I find myself in a strangely good mood these days.  It happens at work, I notice.  Waiting on the people who come brings me joy.  Wine brings them joy, and I enjoy pouring it for them.  It's a great job.  One that flies under the radar.  It turned out to be a decent job for a writer, such as the way things are for writers now.  The moods surprise me, and I look back at where I've come from, that period in any writer's life that are full of great doubts and worries.

I was a happy kid.  I could find happiness easily, when I wanted it.  I was social, good with people.  Then along came some events, college, a time of life, a time of upheaval.  Maybe I over did it, playing cool, like James Dean.  Yeah, but I was working on something that needed to be done.  And slowly but surely I was seeing to it.  Takes a long time.

But when you are on the side of the good, you are on the right side, and things will work out in the favor of that which you are trying to achieve, it that be of good things too.

It is a simple statement, that life can be, well, difficult, on those of us who are naturally self-content, who are thereby prone to go it their own way.  Other people will always tell you that collaboration is the thing, and this is true to some extent, but first, you have to create, and this happens alone.

I didn't even think I'd have a thing to write today.  End of the week, the last shift of the week the night of live jazz.  Could have been much worse.

The bar was a simple life.  There was always plenty to do, plenty people to talk to, projects, cleaning, no end to it, but your own energy.  And I put my energy, the energy of the day, into it, carefully timed and invested.    Anyone should be so lucky, as to find work with hands and body, mind and communication.  Talk, responding to the continuity of stories, of cultural references in a special little inconspicuous place.  A repository of things put in, remembered.

It was the sort of a job Hemingway would have liked.  But it was no bother that there was not much material that directly came from it.  Those things would remain, in place, left unexploited, a simple background for life as it is.  No need to go game hunting.  No need for anything really.  A simple zen life.


The argument against you came from the Puritans, more or less.  Your small mistakes, they shook their heads at, no, he's not one for us.  You were one of the old faith.  The bad student in front of the authorities.  The thing was to avoid the foolishness as best you could now, as you went on with life, much older now.

My therapist, she reminded me, she nursed me back, back to following through with the values I found important.


In an odd way, you become what write.  And you write what you become.  You keep on tending bar, you keep on writing.  I wrote about that as it applied to Ernest Hemingway as a college senior.  A brief essay that came out of a lot of thought, of a failed thesis, of a failed relationship.  I applied to Professor DeMott's class about contemporary cultural criticism, though it didn't really answer the query he posed of us.

And as I recover my good mood enough to have a health like that of a college student again, I see the work, the thing that I was up to.  Yes, some of it had to do with a girl.  I wanted to be a man in that way, and I really saw no other way to do than to be the kind of writer and person I wanted to be.  And by the time I finally was, I guess she did not matter anymore, but as an archetype, a kind of person that you generally respect and wish to by respected by.    She, herself, outwitted me, was too clever, did not so much want to cater to my baseness, the faults that I liked and kept as a part of myself.


It was all quite amusing.  Hemingway writes that somewhere, in one of those brief italicized tale between the stories of In Our Time.   Germans coming over a wall, picking them off.  "It was all quite amusing."  I wondered where that came from, that assuredness, it was all quite amusing.  How would know that about life at that age, I wondered, as any writer must.  Where does one get the self-possession to think that one knows anything.  How do you get that?  It's something we aim for, I suppose, and allow it to take its time.  Years.  The passing of different conditions...

And then you see, as he did, the importance of all the little scraps of paper, of the little thoughts to capture and record.  Put one down, then another comes, and then another, a self within all allowing it to gel.

But it was not, could not, could never be, easy.  There were excesses.  There were lots of many nice opportunities that had passed into the irretrievable, nice things, like girlfriends, like happy normal jobs and the lives that went with them.  People had aged.  People had died.  Financial security had been permanently faded away.

The story, the only one you really have, I've said it before, is that of how you become a writer.



I was not good enough to go out.  The hours were wrong, and I could not afford to make going out a full meal.  It was better for me to work in such a place, then just go home.