Honestly, no one could have done a better job at it, the particular job I did.  I didn't really chose to do it.  I was okay with being a busboy, writing during the day.  They asked me to be the day bartender, as a way up the ladder, an honor.  My mother cried and told me the restaurant business would break my heart, like it did her father's, but I wanted to write, and I didn't listen, and I was done anyway with the day nob in a dreary office, health insurance, HMO, the federal government, etc.

I was good at it, despite an awkward shaky start.  I made a bar what it was.  I welcomed the various factions.  Etc., etc., etc.  I am not proud of it, but, well, I tried.  I tried to bring some humanity to the job, as is hard to do in any job.


Anyway, there I'd been the good bar man bartender, quietly serving, humoring, waiting, and I'd put my heart into it, as one is compelled to do when having a job, a task.  I'd done way more than what was asked, always left a clean stocked bar.  I was the last one, I locked the door, I did it again and again and again, long after other guys had moved on, to things bigger and better.  I was the neighborhood guy, the listener, I  never tried to make myself be the star in any way, and celebrated others and stayed in the shadows, when a barman could have made it far far all about himself.  That wasn't me.  College boy.   Nice guy.  Good listener to old men, and never oppressive to the ladies.  A decent guy.  And again, a bartender.  Which is a hard job.  Requiring many strange hours.

Interesting people.  That's what I'll remember about it, should I be able to move on one day, and not end up dead and broke, homeless, unnatural, alone.

They'll hand the hard working guy the tough job.  They'll use him, the ranger, the scout, the first line in battle.  They'll use him, and then, eventually, they push him out, and everything remains easy for them, because they are not foolish enough to be like him, to make such an effort, to be always filling in the space, showing up every day, for years and years.  Makes things easy on themselves.  Use the community for support.  Out front, you get fired sometimes.  Rare enough, but it stings.  Some corporate crap, the lack of value to the most valuable employees, the ones who make the place what it is.  The corporate rule leveling I will not speak of anymore.  It's like they fire the nicest guy, the most polite person, and always with a charge like "sexual harassment."  Corporate rules hiding their weak spot.  Keeping the noncontributing team member, throwing out the saint, Moses even.  And then they stay sanctimonious and silent about it.  The constant abetting.... the small mindedness, the new provincial nastiness.


Writing what you have to write is always embarrassing.


Waking up with the sense of defeat.  The spiritual journey's low point, when you realize a great change is called for, necessary, vital to survival.  Finding righteousness in the alignment of one's own life...    To the extent that one's mind is capable of considered thought...

Only a spiritual life and the spiritual event can save a moment of time, save a small interaction, by saving a small thing, saving other things, saving everything.


In many ways it was a mistake to come  down here.  For the glory of supporting myself.  Getting out of the nest, parents, hometown...  But I never got far.  My values did not change.  Books, reading, writing... And here in Babylon, the wicked had carried us away, requiring us a song, one of hospitality, and our hearts did not really feel like it.

As I saw it, the mental habit of the D.C. professional world generally does not admit to the condition of existence that this world is a broken one.  Professional types in D.C. live under the notion that they are helping the world out, and one cannot really argue with them to that point.  Except that such thinking and their professional achievements don't protect them from triviality.  The triviality of style and fashion designer magazines and self-improvement.  Shoes, restaurants, politics, all details of minutia the deeper soul.  A celebration of the trivial.

The deeper soul, if one were to inquire within, sees things with a completely different logic, and that logic is hard to sustain.  It can seem unsupported by fact and realities one has to live by.  Worldly logic cannot meet the higher.

One finally does not need any more details about the broken quality of the world, its sadness, its isolation, its wars, its violence, its greed...  Just details.



I had trivialized myself.  Stooped to the lower level.  Taken wine simply, as a panacea, when it is properly only a metaphor.  Gotten lax on the spiritual element, as happens in a broken world...  I had misread wine as s profession, as a commodity, as would have been pushed on as a profession upon anyone making their living, ostensibly, at it.   That professional world is never where the heart is.  Wine is just wine, and people, trying to make money at it, put it into boxes.  In God's eyes, it is still just wine.

But I knew that I was a writer and that I had a good mission as a writer.  I knew I had to sequester myself away, to avoid a social life.  I knew that junior year in college.  I felt bad for years for that, for taking myself away from my friends for that required mental space.  I felt bad for years for being a bad student because of the higher pursuits.

It takes a huge amount of energy to write.  Writing in a broken world will never be perfect, never meet the high professional standards, never be able to compete with the perfect presentation of the trivial the world demands over and over again as a cover story.  The best of energies will allow for little more than the scattered sketches one will find throughout here.

Maybe that's all you get.  Brief sketches, plucked from the thoughts of naps on couches on a day off, not feeling any energy to deal with the world.