But Papa, how did the Universe come about?  How did life come about?  How did the stuff we stand on, the stuff we breath, the depth we see...  All of it, why?

And I was tired, and had long lived to sort of stoically hide my emotions.  Even as I trust them, even as I feel quite obliged--and, really, happy in a way--to follow them, to explore them, to live the heights and depths, and all the things that catch you and come upon you in the middle of the night, when you suddenly awake, in the middle of things, heart pounding sometimes...

And really, I was in one of those very dreary weary moods...

Well, it's all because of kindness.  Kindness is the feeling, that's when you're with... you know, the whole thing.  The Big Bang is the kindness, like all the good works that people do, how much they care, how much they want good for the world...

It was this explosion of kindness, really.  Out of nothing, boom, everything, and it's a big everything, full of the most minute details, the biggest range, from sand grain to pebble, to river stone, to mountain, to space, the kind we live in and move about in...

And kindness is the living force that remains, or, rather maybe, had something to do with it all.  The kindness and love we feel for things is the same as the winds that were blowing when the whole tiniest of tiny things went BOOM.

Kindness is expansive, isn't it?  It's capable of everything.  It always has room for more, energy for more.


I think that's how my little sermon worked that night.

That night, I'd felt it, atop all the frustrations of work, how the restaurant somehow hangs together, somehow lives... Really the greatest of mysteries...  I mean, look at the world.  Look at how selfish and despots take things of people being together in some strange and seemingly haphazard ways...  The whole thing could go to falling apart and bitter acrimony quite quickly, under the strain.  You'd want to scream and shout at your coworker sometimes trying to make it all happen, but, you see the customers, like at a wedding, all pretty, nice young men and women, and you just want to do the best for them.

This is the awful great physical miracle of the Wedding at Cana, the first one.  (I tried not to choke up...)   Dostoevsky has digested it for human consumption, the poor bastard.  (And I'm keeping some of these thoughts to myself, and not sure exactly what I'm sharing, what I'm keeping hidden...)  God wants joy, human happiness, Dostoevsky gives us.  God wants people to be happy.  Thus, the wine.  And they were poor people, here, and they love wine, because it's one of their few real happy things.  God loves people.  Kindness is flowing throughout.  Maybe that speaks of the nature of all miracles themselves, the impossible kindness...

I'd been so exhausted, the whole thing of having your gas pedal pushed down by other people, other things.  I'd been willing to do it all, because of kindness and wine, human happiness, joy, my own small spectator part of it...

Well, actually, I was a scientist, living in my great scientific clutter, all the people coming and going, the thousand million bits of conversations in my scientific life as a barman putting up with it all... riding the bucking bronco.

In the end you only say a little bit to a child.  I'm both sure and not sure what I spoke to her about it all.   But I think, I hope, I got my point across, both to myself as much as she.  That strong flowing wicked wind we must ride upon, that flows through our chests and our stomachs and in all the hollow spaces of our bodies, through the tops of our hands as well as the cups of our palms, through the tops of our feet as well as the part of us which, like the animal, touches the ground, balancing us, touching the earth.

And when you have deep truth to tell a child, you wonder, you know, why this sudden burst of understanding which I am allowed....

And you, I, we, all of us bear scars about this, the times we betray our own little minerals of understandings about the whole thing, by which I mean everything.  The time we spoke up to someone else, hopefully, hopefully spoke, and we said, or hope we said, well, this is what I did, because what's it about anyway...

And whenever the truth sort of bursts through us like light, light we are somewhat obliged to make look like normal conversation, not to scare anyone, not to bring up other little truths, like, oh, we all are dying too, which you might not want to do, like, on vacation...

We all have moments when we, all our wisdom, gets overlooked, or...  missed, or even disrespected... There you are, having gone on the big family vacation, and you are looking up at the Milky Way there above the Atlantic Ocean in Maine, less light to pollute this the best part of being on vacation here, where you can really see, like, the scale of things.  "The stars...  we are the consciousness of the Universe looking back at itself..."  And I'd even read as much, a nice little book, so I felt some sort of footnoteable confidence, and it wasn't even a weird thing to say...  But you know the response...  We've all heard it.  The damp towel.  Don't be an asshole...

