So, they put me on Saturdays.
And tho' depressed and sleeping 'til 2 in the afternoon, calling mom and making tea, hungry, after three days off, granted one is needed for rest, I'm tired of yoga and being alone and reading the Bhagavad Gita, and so I get ready for work at the old bar wine bar dining room. A night upstairs at the wine bar is, quite the opposite of the placid main dining room downstairs, table clothed, air-conditioned, predictable, more or less, is never ever clean-cut and simple. Not ever, not once.
It's a tedious start. From only two reservations, then in comes the foot traffic... L comes up from downstairs... helps here and there, but it's complicated and I'm already busy, trying to lead the blind who demanding in their blindness.
I've come to think that mainly the writing personality is just that, a facet of the human personality. Perhaps it is a character flaw, a flaw of the species. A peculiarity, tending to manifest in the Irish, for example. The animal cannot find solid ground for calm happiness without fellow beings.
Strange forest-dweller instinct to retreat to a solitary place to the notebook, to leave the norm...
Sunday, July 28, 2019
Friday, July 26, 2019
Thursday, July 25, 2019
Soul searching.
What did I do to that talented and handsome kid with all that opportunity, back when there was plenty of wide open space...
The choices you make... Go live up on the hill, not with your friends down by campus...
Isolation equals wine...
Feeling useless... No energy to do yoga.
The first day off, I can't even write, the aftermath mind of the seductive Turkish woman the night before. Almost invariably, through some form of hypnosis of soft questions over the bar, convoluted as I hear them in her accent and soft purr, she ends up being over served. I've been outside before later in the night, trying to put her in a cab, and she presses up against me and murmurs about hair meeting hair. I've talked into dancing when my instincts at work tell me I should be cleaning. I wake with a similar embarrassing state of erection in the morning, and not getting action in years, give forth some exercise, finishing in a tea cup, then, of course, the Tantric Buddhists are right, no energy with which to write from.
I get out to do yoga under the pines, so so, but still getting it done, a few minutes of lotus. I wolf down the cheesesteak from the Korean market, roll and all, hot peppers with a hint of soy sauce. Followed by some laziness, reading on the couch.
By the time I'm able to walk down into Georgetown to climb the Exorcist Stairs, The Tombs is just closing. I'm out for a walk, but hungry. I end up at the late night shawarma on Wisconsin below M. Nice guys, from Afghanistan. I eat my little dinner of meats over romaine on a little table across the street, overlooking the old canal. Rats come in and out of the stone walls and along the sidewalk.
I walk back to the last corner on M, seeing how the shops have all changed down in Georgetown's business district, always changing, and at a faster turnover, it seems. The large space inhabited by The North Face has been recently vacated, leaving racks and hangers still attached to walls. And I've always felt like an alien visiting here anyway.
And on the second day, I don't sleep well with construction noise, the beeping of the Bobcat bucket loader digging away at the hillside behind the new concrete foundation. I sleep in, get my rest, ten hours, and then I wake up feeling guilty. "Oh, this is my problem... I'm a big damn bum..." The day has sailed past while I had my uneasy sleep with all the noises of the day and the airplanes... Feeling behind, then you don't want to make any social life for yourself, because you have work to do...
Then the emotions, calling mom. How's she today? It's Harbor Fest in Oswego... Yesterday, all I did was look into my iPhone all day, checking Facebook, a hundred times.
But I can feel, after the rest, that it's easier for me to slip into holy man mode, hermit mode... Maybe the rest, maybe the shame for being unable to sleep, feeling tired because of the wine, then unable to get up out of bed... I'm feeling it easier to turn away from the rest of the crowd's karmic incarnation attitudes and remember a bit of my own, the people I naturally get along with, often musicians or other artists. Away from work, outgrowing hanging out.
I read from Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, Informal talks on Zen meditation and practice. The artist cannot hold himself to the ideal, the ideal of the art he might wish for, but rather simply practice... I make note. Maybe that's what got to Kerouac, his high literary ideals.
And then I hear from my old friend Ken Kilkenny, jazz guitarist, back from up where I'm from more or less, and a kindred soul, and feeling a similar karmic incarnation as he, my soul feels lighter and finally some ease, as I think one might deserve after the work week out amongst the worker bees with their focus just so, cyber security higher degrees, business and the like...
Yes, if one takes better grasp of his own karma, reflected in the shapes and character of his life, then he can rest better and better see the work he has to do, and understand the nature of earlier choices.
And what should I expect of the work week anyway, we aren't all cut from the same cookie cutter... and there will be, as always, people who get us, and people who don't, so go, young man, then, go and do your yoga, go moan for man, as old Jack Kerouac says, remembering to see things by your own light, and yoga and meditation and sitting that awkward way that requires a warm up, lotus zazen cross-legged Buddha, one of the whole points of yoga anyway, and remember that you are different, different from all those people more subject to all the controlling things of society's obligations...
Perhaps it's in our collective karma now, the things we do and have done to whales and captured animals put to the circus, and all the other things we've done contrary to the good karma of Moses who saved each species two by two... Now it's we ourselves who are the blasted ones, the hunted, the captive, the Gaul dragged in front of the Romans... And one who directly faces the shit of collective karma, suffering for all, he's the one who can counteract it in some small but hopeful meaningful way...
Can one even find his own karma in all this mess? Can the whale remember why she came into form as a whale, or the monkey, the monkey, the whole great interconnected web of karmic life in all its creatures and hungry sentient beings? Can the barman remember that God made him just so by a template, by the art form that God practices, toying with a little Jesus joke as far as serving wine and bread, a minor poet on the side... That would take some peace and quiet, one should think.. to remember one is simply not just a bum wino in some alien construing wrought in the image in the eyes of people who fancy themselves in more control of life...
Wist ye not, don't you know who you are anymore... (Keeps you out of the sauce, less jangled nerved.)
So maybe that was it, why you made your little life choices, sort of going off on your own, basic karma reasons, that somehow you can sense... I went up to live on the hill above town, beyond Emily Dickinson's house, to find my own karma, my own individuality. It's a hard thing to do. The truth hurts sometimes, realizing that I am not like the others somehow...
Did I learn much about karma this year of doing yoga under the California Pines up on the bluff over the river? I began to do a good five minute head stand, plow, warrior, tree, and even finally a pretty strong lotus pose, feeling strong and anchored as I did so.
Jesus, and the Buddha too, travelled a lot, met a lot of people, in the course of finding out their karma, their truth, their individuality, the originality, the uniqueness, and in doing so, finding the Universal Truth, each expressing it in his own more or less divine way. To be exposed to so many, as I've been, behind that old bar of The Gaul, and the one before it, old original Austin Grill, seems to naturally highlight the differences between your own personality, your own individual truth and that of all the people who come to bars with common desires and common problems, wanting to relax and socialize, creatures that they are.
And I reflect. My choices... Perhaps some of us have that sense, while being youthful, of uncertainty of our own particular karma, or rather not being certain what that karma might truly be, other than we have to start out on a long path. What are the fates that await us? Where is our truth, in which direction does it lie? Is it in your karma, to have a life with the Princess? I would respect anyone for displaying a bit of caution, as I seem to have, without necessarily meaning to, and still regretting.
It begins to feel, in poses, karma is not of our own conscious making, our own conscious choice, but that of the deeper, the Universe, That Which Is... And when you realize that, you get stronger all of a sudden. You find it out on your own.
It's eighty five out, but under the high pines's shade it's quite comfortable. I lay down my gray yoga mat on the soft clean pine needled floor, picking up a few small branches lost in the storm. A woman in a black house dress with a baseball cap walks two Jack Russells. "They're well behaved, very calm," I call from my distance. "Yes, until they see a squirrel." I gesture with my hand, a squirrel climbing down the tree, as I saw a few days ago... A few needles stick to my feet, but no bother. I begin with a stretch backward, and then, sun salutations.
Doing a tree pose, I imagine my body as having grown out in rings around my core of charka alignment, and this, it turns out, helps me hold the pose, oddly enough, an invisible set of concentric rings just like trees have rings, and soon I'm standing solidly, first on the right leg then on the left, and reaching with my arms above. Inner phylum, outer bark, a lot in between. The trees talk to me, and having little else going on, I can understand them a little bit more than the preoccupied.
I didn't have a lot of other focuses going on, I guess you could say, and so, I suppose, I could put a greater percentage of my being into these explorations of what my truer personality, my truer karma might actually be, (as opposed to all that I had accepted upon myself good naturedly as a steady barman worker bee...)
No, I wasn't focussed on a lot of things, a lot of things one probably should be focused on, but then that didn't seem to be my thing, not holding a lot of truck within, so my karma played itself out, some sort of teacher persona occupying my personal space if I was honest with myself.
To a great extent I'd been fooling myself, seeing only a surface, and not the correctness, the reality of the depths, the surface being but a play of light on the whole. What takes, what doesn't take? You know better when you stop, when you stop and do enough yoga to bring you back to your own body, joyfully in your work at it, and then when you grow better at the lotus pose for accomplishing the meditations that are useful for perspective, when you admit to yourself that you are not just like the others, identical, and not for all of their agendas, having rather your own, just as you have your own soul, just as all people are individuals...
'Cause in the old days, I had a much harder time, easily led astray, involved with things that weren't for me...
It is a long path, a long road, while your karmic incarnation here in this life figures it out. There is a lot of stumbling, a lot of confusion, a lot of the foolish.
The night is spent up late, after the post dinner nap on the couch, reading the Bhagavad Gita.
This all has something to do with my father, his legacy...
What did I do to that talented and handsome kid with all that opportunity, back when there was plenty of wide open space...
The choices you make... Go live up on the hill, not with your friends down by campus...
Isolation equals wine...
Feeling useless... No energy to do yoga.
The first day off, I can't even write, the aftermath mind of the seductive Turkish woman the night before. Almost invariably, through some form of hypnosis of soft questions over the bar, convoluted as I hear them in her accent and soft purr, she ends up being over served. I've been outside before later in the night, trying to put her in a cab, and she presses up against me and murmurs about hair meeting hair. I've talked into dancing when my instincts at work tell me I should be cleaning. I wake with a similar embarrassing state of erection in the morning, and not getting action in years, give forth some exercise, finishing in a tea cup, then, of course, the Tantric Buddhists are right, no energy with which to write from.
I get out to do yoga under the pines, so so, but still getting it done, a few minutes of lotus. I wolf down the cheesesteak from the Korean market, roll and all, hot peppers with a hint of soy sauce. Followed by some laziness, reading on the couch.
By the time I'm able to walk down into Georgetown to climb the Exorcist Stairs, The Tombs is just closing. I'm out for a walk, but hungry. I end up at the late night shawarma on Wisconsin below M. Nice guys, from Afghanistan. I eat my little dinner of meats over romaine on a little table across the street, overlooking the old canal. Rats come in and out of the stone walls and along the sidewalk.
