I get up around three on day off number one.  I don't care, meaning, that's life, you need your rest.  The life of the aging barman.  Those who will like him as a writer will like him, and those who don't will not.  (That is one of the lessons one learns in college;  people will judge you.)  There is no particular space, no particular place or recognition he seeks.  If he did, he would not see himself as worth calling a writer anymore.  There was a politics to it, quite essentially.  A loyalty to the arts themselves.

Perhaps the object of the game was to do the utter opposite of what Facebook or Google, Twitter and Instagram and the like were doing.  The most important and essential piece of writing was to remind everyone of the great obscurity of the human being, of the human soul, of the human just as he or she was, without dressing themselves up.  The more you did not pretend to be important or worth any attention at all any more than the next person, the better you were doing.  You were reminding yourself, and hopefully others, about being human, about the projects of the soul and spirit.

We might not have really understood that about Hemingway, as we criticized him on personal grounds, the bully, the blow-hard.


One day, when I am old or dead and gone, a young fresh wise Ken Burns type will come along, and collect the facts and remembrances of our times, of the writers who led up to, who armed us with wisdom and knowledge--as always since ancient times--to face the current battle for the still alive human mind.  There will be the technologists on one side, armed with big data and numbers, treating us as some kind of collective organism, one easily led if one is clever enough, but always to their preferences, their means, their tastes, their clever way of life.    Driven by style, success, a happy social life and material benefit, their blindness will only grow deeper, and the scandals, if they have not come already, will continue, betraying the colors of their moral character in their own 'creative' state.  They will claim being the most creative of all, open to all.  But they have forgotten something. Then on the other side there will be us.  There will be those of us who remember the daisy, the experience of it, and the chickadee and the sparrow.

Instead of connecting us through an increasingly inhuman impersonal connection, false hits of dopamine, for which they will profit handsomely on by charging fees, dues for belonging to the master computerized computer-friendly master race, they will secretly be profiting by destroying the means and the ability for us to meet as strangers, to meet in common places in actual not virtual reality.  They will do all they can to destroy the old meeting places, the old quaint meeting houses and public rooms of rubbed shoulders and shared tales over a benign beverage and decent sustenance, to set up their own.  They will be set precisely against such people as me, old middle aged barman who've been at it for twenty five years in a neighborhood, against such who might still claim some right to write about real life encounters in all their strangeness and wonder.   (I will be dismissed as servile, not cool enough, not enough a self promoter.)

They will create a master race who goes where the machine, the big data tells us to go, the hot new place for something better, improved.  They will create the dopamine seeking monster in us who must go to the new places, the new scenes, discarding the old ones, the old templates of decent things.  And that new humanity will not be able to have any dialog, despite professing themselves to be the great facilitator of such dialog.  They will create experiences which no longer allow real dialog, as is only in their perfectly defined self-interest to do so.  To go to the new scenes will be unquestionable.  And anyone who does not follow along will be ostracized, trivialized, treated as an old fogey, irrelevant, uncool, uncouth, not following the latest in style.  The haircut will be their symbol of belonging.

To stand behind a counter, a bar, and offer the basic good things of life, as recognized by Jefferson and the Renaissance, will be a forgotten, regarded as a tradition now worth keeping, if it does not fall into that created diorama of the desirable, the fashion, the hipster connected cool.  (I once had to ask what a hipster was.  I guess I know, better, now.)

The Ken Burns type out there in the future will, with the benefit of historical hindsight, treat this old corps of writers in a way that will be similar to the treatment of the soldiers, the generals, the political leadership as done in The Civil War, or perhaps in his piece on Baseball, or Jazz.  The creative types, for all their jazzman struggles and health concerns, will be seen finally as patriots of a sort, perhaps in the way that Yeats wrote of the Easter Rebellion.  His writers and artists will be a sort of natural history museum, naturalists, people who remembered how the human mind and the human psyche worked, what they might have looked like, before the great brain washing, the new communal new Communism, destroyer of the human soul.  They will be seen as brilliant vivid alive types, passionate hotheads, men barely in control of their emotions, caught up with some archaic and old fashioned concern, if there still will be such words.

Strangely, the works of Ken Burns converge upon a center.  The jazzman, the Lou Gehrig, the John Muir, the Robert E. Lee, the Lincoln, the Vietnam soldier blend at a cellular level, all up to the same thing, in different ways.  These are people who led actual lives, with actual ups and downs.