But you and I, and poor Fredo Corleone even, we can grow a little understanding of all the amazing things blowing within us.


Sometimes I wasn't so happy doing my primate work at the bar.  It was too much work.  Physically grinding.  But there was Stephen Hawking with his ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease, beating him down, and he was a chap and put up with it.  It was my anthropological library, my body of memory, my field of study.   But it was hard.  And I knew I had lots of wise things to tell children, just not sure how much it would do for them, just that it was truth, the truth, and the truth, as they have always said, from the Big Bang onward, the truth will set you free.


Is it sad to know all these things?  Well, it's just kindness.  Kindness lives in acts, in frog's eyes, in birds...

So the schedule had given me two of my usual nights off, the nights I am expected to be there, so that I would fill in over the busy Friday and Saturday night.  And this throws me off, and it's even a relief to be walking through the warm woods with the sun out and cherry blossoms and water in the stream, and mom has called a few times already, asking what the plan is...  Going back to work.

But it is not a joy when I arrive.  The kid didn't bother to restock.  And the whole downstairs main dining room has been 'bought out' for a wedding party, and so the busboys are luging the taller tables up from the basement, and putting away the teak cubical coffee tables that normally serve as tables up at the wine bar.  The same with the chairs.  And this is bad, because it's going to get very full, and people dining with the subtle expectations they have eating downstairs on tablecloths, and not this experiment in service ad hoc that it a night at the wine bar.

It's one of those nights, like the old days, when you just keep moving, keep moving quickly, taking the night bite by bite, doing what's immediately necessary before you, a dessert order, relaying a coffee tea order to the busser, keeping the dishwasher running through as all the glasses are either dirty or piling up, almost completely out of wine glasses, clearing tables, taking orders, twisting, turning, reaching...  with no idea of what's going on, just keeping doing it.

So I am exhausted when it is all over.  And the night had been too busy, dodging people, reaching, etc., always something to do, more butter dishes, more bread, what the hell is going on, I don't get the chance to pour myself much electrolyte water, but, when I finally had time, wanted a more numbing beverage, pinot noir on the rocks when I finally had some time to catch my breath, and mom calls again, sounding a little confused, who is picking her up, no one is telling her the plan, does she need to move to the other house...  I do my best to soothe her over my cell out on the front street when there's breathing room after the desserts and checks...

I get home, take my work shirt off, and sag down on the couch with the television on, and soon cannot move, not even to get up to go to bed more properly.  Around 5 AM I'm awake enough to brush teeth and go to bed, but I cannot now go right to sleep, so I check on a few things, like bank account, like my American Express statement.  Worries.  The inner worrying voice tells me, I've waited too long to make the changes I really need to make, to find a job that doesn't kill me, a career path, etc., and now mom is falling apart, so it seems.  I've tried, the voice says, and it hasn't, of course it hasn't, gone that well for me, and I know this, and am trying to rethink the whole reasons why.


Later, with Kerouac and New York on my mind, I dream of the princess.  We have a harmless meeting up in her big city, and she's friendly, solicitous even, and helpful, and generous taking me around, finding good stuff to eat.  It turns out she has an illness.  Her fingertips are disappearing, withering away, incomplete ends that aren't so much fingers anymore, strange, and I realize that's why she's wearing a sort of a scarf kind of a thing, to protect them.  She is getting treatment, but I admire the saintly way she's dealing with this strange disease...  She too is a saint, dealing bravely with the strange conditions of being alive, holy mother.

And also, another chapter of the dream, more or less, that I show my wine bar customers that I am, indeed, carrying a Cross, even beneath my humor and my charitable cheer, and when I wake and meditate, there is the Cross within too, blueprint of our nervous systems.  It's okay to be dramatic in dreams.