I walk back to the last corner on M, seeing how the shops have all changed down in Georgetown's business district, always changing, and at a faster turnover, it seems. The large space inhabited by The North Face has been recently vacated, leaving racks and hangers still attached to walls. And I've always felt like an alien visiting here anyway.
And on the second day, I don't sleep well with construction noise, the beeping of the Bobcat bucket loader digging away at the hillside behind the new concrete foundation. I sleep in, get my rest, ten hours, and then I wake up feeling guilty. "Oh, this is my problem... I'm a big damn bum..." The day has sailed past while I had my uneasy sleep with all the noises of the day and the airplanes... Feeling behind, then you don't want to make any social life for yourself, because you have work to do...
Then the emotions, calling mom. How's she today? It's Harbor Fest in Oswego... Yesterday, all I did was look into my iPhone all day, checking Facebook, a hundred times.
But I can feel, after the rest, that it's easier for me to slip into holy man mode, hermit mode... Maybe the rest, maybe the shame for being unable to sleep, feeling tired because of the wine, then unable to get up out of bed... I'm feeling it easier to turn away from the rest of the crowd's karmic incarnation attitudes and remember a bit of my own, the people I naturally get along with, often musicians or other artists. Away from work, outgrowing hanging out.
I read from Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, Informal talks on Zen meditation and practice. The artist cannot hold himself to the ideal, the ideal of the art he might wish for, but rather simply practice... I make note. Maybe that's what got to Kerouac, his high literary ideals.
And then I hear from my old friend Ken Kilkenny, jazz guitarist, back from up where I'm from more or less, and a kindred soul, and feeling a similar karmic incarnation as he, my soul feels lighter and finally some ease, as I think one might deserve after the work week out amongst the worker bees with their focus just so, cyber security higher degrees, business and the like...
Yes, if one takes better grasp of his own karma, reflected in the shapes and character of his life, then he can rest better and better see the work he has to do, and understand the nature of earlier choices.
And what should I expect of the work week anyway, we aren't all cut from the same cookie cutter... and there will be, as always, people who get us, and people who don't, so go, young man, then, go and do your yoga, go moan for man, as old Jack Kerouac says, remembering to see things by your own light, and yoga and meditation and sitting that awkward way that requires a warm up, lotus zazen cross-legged Buddha, one of the whole points of yoga anyway, and remember that you are different, different from all those people more subject to all the controlling things of society's obligations...
Perhaps it's in our collective karma now, the things we do and have done to whales and captured animals put to the circus, and all the other things we've done contrary to the good karma of Moses who saved each species two by two... Now it's we ourselves who are the blasted ones, the hunted, the captive, the Gaul dragged in front of the Romans... And one who directly faces the shit of collective karma, suffering for all, he's the one who can counteract it in some small but hopeful meaningful way...
Can one even find his own karma in all this mess? Can the whale remember why she came into form as a whale, or the monkey, the monkey, the whole great interconnected web of karmic life in all its creatures and hungry sentient beings? Can the barman remember that God made him just so by a template, by the art form that God practices, toying with a little Jesus joke as far as serving wine and bread, a minor poet on the side... That would take some peace and quiet, one should think.. to remember one is simply not just a bum wino in some alien construing wrought in the image in the eyes of people who fancy themselves in more control of life...
Wist ye not, don't you know who you are anymore... (Keeps you out of the sauce, less jangled nerved.)
So maybe that was it, why you made your little life choices, sort of going off on your own, basic karma reasons, that somehow you can sense... I went up to live on the hill above town, beyond Emily Dickinson's house, to find my own karma, my own individuality. It's a hard thing to do. The truth hurts sometimes, realizing that I am not like the others somehow...
Did I learn much about karma this year of doing yoga under the California Pines up on the bluff over the river? I began to do a good five minute head stand, plow, warrior, tree, and even finally a pretty strong lotus pose, feeling strong and anchored as I did so.
Jesus, and the Buddha too, travelled a lot, met a lot of people, in the course of finding out their karma, their truth, their individuality, the originality, the uniqueness, and in doing so, finding the Universal Truth, each expressing it in his own more or less divine way. To be exposed to so many, as I've been, behind that old bar of The Gaul, and the one before it, old original Austin Grill, seems to naturally highlight the differences between your own personality, your own individual truth and that of all the people who come to bars with common desires and common problems, wanting to relax and socialize, creatures that they are.
And I reflect. My choices... Perhaps some of us have that sense, while being youthful, of uncertainty of our own particular karma, or rather not being certain what that karma might truly be, other than we have to start out on a long path. What are the fates that await us? Where is our truth, in which direction does it lie? Is it in your karma, to have a life with the Princess? I would respect anyone for displaying a bit of caution, as I seem to have, without necessarily meaning to, and still regretting.
It begins to feel, in poses, karma is not of our own conscious making, our own conscious choice, but that of the deeper, the Universe, That Which Is... And when you realize that, you get stronger all of a sudden. You find it out on your own.
It's eighty five out, but under the high pines's shade it's quite comfortable. I lay down my gray yoga mat on the soft clean pine needled floor, picking up a few small branches lost in the storm. A woman in a black house dress with a baseball cap walks two Jack Russells. "They're well behaved, very calm," I call from my distance. "Yes, until they see a squirrel." I gesture with my hand, a squirrel climbing down the tree, as I saw a few days ago... A few needles stick to my feet, but no bother. I begin with a stretch backward, and then, sun salutations.
Doing a tree pose, I imagine my body as having grown out in rings around my core of charka alignment, and this, it turns out, helps me hold the pose, oddly enough, an invisible set of concentric rings just like trees have rings, and soon I'm standing solidly, first on the right leg then on the left, and reaching with my arms above. Inner phylum, outer bark, a lot in between. The trees talk to me, and having little else going on, I can understand them a little bit more than the preoccupied.
I didn't have a lot of other focuses going on, I guess you could say, and so, I suppose, I could put a greater percentage of my being into these explorations of what my truer personality, my truer karma might actually be, (as opposed to all that I had accepted upon myself good naturedly as a steady barman worker bee...)
No, I wasn't focussed on a lot of things, a lot of things one probably should be focused on, but then that didn't seem to be my thing, not holding a lot of truck within, so my karma played itself out, some sort of teacher persona occupying my personal space if I was honest with myself.
To a great extent I'd been fooling myself, seeing only a surface, and not the correctness, the reality of the depths, the surface being but a play of light on the whole. What takes, what doesn't take? You know better when you stop, when you stop and do enough yoga to bring you back to your own body, joyfully in your work at it, and then when you grow better at the lotus pose for accomplishing the meditations that are useful for perspective, when you admit to yourself that you are not just like the others, identical, and not for all of their agendas, having rather your own, just as you have your own soul, just as all people are individuals...
'Cause in the old days, I had a much harder time, easily led astray, involved with things that weren't for me...
It is a long path, a long road, while your karmic incarnation here in this life figures it out. There is a lot of stumbling, a lot of confusion, a lot of the foolish.
The night is spent up late, after the post dinner nap on the couch, reading the Bhagavad Gita.
This all has something to do with my father, his legacy...
Monday, July 22, 2019
On the first day of the heat wave, indexes in the triple digits, I take the early bus in. And the bar is torn apart.
Hugo tells me the boss had brought in an exterminator, having evidence of rats, traps for cockroaches too. And from several shelves, missing back up stock, like soda water, beer back ups, things the other bartenders are oblivious to.
There's not much on the book. "Manuel is on vacation," states Marie Reine matter of factly.
So I pull it all together. Mineral water, more Sancerre, i need soda water and tonic water back ups, I need citrus fruit, prepare the back and the sink bin used as ice bins for the back up opened white wines, the roses, the sparkling wines... I put the bus tub from under the sink, which has an inch of condensation water, stinking, through the washing machine, along with the cutting board, as someone put the bin for the dirty linens on top of it. There's a cockroach stuck under a wire conduit up on the mirror above the Campari, pastis, Chartreuse liquor shelf, and this is not easy to clean up...
The air conditioning unit portable by the window, come to find, the tube attachment, a queer thing to handle, easily detaching, is letting hot air pour in, and it takes a good eight minutes to get it set and reasonably making a seal again, after turning things around completely.
I'm already busy with walk-ins by the time the boss walks in. Ted, I want to talk to you... And he explains the things he found in his operations last night... Dirty plates fallen behind the milk crates... More stock and clutter makes it harder to keep things clean. Okay, boss. The Chinese woman, finding cocktails aren't on happy hour has hot water with lemon, he's having ice water. They are foodies. I spent a good ten minutes talking over the menu... "Table 50 wants you..." Yeah, dude... He goes over and takes the order I prepped them for, having already got their order for escargot. Yeah, I got it... Why is she waiving anyway, I was just over there...
Two other couples have come in, one at the bar, I get their drink order. The couple at table 57, walk ins, is pregnant, and I went through pains to explain that two of the cheeses on the plate are unpasteurized... as well as other menu notes, as she doesn't want to eat a full entree.. Another couple is sat, and a coworker with no emotion on her face, blank, comes up, doesn't see water glasses that need filling on the five top... gets a drink order. I told the specials she tells me, giving off an air of disapproval to this whole messy upstairs operation and maybe because it's eighty degrees...
Co-worker from downstairs seats the two guys at 60. She's efficient. I go over and talk wine with them, after I've got things more or less covered and under some control, the two who will go down at 7 after their drinks, two glasses of happy hour wine. I don't need a lecture right now. and I'm the only guy who attempts to clean things. Fine, you don't want me to stalk, I won't. I talk menu and wine the two gentleman, they're cool... The Chinese couple hands me a big old school camera to take their picture with their entrees, Cassoulet, scallops over ginger broccoli mousse.
The busboy furiously brings up the plates of food for the tables, whether or not I've had time to clear off the appetizer plates finished... The helper retreats to the air conditioned calm predictable situation of the main dining room... They must be full downstairs.
Another two top, seated way back in the wine room, followed by a four top also seated back in the room...
Bar couple has finished dinner, and she'll have another pinot blanc, and he'll take a Calvados. I have the Django gypsy swing station playing on Pandora, and the boss's wife comes up the stairs, and two more women take a seat at the table near the bar. The boss comes up and reminds me of the four top, yeah, I know. The heat is getting to me a bit, can't help snapping. He goes over to the table to take their wine order, and one of the ladies is rather attractive. Well, I'll get to be their wine shrink later on.
