the pain, all that which was put upon him largely through medical treatments of all the issues that are basic endemic issues of anyone who walks around with type O blood in their veins and every cell.  His voice lives on, great voice, great speeches, great humor, a great Irishman.

The guy had guts, when you see him walk into, upright, back brace holding him together, pelvis, lower back, into the old place of press conference, (before Nixon filled the old white house swimming pool with bricks), an auditorium in the State Department building, just above the Lincoln Memorial and several other buildings.  Standing upright,just to get there boldly, and field questions as a was a certain joy for him to d, livening him, and the rest of us.

The morbid pictures of him, one wonders, is he still there, where did he go, so vital he was.

People nod, one is taking medicine for thyroid issues, one is a sailor, one works out and fasts, on and on, and all this is true if you, like I, are type O.

(Thank you, Ingrid, by the way, for turning me on to the whole theory and explanation.)