When I wake, I find that I do not have to work.  Thank god.  I am out of gas.  I turn over and rest more.

And in fact, so put out I am by the awful night holding down the fort, that I don't move off the couch, and my fears about the place are fueled, and there's no real good mood to be had, and then mom calls again, and then after that I want a glass of wine, from a chilled bottle of Beaujolais...  And I've been famished, going through various leftovers...and still, rehydrating, still, not feeling any energy...



You're not having fun anymore, my mother tells me, the next day, as she calls for the second time, around noon, so finally I get up.  I carry the cell phone into the kitchen, find a small mason jar of chilled green tea, patiently going through the whole, this is where I am, but I have to move it all and the cat over to the other place...  Mom, no, you just need to go down to get wine at...  We talk, I ask her if she's still watching the Masters, or if, in her wine shortage last night if she made a vodka v8 for herself, if it came to that, and I forget to tell her about the BBC piece I saw dramatizing poor Dylan Thomas coming to New York...  I manage to mention, in my groggy state, I rode my bike indoors, that it's just the start of the season, that Paris Roubaix was today...  Yes, the bike will be fun, once I get back in shape...

Yes, a shrink told her this once, you're not having fun anymore...  And your father wouldn't know fun if it fell on him, (though it turns out he did know how to have fun...)

Well, well, it's not so bad.  I'll slowly wake, drink my water with baking soda and good salt, and the salt of the earth shall have its savor and I'll go off to work, get set-up, no matter how the kids left it, and then the Sunday regular people will come, early and late, to talk of hip replacements on the horizons, and retirement, and other things, and the pace, hopefully, will not be that of a one-winged coat-hanger, and I'll get peaceably through the night shift, avoid the tree pollen exposure, earn my little share of the tip pool with my three shifts this week, they kind of screwed me on that...  And I will work then Monday, and then Tuesday, and then Wednesday I'll wake at the proper time and remember the proper time of my therapist appointment, and after that I will not have to go to work, and that is fine, they're putting me on Saturday instead of Wednesday Jazz Night and that is fine...

The nice couple, middle aged as I, a few years older, who got engaged at the Gaul one Paris Roubaix evening--Cancellara won it that year--might come by, and things will move forward into the week.

But a lot of thought goes into all this waiting and serving on people.  A lot goes into hospitality.

Listening to NPR, as I ponder going off to work, I learn it's poetry month, and they are talking about Walt Whitman.

So I order some copies of my book, not sure why, just to have them around I guess, I get them cheap, about four bucks a pop.  The box comes from Amazon, sitting there on the front stoop.  The package, looks like it's been opened.  The blue plastic tape has been cut, methodically, along the whole top and the sides of the top, and the top looks like it could have been opened, enough so that one could look in.  The weight a good ten pounds.  And the box has been closed back up with three strips of clear plastic wide packing tape from side to side.   The burglar or whomever must have been disappointed with such loot.  And when I open the box finally--the thieves had made this task easier--yup, nothing but the twenty two of my famous novel A Hero For Our Time, 265 pages, along with some brown packing paper snaking around, just as I'd ordered through CreateSpace, as if these little boxes of literature now completely outmoded, they might as well be mummified by now.  How's that for a chuckle.

And I am a bum.  Really.  I might be a nice one, but I am a bum.  A total bum.  It's bad enough if you're an artist, but to be a bum on top of that...  And where does one even look, to find the roots of it, where did I become a bum...


It's five in the morning, and the half moon is on the other side of cloudy forty two degree distant pond, robins are giving it a chirp, and soon a Postal Delivery truck will make a great thump over some hollow part of the streets below, and airplanes will take to the sky heading west.

And this is about the time, here now, in the hours when one takes out the recycling, and other such stupid things like preparing to make tuna salad and regretting that one had a cider at the grocery store, should have just gotten the groceries home and not felt so stressed out earlier when leaving the old and sacred house on the old and sacred street of stray and feral cats and other such small epiphanies of personal libraries and people with good histories and good taste and knowledge, readers, that I would habitually turn to the sad things that accompany life in this old town.  For various reasons of exile sensitivity, I could never get enough of other people's more famous misery.