Couple at the bar suggests a music change. They've been to Paris. Hotel Costes. Does this music drive you crazy? Oh, yes it does, particularly when it's live, I tell them. So, having talk of the moonwalk fifty years ago, I switch over to Henry Mancini, which can be fun in a nostalgic cool mellow way. One song and then another, as I greet, somewhat wearily, the boss's wife, Cl. They had a late dinner up by the window with me a week ago... I get her some water. "I hate Glen Miller," she says, as a song by his orchestra plays away. "Put on Hotel Costes," the lady of the bar two says, as I turn around and sort of glare at Cl. Okay, I change the muzak. And continue to run around back to the room and up to the front. Dessert for 65. Clear the four top, not getting much help. Hugo comes up with silverware and goes back to the corner to sort them out. Could you get me an espresso for 42...
Cl. is looking at the bottle of Italian cabernet that ended up in front of her. As a gesture of peace, I call her name, but she looks away. I open the bottle and put a tall wine glass in front of her. After a little chat, they depart, presumably to the other restaurant up the street, as I'm still in the weeds anyway. Bosses, and entrepreneurs, by their karmic incarnations here in this world keep an aloof and sometimes bitchy attitude, which rubs me, as I am not of their type.
(Yes, at work, they all try their best to cow the poor wise holy man, and people will even throw you to the Roman soldiers, I find out a few days later after patiently waiting on two ladies the whole evening who have two bottles of the brut chardonnay cremant from Burgundy, who, seeing me fried at the end of the night and pouring out the tastes of different wines to placate the last couple having a late dinner with their Tinder date,, and the seductive woman from Istanbul who often pushes her tolerance, "we'd like a tasting of red, too," as if it's owed them, as if they'll be displeased in that customer way if they don't, for free, too, though, after I pour them some small sips, they say thank you, appreciatively enough, having won, and one of them reaches over and finishes several of her girlfriend's little sips. All the attitude I get, when I'm just a humble guy trying to keep the business up and drum up fresh interest through my little wine offerings... Humorless people sometimes, as if I'm giving away what belongs to them personally...)
The bar conversation, now that my friend Karin has joined, my two guy friends, careens around in different ways, and the lonely barman needs a taste of chilled red wine... the differing voices getting in their words...
The ideals of art are too much sometimes. There is no bridge between our own talents to the ideal, those seemingly attained by other artists, I find in my Zen readings of late. That will keep you in tune with the inner gyroscope compass... Do I have the time to spell all of my evening out, without a pot of coffee or a cigarette?
And so a barman is stuck, being a poor version of the monk, of a Jesus serving wine to sinners and all the personalities of the world, while writing along in his own poor way of some sort of perhaps spiritual journey. Better off with his thoughts and pursuits held privately enough as not to be embarrassing.
Hugo tells me the boss had brought in an exterminator, having evidence of rats, traps for cockroaches too. And from several shelves, missing back up stock, like soda water, beer back ups, things the other bartenders are oblivious to.
There's not much on the book. "Manuel is on vacation," states Marie Reine matter of factly.
So I pull it all together. Mineral water, more Sancerre, i need soda water and tonic water back ups, I need citrus fruit, prepare the back and the sink bin used as ice bins for the back up opened white wines, the roses, the sparkling wines... I put the bus tub from under the sink, which has an inch of condensation water, stinking, through the washing machine, along with the cutting board, as someone put the bin for the dirty linens on top of it. There's a cockroach stuck under a wire conduit up on the mirror above the Campari, pastis, Chartreuse liquor shelf, and this is not easy to clean up...
The air conditioning unit portable by the window, come to find, the tube attachment, a queer thing to handle, easily detaching, is letting hot air pour in, and it takes a good eight minutes to get it set and reasonably making a seal again, after turning things around completely.
I'm already busy with walk-ins by the time the boss walks in. Ted, I want to talk to you... And he explains the things he found in his operations last night... Dirty plates fallen behind the milk crates... More stock and clutter makes it harder to keep things clean. Okay, boss. The Chinese woman, finding cocktails aren't on happy hour has hot water with lemon, he's having ice water. They are foodies. I spent a good ten minutes talking over the menu... "Table 50 wants you..." Yeah, dude... He goes over and takes the order I prepped them for, having already got their order for escargot. Yeah, I got it... Why is she waiving anyway, I was just over there...
Two other couples have come in, one at the bar, I get their drink order. The couple at table 57, walk ins, is pregnant, and I went through pains to explain that two of the cheeses on the plate are unpasteurized... as well as other menu notes, as she doesn't want to eat a full entree.. Another couple is sat, and a coworker with no emotion on her face, blank, comes up, doesn't see water glasses that need filling on the five top... gets a drink order. I told the specials she tells me, giving off an air of disapproval to this whole messy upstairs operation and maybe because it's eighty degrees...
Co-worker from downstairs seats the two guys at 60. She's efficient. I go over and talk wine with them, after I've got things more or less covered and under some control, the two who will go down at 7 after their drinks, two glasses of happy hour wine. I don't need a lecture right now. and I'm the only guy who attempts to clean things. Fine, you don't want me to stalk, I won't. I talk menu and wine the two gentleman, they're cool... The Chinese couple hands me a big old school camera to take their picture with their entrees, Cassoulet, scallops over ginger broccoli mousse.
The busboy furiously brings up the plates of food for the tables, whether or not I've had time to clear off the appetizer plates finished... The helper retreats to the air conditioned calm predictable situation of the main dining room... They must be full downstairs.
Another two top, seated way back in the wine room, followed by a four top also seated back in the room...
Bar couple has finished dinner, and she'll have another pinot blanc, and he'll take a Calvados. I have the Django gypsy swing station playing on Pandora, and the boss's wife comes up the stairs, and two more women take a seat at the table near the bar. The boss comes up and reminds me of the four top, yeah, I know. The heat is getting to me a bit, can't help snapping. He goes over to the table to take their wine order, and one of the ladies is rather attractive. Well, I'll get to be their wine shrink later on.
Couple at the bar suggests a music change. They've been to Paris. Hotel Costes. Does this music drive you crazy? Oh, yes it does, particularly when it's live, I tell them. So, having talk of the moonwalk fifty years ago, I switch over to Henry Mancini, which can be fun in a nostalgic cool mellow way. One song and then another, as I greet, somewhat wearily, the boss's wife, Cl. They had a late dinner up by the window with me a week ago... I get her some water. "I hate Glen Miller," she says, as a song by his orchestra plays away. "Put on Hotel Costes," the lady of the bar two says, as I turn around and sort of glare at Cl. Okay, I change the muzak. And continue to run around back to the room and up to the front. Dessert for 65. Clear the four top, not getting much help. Hugo comes up with silverware and goes back to the corner to sort them out. Could you get me an espresso for 42...
Cl. is looking at the bottle of Italian cabernet that ended up in front of her. As a gesture of peace, I call her name, but she looks away. I open the bottle and put a tall wine glass in front of her. After a little chat, they depart, presumably to the other restaurant up the street, as I'm still in the weeds anyway. Bosses, and entrepreneurs, by their karmic incarnations here in this world keep an aloof and sometimes bitchy attitude, which rubs me, as I am not of their type.
(Yes, at work, they all try their best to cow the poor wise holy man, and people will even throw you to the Roman soldiers, I find out a few days later after patiently waiting on two ladies the whole evening who have two bottles of the brut chardonnay cremant from Burgundy, who, seeing me fried at the end of the night and pouring out the tastes of different wines to placate the last couple having a late dinner with their Tinder date,, and the seductive woman from Istanbul who often pushes her tolerance, "we'd like a tasting of red, too," as if it's owed them, as if they'll be displeased in that customer way if they don't, for free, too, though, after I pour them some small sips, they say thank you, appreciatively enough, having won, and one of them reaches over and finishes several of her girlfriend's little sips. All the attitude I get, when I'm just a humble guy trying to keep the business up and drum up fresh interest through my little wine offerings... Humorless people sometimes, as if I'm giving away what belongs to them personally...)
The bar conversation, now that my friend Karin has joined, my two guy friends, careens around in different ways, and the lonely barman needs a taste of chilled red wine... the differing voices getting in their words...
The ideals of art are too much sometimes. There is no bridge between our own talents to the ideal, those seemingly attained by other artists, I find in my Zen readings of late. That will keep you in tune with the inner gyroscope compass... Do I have the time to spell all of my evening out, without a pot of coffee or a cigarette?
And so a barman is stuck, being a poor version of the monk, of a Jesus serving wine to sinners and all the personalities of the world, while writing along in his own poor way of some sort of perhaps spiritual journey. Better off with his thoughts and pursuits held privately enough as not to be embarrassing.
Friday, July 19, 2019
"... But if you think that God created man, and that you are separate from God, you are liable to think you have the ability to create something separate, something not given by Him. For instance, we create airplanes and highways. And when we repeat, "I create, I create, I create," soon we forget who is actually the "I" which creates various things; we soon forget about God. This is the danger of human culture. Actually, to create with the "big I" is to give; we cannot create and own what we create for ourselves since everything is created by God. This point should not be forgotten. But because we do forget who is doing the creating and the reason for the creation, we become attached to the material or the exchange value. This has no value in comparison to the absolute value of something as God's creation. Even though something has no material or relative value to any "small I," it has absolute value in itself. Not to be attached to something is to be aware of its absolute value. Everything you do should be based on such an awareness, and not on material or self-centered ideas of value. Then whatever you do is true giving, is dana prajna paramita."
page 52
Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind
Shunryu Suzuki
Shambala
Boston & London
40th anniversary edition
"So the practice we stress thus cannot become too idealistic. If an artist becomes too idealistic, he will commit suicide, because between his ideal and his actual ability there is a great gap. Because there is no bridge long enough, he will begin to despair. That is the usual spiritual way. But our spiritual way is not so idealistic. In some sense we should be idealistic; at least we should be in interested in making bread which looks and tastes good! Actual practice is repeating over and over again until you find out how to become bread. There is no secret in our way. Just to practice zazen and put ourselves into the oven is our way."
page 41
see above
page 52
Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind
Shunryu Suzuki
Shambala
Boston & London
40th anniversary edition
"So the practice we stress thus cannot become too idealistic. If an artist becomes too idealistic, he will commit suicide, because between his ideal and his actual ability there is a great gap. Because there is no bridge long enough, he will begin to despair. That is the usual spiritual way. But our spiritual way is not so idealistic. In some sense we should be idealistic; at least we should be in interested in making bread which looks and tastes good! Actual practice is repeating over and over again until you find out how to become bread. There is no secret in our way. Just to practice zazen and put ourselves into the oven is our way."
page 41
see above
Thursday, July 18, 2019
After Saturday night, alone at the bar, Sunday night, a teeming loud Bastille Day celebration...