Anything about Abraham Lincoln, be it a book about his melancholy, or Ken Burns Civil War series, of Abraham & Mary, A House Divided, a documentary I found, would do the trick, if you've ever lived in Washington, D.C., and felt its miseries.  Or, go and catch a funeral train, if not Lincoln's, Bobby Kennedy, or Jack's Kennedy Blue airplane touching down and rolling into the lights of Andrews...    Ghost stories.  Madam Korbonski heard crying through the wall of my bedroom early and dark in the morning when the Polish hopeful airplane crashed in Putin's Russia on the way to acknowledge horrors like Stalin's works of murder against the noble Poles in Katyn woods.

And why did I inherit the misery, but for the lack of kindness--I guess I wanted, out of family history, some sort of special treatment--received at Amherst, or was it that I've never had a happy turning out well relationship with any female of the species (cats and dogs, quite fine), and is that because of my crazy mother or more my own faults and being a bad boy who never figured it out, and who, again, is a bum.

With whatever energy I have after grocery shopping in the early evening, along with loose leaf tea and wine, I spend on cooking, searing chicken breast in the iron pan with left over ginger that was steeped in water with shallot, and then also searing some unhappy tenderloin, to be eaten later, sliced, boring.   And then I pass out on the couch, into the post dinner nap, in front of the television.

In the general state I am in, yeah, you don't really want to run into people, feeling ashamed about something.  I mean, you've tried honestly enough to be a writer...

But to admit that you are miserable in Washington, D. C., is to go against the general rule of presenting yourself as highly competent, and happy, and sometimes to be happy is to make other people miserable.

And this is why, perhaps, I am mystified, when I go down to the local market, which mimics a farmer's market and with beer, wine and cider, a deli counter, cooked chickens, fresh meats packed in plastic on cooler shelves, to see the influx of the young and funky and the hipster, people who might wish themselves to make their own cheeses and beer if they had the time, almost dressed for it, along with the handsome resuméd youthful people who still have time to figure out breeding and who already have dogs...

But here, by myself, a kind of misery, sometimes sleepy, sometimes awake, and happiness and contentment come through performing modest chores, mostly food-related.

Meanwhile, old mom sits up there by herself with all her books, in some form of lonely exile, but that she has a cat, and how did we let all this happen...

Later, today I will go back to work.


Somehow, as a creative, I have never favored collaboration.  More have I leaned to the general very private secrecy that is natural in writers, as writers are, alas, unable to share, but by writing, that saying something about the human condition, and, for that matter, perhaps the spirituality of the prophets.  Dr. King like Isaiah and Amos, I've read recently in the Times...  good to close a sermon with, as was his habit.  I cannot explain this, I just know it to be true.


(Getting ready for work, after the schedule change, comes almost as a relief.  JFK said he'd go nuts if he didn't have somewhere to go every day, and perhaps this is true.)

Oh, but the restaurant business, the odd hours, you never get to talk to anyone.  And this on top of the feeling that you're playing around when you should get serious, that all this is frivolous, even though it is work, definitely, leaving you exhausted.

Amos was a prophet.  He decided that himself.  He was not a professional at it, not a pleaser of powers that be, but an independent.  He was a believer in social justice, so it seems.

With that man, that man in the White House, our White House, the White House of, by, and for, the people...  the opposite of a man with any spiritual life...  and this is hard on people, and even in normal political situations much of the spiritual voice gets drowned out.  No?  The dialog is dragged so far in one direction, even to get back to the median, so that you could acknowledge the spiritual element of the created universe, so much static, and that's how he operates.

Like take King, Dr. King, in his last sermon, toward the end of it, talks of going to the Holy Land, and driving with his wife from Jerusalem down to Jericho, and it's a "winding, meandering road... really conducive for ambushing," a dangerous road that drops three thousand feet, and the question for him in his sermon is not about what happens to the person who stops to help out the man beaten by thieves, not about the I, but about the other, as The Good Samaritan in Dr. King's telling is, what will happen to the man if I do not stop to help him...

It's a remarkable speech to come across today.  About how Dr. King's thoughts were not what will happen to me if I do not stop to help out the sanitation workers, but about what will happen to them if he doesn't stop.

And some people, some men, of course, do not stop.


But we too stop, even the writer.  We stop to write of the neglected possibilities, to see ourselves not just in economic terms, but in terms broader.  Why do we exist?  For what?  Who but us will do the work that is God's work, involving God's thoughts...

Trump would not stop, but to toss paper towels to the victim of the mightiest of storm's wrath, in the photo op.  And get away with it, because he has already changed the dialog so far toward the materialist view, that we can barely conceive of an argument for doing better by the victims, as if he'd hypnotized us, numbed us, taken away our tongues...


You're not going to write unless you help yourself to write.  You're not going to write until you write down something small and seemingly inane, and then help out that idea.  You help it gain strength, and add some coherent structure to it.

Hemingway wrote his story, self-reflecting perhaps, about the Old Man and the Sea, a poor man, an old man, a fisherman, a man with a sort of tattered wisdom and very simple means and living.  Hemingway too could side with nature, with the poor, with the lone artist and his struggle, with the spiritual side of things, the deeper realities that makes things so.  He recorded things as they are.  He was one kind of a writer, and perhaps the times, his times, called for that.  His generations had wars to grapple with, to digest.  And in war there is the soldier's experience, and that's a good deal of what he brought to us, the horrible anonymity of destruction, people marching in lines their souls having been forgotten by any worldly authority.


Who thinks he can write when he wakes up...  what have I to write?  For I am a sinful man, even on a good day, or even at best.

But the writer has this vast body of soulful things to remember.  He sees people, potentially, purely, as souls, almost to the point where they become themselves anonymous, messengers of God in accordance with what they do.   The construct of the world bears him up when he gets to concerned with the microcosm of his affairs.

This is light, and it is hard to look at the brightness of the light sometimes.  The kind of impersonal touch that God and the Lord Jesus Christ brings to personal relationships...

If we, oddly, focus on the details of who people are in their individual circumstances--and everyone seems themselves as an independent individual and unique character, seeing worth in tooting their own horns and presenting themselves in terms of individual greatness and power--we lose their potential to come out and act in the spiritual way...

It is not "I" that writes...  And without sounding pretentious, Jesus is accurate and correct when he says it is His Father's business, that the things he is doing come out of the One who sent him.

Each person is a manifestation of the deeper reality, and the deeper stuff can be thought of as something beyond the personal, as it is the spirit which acts, to help, to do good things, to shine the light...

We don't blame Jesus for his impersonal quality, for his distance, his aloneness.   Sure, we don't want to see him as unfriendly and non-smiling...  but it seems it's almost as much the burden of individuality and ego's things that he lifts off people, and they are people weighted by their identity in society...

A sermon is a day's work, a moment of atomic energy translated, transformed into things very hard for us to grasp but made tangible.

The cult of personality, the pagan gods, they exist today too, but one can know better...  And this is why the hermit life isn't so wrong sometimes.  And what do we have to focus on these days, but the surface, the appearance of on-line life, the image...

There are reasons why we've been brought to where we are, and maybe the events and even the reasons behind why where we are where we are are personally sad and trying.  Lessons, such things are.  To know such gives one strength, strength to deal with scary things like uncertainty.  And maybe, perhaps, uncertainty is there for a reason, to teach you something which you have not been able to quite comprehend just yet, a puzzle, something to think over, and ultimately doing a good job of leading you to a better place.

But maybe it's just too hard to be a writer now.  Too hard to go back and forth between the social and the private worlds.  The private allowed you time for the real work you felt you had to do, out of honor and spirit and for religious reasons.