Very tired getting to work, the day after Bastille Day... Fortunately it's a different back-up band, guitar, vibraphone, behind our singing friend, and more of Burt Bacharach theme, and an old regular comes in right at 5:30 as I reach to fill the six water pitchers, two plastic, four stainless steel, shoveling in the ice from the ice bin, letting the tap run before I much acknowledge them, I'm stressed still, but it's good to see a regular, one who appreciates the unique vibe at this unique little wine bar French bistrot of value and quality... An attractive woman from a different country comes in, with her parents, who smile, and they've made a reservation, great, and soon I help her pick out a wine, happy hour cotes du rhone by the glass rather than the Vacqueyras, she likes the taste of the wine I pour her, and I also bring her a sip of Beaujolais, for friendly measure... They turn out to be from Turkey.
The end of the night getting a little fuzzy with the regulars hanging out with the musicians, an extra glass of wine poured after people have paid their checks, they're good customers, people who bring something...The singer hangs out with me as I eat my chicken curry, has a glass of the new pinot noir, gives me a ride home finally.
One more night to work. 9 AM call to mom, to reassure her that her friend is coming. Groceries, wine, cat food. I finally wake up at two in the afternoon, after dreaming, dreaming of a girl I should have better expressed my affection and more demonstrably, dreaming of taking a ride together, as if on a tour bus, going up North to see the river above Amherst, the land where my dad came from, I wake up feeling pretty stupid. One more night, wine tasting.
Work day number four. At this point it's all about eating and sleeping enough, to get through. My mind flashes with the experience of the people who might come in... as if in some form psychic anticipation...
I monkey with the drain of the tub, baking soda, vinegar, hot water... And it's time to get going, the old bus, after eating a couple of chicken sausages.
Finally, the end of the week comes, mom emotional over the phone, suddenly feeling the absence of her sons, after her lady helper's visit.
It's the first day off, and sometimes even being out in nature fails you. You can't put your finger on it. The yoga outside, that was good, the insect repellent worked well, but you realize you're not a part of the world, as if.
"My failings... my failures..." So says the mind after, all the agitations of a barman's toiling. The mind looks for further agitation, desires, memories of things past one would like to change, as if to recreate the same equilibrium had with people at you all night. What should I do now, the mind asks, agitated, seeking some kind of external calming... Facebook, Tinder... Wanting to go out, to meet the opposite sex...
Agitation is now so normal in the world, the individual participates, competes at it. Louder, faster. And far far away, the Buddha sits under his tree... Agitation leads you to look at Facebook over and over, looking for a replacement for all the talk in your head.
Hearing the shadows of agitated voices at the bar still ringing in my head... Relaxing is not easy, particularly when one is alone. But going out on the town is not really what one needs... It takes time, at least a day, and then hopefully nothing comes up...
Why it fell upon me to comprehend all this, I guess it was a natural state of affairs, a blossoming of an idea that had long simmered, a thought I had well earned over years of listening to people, being forced to listen to people, for all the observations large and small from observing people interact, some puffed up with booze, some merely enjoying temperate wine drinking...
Why go out? What's the point? You've got enough to do just where you are, socks to sort and put away...
Very tired getting to work, the day after Bastille Day... Fortunately it's a different back-up band, guitar, vibraphone, behind our singing friend, and more of Burt Bacharach theme, and an old regular comes in right at 5:30 as I reach to fill the six water pitchers, two plastic, four stainless steel, shoveling in the ice from the ice bin, letting the tap run before I much acknowledge them, I'm stressed still, but it's good to see a regular, one who appreciates the unique vibe at this unique little wine bar French bistrot of value and quality... An attractive woman from a different country comes in, with her parents, who smile, and they've made a reservation, great, and soon I help her pick out a wine, happy hour cotes du rhone by the glass rather than the Vacqueyras, she likes the taste of the wine I pour her, and I also bring her a sip of Beaujolais, for friendly measure... They turn out to be from Turkey.
The end of the night getting a little fuzzy with the regulars hanging out with the musicians, an extra glass of wine poured after people have paid their checks, they're good customers, people who bring something...The singer hangs out with me as I eat my chicken curry, has a glass of the new pinot noir, gives me a ride home finally.
One more night to work. 9 AM call to mom, to reassure her that her friend is coming. Groceries, wine, cat food. I finally wake up at two in the afternoon, after dreaming, dreaming of a girl I should have better expressed my affection and more demonstrably, dreaming of taking a ride together, as if on a tour bus, going up North to see the river above Amherst, the land where my dad came from, I wake up feeling pretty stupid. One more night, wine tasting.
Work day number four. At this point it's all about eating and sleeping enough, to get through. My mind flashes with the experience of the people who might come in... as if in some form psychic anticipation...
I monkey with the drain of the tub, baking soda, vinegar, hot water... And it's time to get going, the old bus, after eating a couple of chicken sausages.
Finally, the end of the week comes, mom emotional over the phone, suddenly feeling the absence of her sons, after her lady helper's visit.
It's the first day off, and sometimes even being out in nature fails you. You can't put your finger on it. The yoga outside, that was good, the insect repellent worked well, but you realize you're not a part of the world, as if.
"My failings... my failures..." So says the mind after, all the agitations of a barman's toiling. The mind looks for further agitation, desires, memories of things past one would like to change, as if to recreate the same equilibrium had with people at you all night. What should I do now, the mind asks, agitated, seeking some kind of external calming... Facebook, Tinder... Wanting to go out, to meet the opposite sex...
Agitation is now so normal in the world, the individual participates, competes at it. Louder, faster. And far far away, the Buddha sits under his tree... Agitation leads you to look at Facebook over and over, looking for a replacement for all the talk in your head.
Hearing the shadows of agitated voices at the bar still ringing in my head... Relaxing is not easy, particularly when one is alone. But going out on the town is not really what one needs... It takes time, at least a day, and then hopefully nothing comes up...
Why it fell upon me to comprehend all this, I guess it was a natural state of affairs, a blossoming of an idea that had long simmered, a thought I had well earned over years of listening to people, being forced to listen to people, for all the observations large and small from observing people interact, some puffed up with booze, some merely enjoying temperate wine drinking...
Why go out? What's the point? You've got enough to do just where you are, socks to sort and put away...
Monday, July 15, 2019
Ah, what am I doing anyway, here, waiting for work, Bastille Day, what the hell am I doing, with mom old...
I don't even want to write anymore. Pointless.
And indeed, Bastille Day was a fucker. Loud singers on Jazz Night, three regulars sitting at the bar, oh, I forgot it was Bastille Day, as I sweat and groan away, and my female co-workers staring me down, "no tastings," what do you think I am a fucking idiot, and "no specials," even though the chef wants to sell the halibut in addition to the soft shell crabs... Bar full at 6:15, walk-ins, again, oblivious to today is Bastille Day...
And it's a long slog, plates, plates, plates, plates plates plates, down on my knees scraping off the main food residue, stacking them in some order so I won't trip over them... Everything flying, people standing by the bar mouth, do you have a reservation, L. in the back room, plates of fresh food arriving from downstairs carried by the busboy, where does it all go, barely remembering my own orders, the placid couple at the bar on an early date, enjoying things, telling tales of travel, normal people on a normal date with a normal social life, and they like wine and food, perfectly polite if a little geeky, and I toil on with my ruined life, trying to pay the rent, etc., etc., etc., and this goes on for quite a while, and then finally, worn out, not able to start cleaning up quite yet, getting to chat a bit with the guy who lived in Toulouse for a time, a landscape architect with funny stories of being reduced to being a gardener trimming high rosemary bushes, the oils getting all over him, he ordered a Jurancon Sec, and it turns out he knows a buddy, a professor of landscape architecture, they both went through LSU together, and the three French females, who know the singer, one a teenager, they are sweet, even as late arrivals, and one breaks into little operatic trills way up high, and they sing The Marseilleuse, with perfect French toned harmony in a way I will never hear matched... The French, a truly polite race, a balm to my withered nerves... a gayety toward life I seem not to possess.
A restaurant owner, a Trump guy, business man, comes in and presses for a table, pushy, leaves, then comes back, hey Teddy how long for two spots at the bar, I shrug, an hour, I say, (leave me be), and they have to wait for the entree, maybe I didn't fire it soon enough, and I've got two bottles to open, and my coworker is short with me, directing, and I can't hear what she's saying, and me and her and busboy are doing our little dance behind the bar dodging each other and the open dishwasher with its rack out in the way by the bar's opening, in and out, plates arriving, plates clearing, people chatting... and he's standing in the bar mouth, yet again, telling me to cancel the veal scallopini if it hasn't been ordered yet... Up close, as he rests his hand on the dishwashing machine, he reminds me of someone, his hair close on his head, Mussolini, perhaps...
Back on the home front, anxiety, the tub is draining very slow all of a sudden, and the toilet tank stopper is not sealing well, so the water runs on, and this is a bother too. I finally lay out the yoga mat in the apartment, with enough room to do a little bit...
I get out to the market, the liquid plumber is only in the largest size, not cheap, so I get vinegar and baking soda to treat the tub's drain, and I take a walk underneath the trees, overlooking the river, and my soul at least feels a bit better and crows under the pines raise up into the tree branches and Kaw back and forth.
I don't even want to write anymore. Pointless.
And indeed, Bastille Day was a fucker. Loud singers on Jazz Night, three regulars sitting at the bar, oh, I forgot it was Bastille Day, as I sweat and groan away, and my female co-workers staring me down, "no tastings," what do you think I am a fucking idiot, and "no specials," even though the chef wants to sell the halibut in addition to the soft shell crabs... Bar full at 6:15, walk-ins, again, oblivious to today is Bastille Day...
And it's a long slog, plates, plates, plates, plates plates plates, down on my knees scraping off the main food residue, stacking them in some order so I won't trip over them... Everything flying, people standing by the bar mouth, do you have a reservation, L. in the back room, plates of fresh food arriving from downstairs carried by the busboy, where does it all go, barely remembering my own orders, the placid couple at the bar on an early date, enjoying things, telling tales of travel, normal people on a normal date with a normal social life, and they like wine and food, perfectly polite if a little geeky, and I toil on with my ruined life, trying to pay the rent, etc., etc., etc., and this goes on for quite a while, and then finally, worn out, not able to start cleaning up quite yet, getting to chat a bit with the guy who lived in Toulouse for a time, a landscape architect with funny stories of being reduced to being a gardener trimming high rosemary bushes, the oils getting all over him, he ordered a Jurancon Sec, and it turns out he knows a buddy, a professor of landscape architecture, they both went through LSU together, and the three French females, who know the singer, one a teenager, they are sweet, even as late arrivals, and one breaks into little operatic trills way up high, and they sing The Marseilleuse, with perfect French toned harmony in a way I will never hear matched... The French, a truly polite race, a balm to my withered nerves... a gayety toward life I seem not to possess.