But there was a hell of a cost for it.  Think of all the vulnerable people who have those late night jobs at checkout counters and so forth...  I became one of them.  Tired, at odd hour, leery of each other, but reaching out by some quiet politeness, to re-identify ourselves as human beings, capable of all things even if we have not succeeded in life by the norm.


I feel stupid and ashamed.  It could be construed I was sneaking around, avoiding humanity on days off, but I felt quite tired, and like Dostoevsky, I wanted the quiet time of the deeper night, three in the morning, which both worked with the circadian rhythm imposed by said job of physical struggle.  This was the time I'd find to grocery shop at the 24 hour stores, the Safeway across the street and a block up from work, and believe me that could be a long walk in the cold hungry night, and for other basic needs the Rite Aid, another walk long enough and dreary in the night, for things like toilet paper, soda water, laundry detergent and paper towels.  Somehow at this hour the sound of the laundry was less offensive, and more calmly I could sit down and try to work, not that I ever really did, but just that it helped to write.  And I could remember the kindness of late night people at work...

It felt that life had gone seriously off-track, and I didn't seem to know anyway to bring it back, such a person was I, disagreeing, not willing to join in so contentedly as do people who smartly know that it's simply wise to do so as far as actual life goes, the things most people want, spouse, house, kids...

Whatever the days I worked, it all succeeded in making me tired.

And in this late hours, of course, of course you wonder about your sanity, about your choices, about where it all is headed.  And further, it felt like you needed, that you deserved, even, a break, of some sort.

Who would want, in their right mind, to be up alone at four AM, working on their little projects...  But how else does it get done?

And perhaps only in such danger do things become clearer, even if you might not want to hear what being clearer is, realizing the very issues...  And you think, hmm, no wonder Dostoevsky wrote at night.  No wonder Dostoevsky penetrated beyond issues of civil authority in the murder story of old Karamazov.

No wonder he depicted Christ as a silent captive, kept in the dungeon by the powerful bishop inquisitor who identifies completely with the profane.  As in, "we have it better without you being here...'



As a boy going to bed I'd look down from the balcony, down into the living room, and there, always, was my father, sitting in his brown chair, with papers around him, reading, perhaps writing on a legal pad, and always after dinner 'til midnight, a good four hours anyway, and often a cat getting an ear rub next to him, one of the wolfhounds or the corgi by the firepot...  He'd put on the teaching performance during the daytime, up at the college, and then, now, he was doing the deeper matters of his work.

When you write you have to poking along, struggling, wading into new waters.  And whoever might come along and read what you might write on that one day, well, they might see blue colors when you are generally painting in orange colors...

There is enough out there to write about, just by existing.  And one could include in that the works of all the painters, from Giotto, and the early guys, to Van Gogh and Cezanne...  Art, art is spiritual, worth noting, as part of the struggle...  part of the path toward a better spiritual understanding, an understanding of the other.

Did they paint with massive doubts hanging over them?  With concerns about the coming crisis of the aging of their elders...

I wish I knew what the old man had been writing, his lesson plans.  His letters were always tremendously well thought and written, long hand with a felt tip pen...  I wish I could have shared him with more of my friends and more people, how sweet and great he was.



The night is self-correcting.  A load of laundry is for the most part done, just in need of being put away.  The time is precious when undisturbed.  And this is why I never go out.

What would I teach if I were a teacher?  I would teach about all sorts of things, no particular subject.  Probably not economics, but what does the great Void and the Universe and all its stuff really care about economics...



I'm not saying I'm a good writer.  I'm not saying I'm a useful writer.  I'm not saying there's much value for any sort of marketplace.  I'm not saying I deserve to be read.  But that is not why anyone writes, not if they are serious.

Some explore the daytime, and some explore the lonely nighttime.  They are both experiences to be had.  Facing yourself...