A restaurant owner, a Trump guy, business man, comes in and presses for a table, pushy, leaves, then comes back, hey Teddy how long for two spots at the bar, I shrug, an hour, I say, (leave me be), and they have to wait for the entree, maybe I didn't fire it soon enough, and I've got two bottles to open, and my coworker is short with me, directing, and I can't hear what she's saying, and me and her and busboy are doing our little dance behind the bar dodging each other and the open dishwasher with its rack out in the way by the bar's opening, in and out, plates arriving, plates clearing, people chatting... and he's standing in the bar mouth, yet again, telling me to cancel the veal scallopini if it hasn't been ordered yet... Up close, as he rests his hand on the dishwashing machine, he reminds me of someone, his hair close on his head, Mussolini, perhaps...
Back on the home front, anxiety, the tub is draining very slow all of a sudden, and the toilet tank stopper is not sealing well, so the water runs on, and this is a bother too. I finally lay out the yoga mat in the apartment, with enough room to do a little bit...
I get out to the market, the liquid plumber is only in the largest size, not cheap, so I get vinegar and baking soda to treat the tub's drain, and I take a walk underneath the trees, overlooking the river, and my soul at least feels a bit better and crows under the pines raise up into the tree branches and Kaw back and forth.
Sunday, July 14, 2019
Okay, so I get out of a sleepy Saturday night, not much going on, the boss and wife having dinner in the corner by the window where the bands play as I wind down and clean up. I never like to clean up, put everything away, directly, because of the protocol, what you take down, who might still need something, etc.
I have enough energy to get to the Safeway. I'd like a good burger right about now. Meat. Onion. More meat. Goat cheese. Frozen spinach. Shopping while hungry...
Uber back, the apartment is hot. I turn the conditioners on, put the groceries away, check the web, a brief inquiry into the Tour de France, an interesting stage, looks like, Macon to St. Etienne...
But it's get back to the pine trees, that's what's important for me now. Health. Fresh air. Back to the grove of pines under which I do my little stretches and things...
The cicadas, they have set up their telegraph wires. Cht,cht, cht. Cht, cht, cht. Notes of three. Syncopated with response from fellow bugs in further trees, such that it's quite a phone call going on, the whole neighborhood a'gossiping. Every now and then a two note, breaking the line, to welcome in another, and then it's back to cht, cht, cht. Cht, cht, cht.
In a few foot steps, here underneath the tall pines, a deer puffs at me.
Canal Road is abandoned. I go walk along, completely empty, 'til a Police SUV comes through, fast, putting up dust.
When I get back to the bluff, the owl is up in the trees too. "Who locked, who locked, who locked the door," the owl, great, puffs with inner bagpipe, just as the frogs bassooned down in the canal reedy cattail muck, sounding as if they weigh fifty pounds, huge...
There's a deer louder, puffing more seriously, in the darkness, and I walk back to the apartment, having had my little break from urban and people...
I have enough energy to get to the Safeway. I'd like a good burger right about now. Meat. Onion. More meat. Goat cheese. Frozen spinach. Shopping while hungry...
Uber back, the apartment is hot. I turn the conditioners on, put the groceries away, check the web, a brief inquiry into the Tour de France, an interesting stage, looks like, Macon to St. Etienne...
But it's get back to the pine trees, that's what's important for me now. Health. Fresh air. Back to the grove of pines under which I do my little stretches and things...
The cicadas, they have set up their telegraph wires. Cht,cht, cht. Cht, cht, cht. Notes of three. Syncopated with response from fellow bugs in further trees, such that it's quite a phone call going on, the whole neighborhood a'gossiping. Every now and then a two note, breaking the line, to welcome in another, and then it's back to cht, cht, cht. Cht, cht, cht.
In a few foot steps, here underneath the tall pines, a deer puffs at me.
Canal Road is abandoned. I go walk along, completely empty, 'til a Police SUV comes through, fast, putting up dust.
When I get back to the bluff, the owl is up in the trees too. "Who locked, who locked, who locked the door," the owl, great, puffs with inner bagpipe, just as the frogs bassooned down in the canal reedy cattail muck, sounding as if they weigh fifty pounds, huge...
There's a deer louder, puffing more seriously, in the darkness, and I walk back to the apartment, having had my little break from urban and people...
Saturday, July 13, 2019
Well, I get bored just sitting home on the couch not so comfortably, reading about meditation in Pema Chodron, and I send Jeremy up at work a text, hey what's going on at Dying Gaul... He mentions who is at the bar, sounds quiet, an interesting German woman with a familiar visitor...
So, I get on the 9:50 D6 heading into town. The kitchen's closed by now, but maybe I'll do some grocery shopping. I get on and up the stairs finally, and then I see that this is only better than where I came from through my old friends who are here. I'm joining the conversation late, and don't feel much like being a part of it, nor my younger friend's stories about hanging out with girls.
My server friend A. comes up to the bar. Do we want to go out to Mari Vanna tonight... I demure. What, you don't like girls anymore? You're going grocery shopping? There will be lots of Ukrainian out tonight...
And then, the plan changes, as Jeremy gives me a ride. L2. I should have escaped then...
ESL, to meet M., and then M. now wants to go to Flash...
I end up out on the street, making my escape, and I am in the urban area now... Weed fumes... Tattooed African American DC people clogging the sidewalks having their night...
Cabdriver gets me home finally with my lamb gyro, telling me tales of black men in cabs... Guns pulled. Punches. Not paying him for the ride out to SouthWest DC, Benning Road. Best country in the world, and their attitude...
But I've been led around by the nose, again. Unhappy in the onslaught assault to the senses that DJs work. What am I doing here... I intended to walk home from Georgetown along Canal... Just by my lonesome. Would have saved me money...
I had meditated after some excellent yoga under my pine trees, reflecting in meditation on an array of emotions and feelings, sensing them in a way to describe them physically, the weight upon my brow for instance, on my shoulders, my face being pulled down by some form of sadness.... I reflect on Kerouac in The Dharma Bums, when he's down visiting his sister in Rocky Mt., North Carolina... St. Jack of the Dogs.
Act like a saint and maybe you'll be one. I got about as good a chance as anyone being one, whatever that means...
I meditate. I feel vaguely terrorized by some form of professional circumstances, but that's all part of meditating, feeling ultimately what all sentient beings are feeling now, suffering, change, anxiety... This being the lesson that turns us around so that, less selfishly minded, we turn to help our fellow beings...
There is lovely oxygen needled air around me, falling down gently on everything in this little part of the world, the saintliness of trees, a squirrel heading easily down the pine, in no rush, nonchalant, at peace as everything else is at peace and as butterflies coast with remarkable speed and span, chasing each other through the high branches above me and my gray yoga mat.
And everything about the urban area, as I reflect, as I sense, there with the bass thumping and the lights flashing and the old cocaine real estate guy thinner and more haggard over there by the bar alone, a myriad of miseries, the contrast between the health of yoga outdoors and meditation, and all this urban life, trapped down here in streets, looking for aggression and pleasures and escape...
Why am I so easily led... Why was I not able to stand up for myself, no, I'm not in the mood, I just want to grab a hamburger and walk home... But one thing after another, the Uber is here, then the plan changes...
I write, in the usual state of some form of sadness, and I begin to wonder... The story is what we are attached to. If we can ease off with the story, perhaps we could find some form of a new way to use energy
I go out and do my yoga again, and again, nature is there for me..
Wine doesn't seem so bad, compared to all flashing light pounding loud music club stuff. Wine can abide in the hermitage...
So, I get on the 9:50 D6 heading into town. The kitchen's closed by now, but maybe I'll do some grocery shopping. I get on and up the stairs finally, and then I see that this is only better than where I came from through my old friends who are here. I'm joining the conversation late, and don't feel much like being a part of it, nor my younger friend's stories about hanging out with girls.
My server friend A. comes up to the bar. Do we want to go out to Mari Vanna tonight... I demure. What, you don't like girls anymore? You're going grocery shopping? There will be lots of Ukrainian out tonight...
And then, the plan changes, as Jeremy gives me a ride. L2. I should have escaped then...
ESL, to meet M., and then M. now wants to go to Flash...
I end up out on the street, making my escape, and I am in the urban area now... Weed fumes... Tattooed African American DC people clogging the sidewalks having their night...
Cabdriver gets me home finally with my lamb gyro, telling me tales of black men in cabs... Guns pulled. Punches. Not paying him for the ride out to SouthWest DC, Benning Road. Best country in the world, and their attitude...
But I've been led around by the nose, again. Unhappy in the onslaught assault to the senses that DJs work. What am I doing here... I intended to walk home from Georgetown along Canal... Just by my lonesome. Would have saved me money...
I had meditated after some excellent yoga under my pine trees, reflecting in meditation on an array of emotions and feelings, sensing them in a way to describe them physically, the weight upon my brow for instance, on my shoulders, my face being pulled down by some form of sadness.... I reflect on Kerouac in The Dharma Bums, when he's down visiting his sister in Rocky Mt., North Carolina... St. Jack of the Dogs.
Act like a saint and maybe you'll be one. I got about as good a chance as anyone being one, whatever that means...
I meditate. I feel vaguely terrorized by some form of professional circumstances, but that's all part of meditating, feeling ultimately what all sentient beings are feeling now, suffering, change, anxiety... This being the lesson that turns us around so that, less selfishly minded, we turn to help our fellow beings...
There is lovely oxygen needled air around me, falling down gently on everything in this little part of the world, the saintliness of trees, a squirrel heading easily down the pine, in no rush, nonchalant, at peace as everything else is at peace and as butterflies coast with remarkable speed and span, chasing each other through the high branches above me and my gray yoga mat.
And everything about the urban area, as I reflect, as I sense, there with the bass thumping and the lights flashing and the old cocaine real estate guy thinner and more haggard over there by the bar alone, a myriad of miseries, the contrast between the health of yoga outdoors and meditation, and all this urban life, trapped down here in streets, looking for aggression and pleasures and escape...
Why am I so easily led... Why was I not able to stand up for myself, no, I'm not in the mood, I just want to grab a hamburger and walk home... But one thing after another, the Uber is here, then the plan changes...
I write, in the usual state of some form of sadness, and I begin to wonder... The story is what we are attached to. If we can ease off with the story, perhaps we could find some form of a new way to use energy
I go out and do my yoga again, and again, nature is there for me..
Wine doesn't seem so bad, compared to all flashing light pounding loud music club stuff. Wine can abide in the hermitage...
Friday, July 12, 2019
Ah, one of those days... As if good yoga and meditation had a backlash... but, you turn the pain and lonesome feelings into life energy.
The days you seem to have time to write are sometimes the harder ones...
It's human nature, that you grow tired of the same old story line. You have to turn things around, look at them in a different way, explore, through meditation, your response, your experience of what's going on in your head, thus finding the means to turn the negative into something positive...
Indeed, meditation can be unsettling, irritating, the things that come through your head. "Try to visualize how the pained perceptions feel, do they feel cold, dark, heavy..." Yes, the feelings there in your mind are indeed quite uncomfortable and unsettling. But patience... Work through them, with them.
And then you come out the other side, whether or not this too will last so solidly, but it is good in the sense that through doing meditation on your blues, the usual triggers, you find yourself loosening away from that old identifier, in my case, say, The Princess, should have would have could, or, my job, say... You find a new energy, even as it was very tiring and lonely to go through. You come out a new person, more Buddhist...
For a few days I could not write. Or if I tried, I was not satisfied... Am I done as a writer? Then, if so, what will my claim on life's work be.
But you don't have to renounce the work. You're just changing the way you're looking at things...
What was an issue for you, becomes the light that frees you from attachment, unnecessary attachment to a created identity that perhaps you've outgrown, in doing so, becoming a better person. The very thing that was perceived as a cause of sorrow and regret, of general unhappiness, is transformed into the thing that heals you. You breathe freely again.
Perhaps then what you observe about yourself might not be so pretty. Perhaps you'll find within yourself that which we locate through the term of sin. Covetousness, sloth, envy... avoidance... And this, I suppose, as it is treated in books on Buddhist philosophy, as in Pema Chodron's Taking the Leap, is all forgivable, and normal. (I found the book hard to take, at first, convoluted.) The point is to liberate yourself and all your innate love, kindness and intelligence, to find new energy, and to keep at that new energy.
The things that hurt turn out to be a gift.
I wasn't all bad, the bad person, I might have thought I was, in so hiding from myself, I suppose... a survivor of the terms and put-downs that nice people come across in this modern world...
I found feelings of shame, a lot of shame, as I meditated upon it all. Shame for being a writer, shame for being overly sensitive and thin-skinned, bound to flights of imagination in impractical ways. And the shame I was feeling, I suppose, it made the escapism into something bigger...
The days you seem to have time to write are sometimes the harder ones...
It's human nature, that you grow tired of the same old story line. You have to turn things around, look at them in a different way, explore, through meditation, your response, your experience of what's going on in your head, thus finding the means to turn the negative into something positive...
Indeed, meditation can be unsettling, irritating, the things that come through your head. "Try to visualize how the pained perceptions feel, do they feel cold, dark, heavy..." Yes, the feelings there in your mind are indeed quite uncomfortable and unsettling. But patience... Work through them, with them.
And then you come out the other side, whether or not this too will last so solidly, but it is good in the sense that through doing meditation on your blues, the usual triggers, you find yourself loosening away from that old identifier, in my case, say, The Princess, should have would have could, or, my job, say... You find a new energy, even as it was very tiring and lonely to go through. You come out a new person, more Buddhist...
For a few days I could not write. Or if I tried, I was not satisfied... Am I done as a writer? Then, if so, what will my claim on life's work be.
But you don't have to renounce the work. You're just changing the way you're looking at things...
What was an issue for you, becomes the light that frees you from attachment, unnecessary attachment to a created identity that perhaps you've outgrown, in doing so, becoming a better person. The very thing that was perceived as a cause of sorrow and regret, of general unhappiness, is transformed into the thing that heals you. You breathe freely again.
Perhaps then what you observe about yourself might not be so pretty. Perhaps you'll find within yourself that which we locate through the term of sin. Covetousness, sloth, envy... avoidance... And this, I suppose, as it is treated in books on Buddhist philosophy, as in Pema Chodron's Taking the Leap, is all forgivable, and normal. (I found the book hard to take, at first, convoluted.) The point is to liberate yourself and all your innate love, kindness and intelligence, to find new energy, and to keep at that new energy.
The things that hurt turn out to be a gift.
I wasn't all bad, the bad person, I might have thought I was, in so hiding from myself, I suppose... a survivor of the terms and put-downs that nice people come across in this modern world...
I found feelings of shame, a lot of shame, as I meditated upon it all. Shame for being a writer, shame for being overly sensitive and thin-skinned, bound to flights of imagination in impractical ways. And the shame I was feeling, I suppose, it made the escapism into something bigger...
Wednesday, July 10, 2019
And now I have arrived,
at that precarious hour of the night and life,
when I see my life somehow superimposed, or is it the other way around,
with old Jack Kerouac. Except that he's done far more work, collected letters, intellectual discussions, whereas I was just in my own world, sort of, a private person with a barman's life, toiling away with hand and fist, legs, back, my old now face, my having shot all my chances at a decent life, family, wife, income, retirement, all that sort of thing.
But in such an hour, here, 2:30 AM, The Dharma Bums being the last of texts I've really pondered to absorb, along with the usual Buddhist help, Pema Chodron, Thich Nhat Hahn and the like, I am, I am more, I have gone further away, it seems, from the conventions, in order to find the bravest work an artist can find, a real normal, a real normal that works, that includes weird stuff, going out at night and walking under pines, the ground soft and welcoming, a blanket, calling you, airs you cannot find in any man made domicile...
I am more drawn to, rather than all the so-called fixes of life, the should-do list, the practical responsible list, (believe me, I'm responsible enough to show up at a job I've always had a very hard depressing time with, and in the end, at least on some days, made it work, making it more than it was, adding the Amherst College to the task, I've made it a wonderful place for all of us, even as I grit my teeth with worries of ultimate homelessness, the pointlessness... I've brought things you cannot qualify or quantify to work, made some magic out of it, when the mellowness of memory in the lack of self irritation comes around, as it does, like the visit of a bird...) I am more, still, even with a greater pull, drawn to the Kerouac hours, drawn to the out on the road, the hike, the trees, the remedy of nature against the craziness that our mixed humanity suffers insult by enduring... as much as the riches of driving by Coney Island might be...
And you cannot inhabit the whole range or brilliance of a Kerouac or a Larkin, or any of the many who have fallen into this poetic sweet spot, here in mid-life crisis, having harrowingly survived the Sirens Singing and what not else, the dark stuff too, mistakes made, without being there yourself, even if you might feel presumptuous about being so.
I write, because you have to write. It's natural. It's beautiful. It's a thing you have to do. It's a thing that you can do with very little what do you call it, economic investment, start up costs, I guess you'd say, where everything else does, even a simple roadside taco stand let alone a wine bar, in this day and age...
The reward. If you sit long enough, with your own inner Queequeg, or whoever he is, the strange inner Polynesian, whoever this strange person is, the only one to have a conversation with, now, here, in life, with you, at this hour, everyone else having tucked in to some safe life away from such strange flux, you will see the miracles of life, my point here.
This is what you see, late at night, even with no one else to enjoy it with,
at that precarious hour of the night and life,
when I see my life somehow superimposed, or is it the other way around,
with old Jack Kerouac. Except that he's done far more work, collected letters, intellectual discussions, whereas I was just in my own world, sort of, a private person with a barman's life, toiling away with hand and fist, legs, back, my old now face, my having shot all my chances at a decent life, family, wife, income, retirement, all that sort of thing.
But in such an hour, here, 2:30 AM, The Dharma Bums being the last of texts I've really pondered to absorb, along with the usual Buddhist help, Pema Chodron, Thich Nhat Hahn and the like, I am, I am more, I have gone further away, it seems, from the conventions, in order to find the bravest work an artist can find, a real normal, a real normal that works, that includes weird stuff, going out at night and walking under pines, the ground soft and welcoming, a blanket, calling you, airs you cannot find in any man made domicile...
I am more drawn to, rather than all the so-called fixes of life, the should-do list, the practical responsible list, (believe me, I'm responsible enough to show up at a job I've always had a very hard depressing time with, and in the end, at least on some days, made it work, making it more than it was, adding the Amherst College to the task, I've made it a wonderful place for all of us, even as I grit my teeth with worries of ultimate homelessness, the pointlessness... I've brought things you cannot qualify or quantify to work, made some magic out of it, when the mellowness of memory in the lack of self irritation comes around, as it does, like the visit of a bird...) I am more, still, even with a greater pull, drawn to the Kerouac hours, drawn to the out on the road, the hike, the trees, the remedy of nature against the craziness that our mixed humanity suffers insult by enduring... as much as the riches of driving by Coney Island might be...
And you cannot inhabit the whole range or brilliance of a Kerouac or a Larkin, or any of the many who have fallen into this poetic sweet spot, here in mid-life crisis, having harrowingly survived the Sirens Singing and what not else, the dark stuff too, mistakes made, without being there yourself, even if you might feel presumptuous about being so.
I write, because you have to write. It's natural. It's beautiful. It's a thing you have to do. It's a thing that you can do with very little what do you call it, economic investment, start up costs, I guess you'd say, where everything else does, even a simple roadside taco stand let alone a wine bar, in this day and age...
The reward. If you sit long enough, with your own inner Queequeg, or whoever he is, the strange inner Polynesian, whoever this strange person is, the only one to have a conversation with, now, here, in life, with you, at this hour, everyone else having tucked in to some safe life away from such strange flux, you will see the miracles of life, my point here.
This is what you see, late at night, even with no one else to enjoy it with,
Up at two, at the end of the work week, feeling foggy. Walked home from work, singing On a Rainy Night in Soho to a mockingbird up in a tree going through his repertoire, and he keeps singing, as I gently persist with Shane MacGowan's lyric....Closer to home hearing an owl up in a tree above the schoolyard, swigging from a bottle of wine the whole 1 AM way for my troubles and no bus.. All I had for dinner was salmon tartar appetizer, followed by leftover family meal rice and potato with the curry chicken gravy cold now and unappetizing. Four nights straight, Saturday, after driving back, through Tuesday Wine Tasting night, closing each night, of course, a server helping out with Monday jazz... Excellent hospitality provided, and I come home alone and live alone. Back from the visit with mom.
Thoughts on Kerouac, amorphous, deeper level, as I close down the bar at the end of the night, exploration of YouTube's offerings on the man, his own story, his times. His truth. First thought, best thought. Enough of Hemingway's rules, thoughtful and considerate as they may have been...
Is there such a thing as spiritual gift, spiritual talent.. I wonder, about old Kerouac...
Each of us has to figure it out by ourselves, truly, how to write, what to write, the way to write. I admire much more those who nakedly grasp with that aspect of writing in their works... More so than the ones who imagine their way to a narrative arch with characters neat and story lined.
I prefer the writers who do not write so well, but by instinct and happenstance, telling their own stories rather than made-up ones...
You're trying to express what cannot be expressed, at least in an easy fashion. You are seeing the difference between your true self and the nomenclature placed upon the individual by all things like city life, jobs, socioeconomic positions, all those perceptions and standards, all of which are inadequate and poorly fitting. Who are you? That's what the artist is up to, and it's never easy, a work in foggy circumstances.
The rewards are never very good. People and readers and minds have to return to their jobs, their making a livings, their set relationships. Where the writer is an outsider, more or less, in his strength something like a forest dweller, making no assumptions, not buying the terms he has himself been named by. The writer is barely employable.