But somehow it was a tough week on the body, what with driving back from up north, Oswego to DC, back to work for one day, busy, then off two days, then out to dinner with amigos and then back to work for a hard Saturday night, then Easter Sunday night shift, the anniversary of my father's passing, the Monday jazz with my coworker bearing down on me and my pains, then off on Tuesday, then my buddy calling me saying I should come by, back to the wine bar, and meet the three young women from Paris the retired arbitrator gentleman has brought by.  And I wake up early in the morning feeling some sort of Kerouac panic, "old man, lonely, no family, and fat."  Thrown off, I guess.  Worried about adult stuff like jobs that pay the bills and aging mothers who are lonelier than I am, whom I am at least faithful about calling and visited her for birthday.  Well, I retreat to the bar rather than trying anymore to chat up the young women from France here for a business seminar, talking to my friend J the bartender who gives me a ride home at the end of the night.  Better to go out then stay in, but sometimes you can't really tell and maybe it's all the same misery anyway.

Early early in the morning I lay awake, get myself a fresh glass of double filtered water in the plastic Foxhall Smiles pint glass from the dentist, and crack open the book on the bed next to me, Kerouac, Big Sur, which is almost too much for me, delving into the horrors of alcoholism, and the only real bright spot beyond the touching stuff about Tyke the beloved cat back at his mom's in Long Island and the comfort Kerouac has giving us a bit of his Canadian French personal family talk like that of his dying father's groans is the bit at the end about seeing the Cross, after all his Buddhist readings, he sees the Cross there as clearly as he's ever seen anything, finding that remarkable.  The poems written to the sea soothe the harrowing read.

And why did I get into this foolish line of work anyway, the grey sky of April the fourth tells me, in its stillness before the wind picks up as predicted.  Yes, it is not easy when your work schedule gets thrown off, you feel jerked around.

But I have other books of Kerouac, his Book of the Dharma, and after warming a can of black-eyed peas, green tea, a chat with mom whose day is also cold and raw, and doing the dishes so that I have clean forks again and all the cups are clean except for the ones I am using, more or less, and the plates from the shelf where the cockroach was are rinsed in comforting hot soapy water, the spiritual life, with ETWN on in the background, and Mom too was just watching TV with Mother Angelika praying the Holy Rosary and I've lit some incense, Frankincense and Myrrh.  Not to be gross, saints in their little cabins such as Kerouac have their little encounters with the living creatures of the world like mice and spiders who go about their business in the outhouse...

Hungry, I eat, and yoga later on this odd day off before the winds come...  Otherwise I feel pretty useless, and that is how we are these days anyway, entranced by our little on-one devices, Google News, Facebook, emails, whatever else we might find out...

I'm in a bad mood at the start of work.   The walk through the woods was mild and sunny, and I did some yoga before, but when I get in I see them monkeying with the reservation pad, how are we going to fit all the parties in.  I bury myself in restocking, step by step.  When we're seated at the round table downstairs eating our baked chicken wings in rice, the young woman I'm going to work with pipes up, without much warmth, "I know how you are, Ted, don't offer any tastings until we get through things..." to which I respond, quietly, "Alina, I'm not an idiot."

Easter, and I have to be doing this kind of a thing, working Saturday night, and then back for Easter Sunday, the anniversary of my father's passing, then the rest of the week, and the scheduling server manager L tells me she had to put me on the schedule for the entirety of next weekend too.  Okay, whatever, but giving me off two of my usual shifts, which is fine.  I'll be tired enough getting through what lies before me.

The boss comes in, with jeans, shirt untucked, fashionable leather sneakers, greets my co-worker with pecks on both cheeks, and I'm already toiling away, surrounded by a full bar, and some woman, a regular, asking me if the veal special has butter in it.

Later in the evening, the boss comes up the stairs, and bids me good day, and we say, hum, yes, busy busy, that's good.  But a minute or two later, he says, hey, something about my shoes...  and I've been wearing my Brooks running shoes because rodents chewed through the laces of the other ones, and because my feet hurt.  He's right, but it doesn't help my mood much, at least it's getting toward the end of the night.

Easter dawns, without much meaning, so it seems.  No triumphant mood, and more one of "Fuck This."  Mom calls from up north, feeling very lonely.

I have a busser to help out, as the back room, the wine room, is full with two parties roughly at the same time.  And there's the bar, which needs attention from the start, an older African American couple who live out by Catholic University, who drop in from time to time, enjoyable people, and they are in for an early dessert and still wearing their observant finery.  The first party in the back turns out to be two sisters who grew up just west of Paris, and in their sixties, they are fun to talk to, and one mentions Muscadet, being introduced to it when she was five.  Asking about it, I tell her Hemingway liked it with oysters, as her story comes out.

My busser is helpful, but I've barely cleared the six-top when dinner, just fired, arrives, so I have to scramble for that, and my help seems one step behind for much of the evening.  He's been here all day, so I can't blame him, and he's a tireless strongman...  I've sent him home and think I've slayed the dragon when I hear the women downstairs speaking to the last arrivals, having called in a reservation, "yes, check out upstairs, it's very nice."  They are headed up the stairs anyway, even as it is just my friend and I, no one else, and I will just suck it up on Easter night.

They three turn out be nice, the daughter went to Mt. Holyoke, and for me it's either hate them or join them, as far as hospitality goes, and so I join them, and my friend the historian is telling excellent sketches from a night out down on 14th being kind to a mutual friend, a younger guy.

I reflect on his stories, how the Barbary Pirates moved in on the two women they were talking to, one sitting on the girl's jacket on the barstool chair when she gets up to go to the restroom, and showing off pictures of themselves with Secretary Mattis....

It's all about entitlement, such successes, so it seems to me.  It's not about who you are, but about how confidently you feel you deserve desirable things.  "The two Arab guys," presumably with enough money in their pockets to feel a fresh self-confidence, who think nothing of inviting the chicks to the Four Seasons or the Ritz for more expensive treats, have captured the day.

And me, poor old dumb fuck Tranowsky frets his time away carefully considering what he deserves and ends up living a monk's life, and one of service.  Dumbly staring down at his shoes as he scuffs them through the dust in the classic The Thinker pose of shyness, almost a stereotype...  Is it that he is now too careful, feeling old enough and weak enough despite his strengths to 'not bite off more than he can chew, and life is pretty precarious anyway...'  Thus tending bar, as if he doesn't even feel entitled even to write or to place much confidence in it or that it will ever pay off.

Mom calls back at the start of the shift, Easter evening, the light out on the trees across the street, pinkish white apple blossoms, the big old leaning elm that towers over the Boys and Girls Club parking lot with its new rubber green playing field in the distance and the stand of grand old Larches by the scholar's residences, and she has mellowed, considerably, having had a nice conversation with family members, and that's one more anxiety lifted, as I set up, careful to dress a little better and to try on a different pair of shoes taken from under the dresser, a pair of green suede Pumas.


One more shift, jazz night.  I drink the ginger water I brewed yesterday, make a pot of dragonwell green tea, sprinkle some flax seed, some astragalus, some schisandra powder, into my cup and refill it, diluting the taste away.  I've done a great job at work, my job, feeding the sense of entitlement that people have, generally more important people than I.  My body has its aches today, and a tired feeling   within, but the tea is helping.

And I wonder, what would I be like, what would life look like, were I to suddenly grow my own sense of deserving, being entitled to the joys and the abundance of the world rather than the stoic go-it-alone sense of things.  Still, though, I will try to keep enough energy after my shift to do some grocery shopping, a bit tired of the menu at the old Dying Gaul as far as the excitement of tastebuds go...


But what is the writer's entitlement...  A sense of having inherited an ability to discern some form of understanding of reality...  Perhaps his choice was not so much a lack of self-confidence, as it was perceived in the feminine world of many many options and suitors and opportunities for pretty girls.    A quiet sort of old man sense of deserving the act and the ability to write down the oldest and deepest truths...  to be a sort of Lincoln musing over, say, different sides of an issue both claiming divine will, and 'woe unto the world because of offences...'

Apparently it is a lonely station to occupy.  The opposite to the entitlement so plainly evident in the world and Washington, D.C.