And even the strength of Kerouac is worn down to his sad later states, the scotch drinking alcoholic slowly killing himself with booze. He cannot win the battle against the power of the societal control over terms, the put-downs, the labelling, "Beatnik..."
And after four nights at work, I wake up hollow too, feeling in a jam, but having had my glimpse of open country and night sky, before returning to the parts of the city my psyche can endure...
Even as a Buddhist, in a modern society, defined from the top down by Empire rather more than, say, democratic ideals and the protection of freedoms abstract, you get the Christian situation, the persecution, the things of Caesar weighing down upon you, the individual, the fisherman capable of being a full human being, a spiritual being... The truer a mind open to Christian spirituality or any other spirituality, the stronger your tendency will be to walk on your own road, freeing yourself from all the terms a government or a society might address the individual you by. Which is, potentially, a set-up for things which potentially are not so happy and of the normal "happy life."
But gaze into any other human being, any other animal, any other form of sentient life, and you want to know, and be known, as an individual, to really "get" the other, as a saint would, being able to talk beyond language norms.
But face it, try talking to tree, people will take you as weird, an idiot, an outcast.
Life becomes as the yoga pose. Hospitality, the serving of wine and bread and dinner, is a yoga pose, for the chakras, for the mind, for the words which come out of a man. And in the poses, these meditations, these acts and motions which seem simple and humble purpose and good health, we find what is real about ourselves. And the stronger you become, the more familiar, in other words, knowing them inside and out with the body and sentient mind, which is all you have, truly, the more you're able to pull away from society's heavy terms and actions and oppressions. You find yourself leaning toward the quiet saint, Jerome, Francis... Quiet reflections going on in a simple life.
Writers have to remember that they are mortal, that they cannot write perfectly, getting the whole narrative down...
I take to the patio, laying my yoga mat down on the flat stones. There strikes me in yoga poses something related to the Christian imagination, the Christian view of the body, the fresco panels of halo, Vitruvian man...
Thoughts on Kerouac, amorphous, deeper level, as I close down the bar at the end of the night, exploration of YouTube's offerings on the man, his own story, his times. His truth. First thought, best thought. Enough of Hemingway's rules, thoughtful and considerate as they may have been...
Is there such a thing as spiritual gift, spiritual talent.. I wonder, about old Kerouac...
Each of us has to figure it out by ourselves, truly, how to write, what to write, the way to write. I admire much more those who nakedly grasp with that aspect of writing in their works... More so than the ones who imagine their way to a narrative arch with characters neat and story lined.
I prefer the writers who do not write so well, but by instinct and happenstance, telling their own stories rather than made-up ones...
You're trying to express what cannot be expressed, at least in an easy fashion. You are seeing the difference between your true self and the nomenclature placed upon the individual by all things like city life, jobs, socioeconomic positions, all those perceptions and standards, all of which are inadequate and poorly fitting. Who are you? That's what the artist is up to, and it's never easy, a work in foggy circumstances.
The rewards are never very good. People and readers and minds have to return to their jobs, their making a livings, their set relationships. Where the writer is an outsider, more or less, in his strength something like a forest dweller, making no assumptions, not buying the terms he has himself been named by. The writer is barely employable.
And even the strength of Kerouac is worn down to his sad later states, the scotch drinking alcoholic slowly killing himself with booze. He cannot win the battle against the power of the societal control over terms, the put-downs, the labelling, "Beatnik..."
And after four nights at work, I wake up hollow too, feeling in a jam, but having had my glimpse of open country and night sky, before returning to the parts of the city my psyche can endure...
Even as a Buddhist, in a modern society, defined from the top down by Empire rather more than, say, democratic ideals and the protection of freedoms abstract, you get the Christian situation, the persecution, the things of Caesar weighing down upon you, the individual, the fisherman capable of being a full human being, a spiritual being... The truer a mind open to Christian spirituality or any other spirituality, the stronger your tendency will be to walk on your own road, freeing yourself from all the terms a government or a society might address the individual you by. Which is, potentially, a set-up for things which potentially are not so happy and of the normal "happy life."
But gaze into any other human being, any other animal, any other form of sentient life, and you want to know, and be known, as an individual, to really "get" the other, as a saint would, being able to talk beyond language norms.
But face it, try talking to tree, people will take you as weird, an idiot, an outcast.
Life becomes as the yoga pose. Hospitality, the serving of wine and bread and dinner, is a yoga pose, for the chakras, for the mind, for the words which come out of a man. And in the poses, these meditations, these acts and motions which seem simple and humble purpose and good health, we find what is real about ourselves. And the stronger you become, the more familiar, in other words, knowing them inside and out with the body and sentient mind, which is all you have, truly, the more you're able to pull away from society's heavy terms and actions and oppressions. You find yourself leaning toward the quiet saint, Jerome, Francis... Quiet reflections going on in a simple life.
Writers have to remember that they are mortal, that they cannot write perfectly, getting the whole narrative down...
I take to the patio, laying my yoga mat down on the flat stones. There strikes me in yoga poses something related to the Christian imagination, the Christian view of the body, the fresco panels of halo, Vitruvian man...
Tuesday, July 9, 2019
Back to Fitzgerald, "show me a hero and I'll show you a tragedy." Which is one way to put it.
"First thought, best thought," Kerouac, contrary to what you'll get at in a so-called creative writing workshop...
Back, off the road, the thunderstorms had held off, and sadness in my heart I rolled in on the last leg, east into DC on Canal Road, then the little left just past Fletcher's Cove up to MacArthur, dropping my bags off at the new unsettled apartment, getting through to mom, both of us heavy from parting after a week together, then taking the car back in the bright heat, feeling the narrowness of DC streets, the tightness, up Wisconsin, Observatory Circle, 34th, down into the woods under Woodlawn Terrace's mansions, then into the hotel parking garage on Calvert, then walking my old walk through the Dumbarton woods up to work, arriving at 4:40..
A man with barely a job, hardly a career, and a night of being a clown, entertaining the diners from bar to back room, a ten-top back in the wine room I'll get to deal with on my own... Keeps me busy enough, no late night hi-jinx chaos...
An Uber home finally, my driver from Kabul, also with an elderly mother. He took his family to see the fireworks from the Old Town side, obscured by smoke.
Then Sunday night, Mom on the edge of tears as we speak over the phone, as she deserves to be. They'll be paving tomorrow in her apartment townhouse complex. Is the car in the right place? Where are her car keys... "I'll just kill myself." She hangs up. I call her back. And soothe things over, even if I'm feeling like hell, the spot I'm in, feeling pointless about work.
Aware already of one birthday gathering back in the dreaded Wine Room, there will be another, and both of these parties will be familiar to me, and I'll have to put on the personal rube/clown act again, personable enough, as happens when you know people and know what to interject and when to just leave it and keep pouring the wine meticulously...
I'm putting in the order for the six top, the tall bearded lawyer regular guy who comes with friendly wife, they like Pinot Blanc, when a many human forms comes up the stairs. I'm looking into the glowing screen, putting in escargot for seats one, three, four, mushroom fricassee for birthday man at six, onion tart for five, then highlighting these as the appetizer course, I'm about to put in the entrees, but turn to see who it is, probably a regular. Ah-hah, it is, cool.
It's my lawyer friend. A connection to Amherst established one night. I pulled out a copy of my book from the liquor closet another night. Well, if you're familiar with the place, it's the main setting of my great Hamlet meets Catcher in the Rye famous novel... Handed it to him.
"I have an announcement to make," he says, as I prepare his Tito's martini.
Earlier, V., whose parents came to New York from Russia, pipes up. There was a study once where they had a robots feed baby chicks. The most anthropomorphized of the robots, dressed-up, had the greatest success keeping the chicks alive. The well-off couple, shrewd, who won't come in unless checking to make sure that I'm there because everyone else just turns away and speaks Spanish, not giving a shit, are on their way out, paying their check, except I've fucked up the last payment tender and have to re-ring their check in... The other birthday party has arrived... Arghh. "I told 64 the specials," my coworker tells me, in the blur. A drink order would have been helpful. Pour them some bubbly, just to keep them happy...
"I finished your book."
"Oh," I say. "Well, you've been on a roll this year, things to announce, grandson, upcoming wedding..."
"I really liked your book, I really did. The writing... the whole thing."
Later, he asks me, "but I have a question." He doesn't get how the whole harsh Princess's "I'll go the Dean's office and charge you with sexual harassment if you say one more word to me..." came about.
I shrug. Yeah, I don't either. I explain a bit of the back ground, how, when I'm visiting my mom, all these scenes come back to me, damn, why didn't I do that at the football game...
Women are... mercurial, sometimes, he says. But... her actions were hard to get... I liked the boy character more than she...
My legs are tired after all the running back and forth that night, coming around the slate top bar to pour wine and entertain familiar faces way back in the Wine Room's narrows. True, I had help from Mr. Busboy who rolls through like a freight train, assembling great piles of plates cleared from the table straight to run right back downstairs and to the kitchen. Again, with the special relationship between waiter barman and regular customers. The six top, after we deliver the special chocolate tart, when I sort of think they might be done with the wine, the wife comes up to the bar, and oh yes, how could I forget, they like dessert wine. Okay, fine. I let her taste the Sauterne, and I let her taste the Jurancon... The Sauterne, she says, okay, I'll open a fresh bottle and pour out six glasses... They start talking about what they're getting, the notes, rutabaga, the older man says, and the wife requests my professional wine nose opinion about the wine... Oh, mandarin orange peel... candied lemon drop style fruit... After years, you can pretty much make stuff up and it's true. But as the good wine professor, I feel obliged to pour these very regular and good customers each a sip of the Jurancon. Here, to cut to the chase, we have orchard, as opposed to the confiture of the Sauternes... I pull a riff on the older man's rutabaga note to Carl Sandberg's Rutabaga Tales, and how he also was a great biographer of Lincoln, as if this was all meant to coincide with the birthday of the tall bearded lawyer sitting at position six, closest to the bar, his seat... Several chuckle at my fool connections, puckish puns sort of...
Then there will be the further entertainment of the table further back... The retired Amherst professor, a politically conservative political science expert mind... The three are happy after their beefeaters, sancerre, gazpacho, three glasses of champagne to toast... A. comes up from downstairs to give them the special chocolate tart with Happy Birthday scribed in chocolate powder dust. Oh me oh my...
Finally I sit down, after a Beaujolais on the rocks, to eat my dinner, poulet fermier au curry, kept warm in the oven behind the bar in the narrow back, where now there is some rodent squeal going on... I taste a few wines with it. The Sancerre seems to work best as far as the whites, bypassing the Pinot Blanc for no good reason. The Chinon doesn't seem to work so well, as far the reds... The Rhone brings out the pepper, sure, but I prefer the Beaujolais...
Music night, Ken the guitar player of the most popular act here comes to chat with the young guitar player whose giving us some great classical style all night. It ends up being a late night. And today, I wake up sad again. The regulars M and E brought by their well-bred son who's back from Kenya for a quick visit, and again, I was commanded to offer some form of a wine tasting to entertain and keep up the old lines of chat that bind us together all these years, many, from how they wrote their wedding vows under my care, back when you could smoke cigarettes on summer nights, and I tell them tales of the Old Dying Gaul and the chefs who come when Bruno is in town, doing my little impersonation of them. One more taste, M commands, at the end, something I will share with him... Okay, what the hell... They too know I've written a book. "How's your next book coming along," Elizabeth asks me.
The guitar player, I bring mine out from the office, here, the house guitar...so they jam together in the corner after 9:30 as old Gene with his ragged Popeye gravel voice goes on at the bar... He'll go to the hospital for surgery on the spots on his old head... His voice...
There was something on Facebook about how the best restaurant experiences come from restaurants who love their customers, and I explain to this last table, as A. is in her denim short street clothes, bye bye, how, looking out the back window that there is my own personal Via Dolorosa, as I come to work, dragging my cross, then in through the basement, and up the stairs, to give love to my customers when it is time...
But I wish, I wish I just had had a normal job, all these years, to ensure and protect, provide myself and my old mom with material comfort rather than sadness... "I am a big loser," I think to myself, just a thought, and I go for a walk, to get out of the apartment to walk under the pines I do yoga with, I say with because they help me, my matt laid out on the soft pine needle earth.
I am forgetting the Finnish family who came in Monday Jazz Night, just as the door opened, as we were still getting organized and feeling weary. The guitarist comes in, and later on he lets me play his, and I strum a bit, and the Finns tell me I was pretty good, this after I got them their drinks, a Sancerre, a Pigoudet Rose, two sodas for the boys. I like Finns. I get to chatting with them.
I am forgetting my impressions being back in the cityscape, how the roads make me feel cramped and nervous. Driving in on 270 to the Beltway, I am reminded how, subtly, we are at war in this age. The Nazism of real estate... men driving their BMW sedans grimly behind their sunglasses, not striking me as messengers of any peace. I walk with my yoga matt in my WETA bag, slowly, stopping by the little Korean market here in the Palisades for tuna salad and Boars Head sliced roast beef.
It is the Buddhist who most needs Buddhism, it occurs to me, as I shower, and get ready for work, the sticky bugginess of outdoor yoga washed free from my body.
Peter, his Christian name, the lawyer who's read my book, here and there, on airplanes back and forth, who has finished it, will be out of town for a month or so. Before he leaves, he tells me, keep writing.
Thank you.
Front of the House.
"First thought, best thought," Kerouac, contrary to what you'll get at in a so-called creative writing workshop...
Back, off the road, the thunderstorms had held off, and sadness in my heart I rolled in on the last leg, east into DC on Canal Road, then the little left just past Fletcher's Cove up to MacArthur, dropping my bags off at the new unsettled apartment, getting through to mom, both of us heavy from parting after a week together, then taking the car back in the bright heat, feeling the narrowness of DC streets, the tightness, up Wisconsin, Observatory Circle, 34th, down into the woods under Woodlawn Terrace's mansions, then into the hotel parking garage on Calvert, then walking my old walk through the Dumbarton woods up to work, arriving at 4:40..
A man with barely a job, hardly a career, and a night of being a clown, entertaining the diners from bar to back room, a ten-top back in the wine room I'll get to deal with on my own... Keeps me busy enough, no late night hi-jinx chaos...
An Uber home finally, my driver from Kabul, also with an elderly mother. He took his family to see the fireworks from the Old Town side, obscured by smoke.
Then Sunday night, Mom on the edge of tears as we speak over the phone, as she deserves to be. They'll be paving tomorrow in her apartment townhouse complex. Is the car in the right place? Where are her car keys... "I'll just kill myself." She hangs up. I call her back. And soothe things over, even if I'm feeling like hell, the spot I'm in, feeling pointless about work.
Aware already of one birthday gathering back in the dreaded Wine Room, there will be another, and both of these parties will be familiar to me, and I'll have to put on the personal rube/clown act again, personable enough, as happens when you know people and know what to interject and when to just leave it and keep pouring the wine meticulously...
I'm putting in the order for the six top, the tall bearded lawyer regular guy who comes with friendly wife, they like Pinot Blanc, when a many human forms comes up the stairs. I'm looking into the glowing screen, putting in escargot for seats one, three, four, mushroom fricassee for birthday man at six, onion tart for five, then highlighting these as the appetizer course, I'm about to put in the entrees, but turn to see who it is, probably a regular. Ah-hah, it is, cool.
It's my lawyer friend. A connection to Amherst established one night. I pulled out a copy of my book from the liquor closet another night. Well, if you're familiar with the place, it's the main setting of my great Hamlet meets Catcher in the Rye famous novel... Handed it to him.
"I have an announcement to make," he says, as I prepare his Tito's martini.
Earlier, V., whose parents came to New York from Russia, pipes up. There was a study once where they had a robots feed baby chicks. The most anthropomorphized of the robots, dressed-up, had the greatest success keeping the chicks alive. The well-off couple, shrewd, who won't come in unless checking to make sure that I'm there because everyone else just turns away and speaks Spanish, not giving a shit, are on their way out, paying their check, except I've fucked up the last payment tender and have to re-ring their check in... The other birthday party has arrived... Arghh. "I told 64 the specials," my coworker tells me, in the blur. A drink order would have been helpful. Pour them some bubbly, just to keep them happy...
"I finished your book."
"Oh," I say. "Well, you've been on a roll this year, things to announce, grandson, upcoming wedding..."
"I really liked your book, I really did. The writing... the whole thing."
Later, he asks me, "but I have a question." He doesn't get how the whole harsh Princess's "I'll go the Dean's office and charge you with sexual harassment if you say one more word to me..." came about.
I shrug. Yeah, I don't either. I explain a bit of the back ground, how, when I'm visiting my mom, all these scenes come back to me, damn, why didn't I do that at the football game...
Women are... mercurial, sometimes, he says. But... her actions were hard to get... I liked the boy character more than she...
My legs are tired after all the running back and forth that night, coming around the slate top bar to pour wine and entertain familiar faces way back in the Wine Room's narrows. True, I had help from Mr. Busboy who rolls through like a freight train, assembling great piles of plates cleared from the table straight to run right back downstairs and to the kitchen. Again, with the special relationship between waiter barman and regular customers. The six top, after we deliver the special chocolate tart, when I sort of think they might be done with the wine, the wife comes up to the bar, and oh yes, how could I forget, they like dessert wine. Okay, fine. I let her taste the Sauterne, and I let her taste the Jurancon... The Sauterne, she says, okay, I'll open a fresh bottle and pour out six glasses... They start talking about what they're getting, the notes, rutabaga, the older man says, and the wife requests my professional wine nose opinion about the wine... Oh, mandarin orange peel... candied lemon drop style fruit... After years, you can pretty much make stuff up and it's true. But as the good wine professor, I feel obliged to pour these very regular and good customers each a sip of the Jurancon. Here, to cut to the chase, we have orchard, as opposed to the confiture of the Sauternes... I pull a riff on the older man's rutabaga note to Carl Sandberg's Rutabaga Tales, and how he also was a great biographer of Lincoln, as if this was all meant to coincide with the birthday of the tall bearded lawyer sitting at position six, closest to the bar, his seat... Several chuckle at my fool connections, puckish puns sort of...
Then there will be the further entertainment of the table further back... The retired Amherst professor, a politically conservative political science expert mind... The three are happy after their beefeaters, sancerre, gazpacho, three glasses of champagne to toast... A. comes up from downstairs to give them the special chocolate tart with Happy Birthday scribed in chocolate powder dust. Oh me oh my...
Finally I sit down, after a Beaujolais on the rocks, to eat my dinner, poulet fermier au curry, kept warm in the oven behind the bar in the narrow back, where now there is some rodent squeal going on... I taste a few wines with it. The Sancerre seems to work best as far as the whites, bypassing the Pinot Blanc for no good reason. The Chinon doesn't seem to work so well, as far the reds... The Rhone brings out the pepper, sure, but I prefer the Beaujolais...
Music night, Ken the guitar player of the most popular act here comes to chat with the young guitar player whose giving us some great classical style all night. It ends up being a late night. And today, I wake up sad again. The regulars M and E brought by their well-bred son who's back from Kenya for a quick visit, and again, I was commanded to offer some form of a wine tasting to entertain and keep up the old lines of chat that bind us together all these years, many, from how they wrote their wedding vows under my care, back when you could smoke cigarettes on summer nights, and I tell them tales of the Old Dying Gaul and the chefs who come when Bruno is in town, doing my little impersonation of them. One more taste, M commands, at the end, something I will share with him... Okay, what the hell... They too know I've written a book. "How's your next book coming along," Elizabeth asks me.
The guitar player, I bring mine out from the office, here, the house guitar...so they jam together in the corner after 9:30 as old Gene with his ragged Popeye gravel voice goes on at the bar... He'll go to the hospital for surgery on the spots on his old head... His voice...
There was something on Facebook about how the best restaurant experiences come from restaurants who love their customers, and I explain to this last table, as A. is in her denim short street clothes, bye bye, how, looking out the back window that there is my own personal Via Dolorosa, as I come to work, dragging my cross, then in through the basement, and up the stairs, to give love to my customers when it is time...
But I wish, I wish I just had had a normal job, all these years, to ensure and protect, provide myself and my old mom with material comfort rather than sadness... "I am a big loser," I think to myself, just a thought, and I go for a walk, to get out of the apartment to walk under the pines I do yoga with, I say with because they help me, my matt laid out on the soft pine needle earth.
I am forgetting the Finnish family who came in Monday Jazz Night, just as the door opened, as we were still getting organized and feeling weary. The guitarist comes in, and later on he lets me play his, and I strum a bit, and the Finns tell me I was pretty good, this after I got them their drinks, a Sancerre, a Pigoudet Rose, two sodas for the boys. I like Finns. I get to chatting with them.
I am forgetting my impressions being back in the cityscape, how the roads make me feel cramped and nervous. Driving in on 270 to the Beltway, I am reminded how, subtly, we are at war in this age. The Nazism of real estate... men driving their BMW sedans grimly behind their sunglasses, not striking me as messengers of any peace. I walk with my yoga matt in my WETA bag, slowly, stopping by the little Korean market here in the Palisades for tuna salad and Boars Head sliced roast beef.
It is the Buddhist who most needs Buddhism, it occurs to me, as I shower, and get ready for work, the sticky bugginess of outdoor yoga washed free from my body.
Peter, his Christian name, the lawyer who's read my book, here and there, on airplanes back and forth, who has finished it, will be out of town for a month or so. Before he leaves, he tells me, keep writing.
Thank you.
Front of the House.
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