It was a Facebook thing, an event invite I misinterpreted as a gathering of people I'd worked with years ago, up at a pizza restaurant next to where we all used to work.  We had all hit Austin Grill at a certain time in life.  The original management team were artists, who loved what they did.  And then it had gone to different management, weird, number crunchers, menu changes.  One morning we were shouted at, as if by Mussolini, on sexual harassment by its worst perpetrator.  I should have gotten out then.

I walked up Mass Ave past all the trees like I used to do, and crossed by the Vice President's house, entering the old neighborhood, Glover Park, on an August Saturday night, crossing Wisconsin at the light at Calvert, walking down from the gas station, past the dry cleaners, past Pearson's Liquor and Old Europe, past what used to be The Grog and Tankard back when, and then, not looking in through the window at the old bar I stood at for years, but for a shuddering moment, down the steps.  I was expecting a small crowd of familiar faces, of people who've been through loss.  I walk in, silent, unrecognized, to the end of the bar, and I know the manager, a good guy I also worked with back at old Austin Grill.  There is a crowd at the bar, just like there always was, the attitudes unchanged, the manners, just different faces, as if DNA were at work, recreating the same in the different, as I've seen even in restaurant staff.


Polite, thinking of escape, I had a glass of wine, a Langhe Rosso, beautiful easy going nebbiolo.  I had a good conversation with the woman next to me, a graduate of Swarthmore, about Joyce and being Irish.  And then another glass, and then I fell into talk with the restaurant guy I know who is sits next to me, who gives me the skinny on who's staying and who's going as far as the restaurant business on the block, a diatribe he thinks I'm interested in at the moment as TVs show endless sport loops.  I hear a good arson story.  And all the while, no Spike, no Jennifer, no old gang.  I see, looking out, up at the street, an old friend, I guess you'd call him, intoxicated, trying to persuade a stripper to get in a cab with him as he sways.  It takes me a moment to recognize him, in a gesture, the way he hunches when he talks to people when in his cups.

I found it semi-nightmarish to be back on the strip.  I asked myself, how could I have ended up there for so many years in such a subservient position, bartender?  What good did I do for humanity?  What an impossible shame.  Trapped there, by the drink, by the companionship in it, by the illusion that by working there and by writing I was building some kind of a career.  We worked, thought we were artists of some sort, liked the soundtrack, the food, the buzz, the friends.  And I had felt that the writing I did was somehow involved with the great academic background I had come from.  And the bosses never really talked to us much, until they turned it over and walked away.  One day, the music box which had played as we worked, one day it stopped playing the tune.

I do get caught up on the doings of old friends, thanks to Joe.  I find out about Keith, and Kevin. Tom has moved to Florida.  I express condolences to my friend over the loss of father.  Other than that, it's a lonely night.  The bartender knocks over a row of stacked pint glasses which fall to the floor with a crash.  I don't like bars anymore, a waste of time.  And then, four glasses in, I start my exit.  I walk up the steps to the sidewalk, to check out Bourbon, then Townhall, conscious of the sleeping unconscious sadness of the crowd passing on the street.  I enter a place I wouldn't,  the in-people who know how to dress, belonging far more than I ever will, in a uniform of shorts and summery light tee shirts without much care, but confidence in the belonging to the scene, a privileged confident entitled crowd of blasé attitudes all seeming to know each other.  I'm an outsider.  I ask the bartender for the wine list, don't bother having another glass, get rid of a two dollar bill the people at Kramer's gave me as change months ago.  I don't know, it seems like we served a fair cross section of humanity at the old Grill, journalists, a playwright, musicians, the neighborhood, young and old, funky and not, mainstream and non-mainstream.  It wasn't all bad.

I go and stand at the street corner at the light again.  I walk home, rather than hail a cab, to punish myself, wishing I had just stayed in, had no wine, read something useful.  Is it that there's always an excuse, always the illusion.

Rattled, and tired, defeated, and wanting no part of it anymore, I went to work, only because I had to, Sunday evening my Monday morning, and the door opened at the good people showed up, and I fell into the groove again, for better or worse.  Toward the end of the evening, joined by a regular, a good conversation with a person who has just moved from San Fran feeling a little sad, talk of Suffi poetry, talk of the Muslim world, Shi'a, Sunni conflicts.  And once again, I am a glimmer of a lost scholar of a vaguely religious kind, as I may have always been, but up close and personal with the existential sufferings of humanity and the sorrows of pleasure. What's the line of Buddha's?  Was it that he found himself 'ripe,' or, the perfect candidate for such an enlightened change, ready, perfectly prepared...

I come home and read a sad NY Times story of a generous Brooklyn restaurateur's suicide, and wonder, where do you go after you give your generosity and realize that everyone is suffering?  Do you renounce, and go on the road, like Jesus did;  do you go as Merton did, join a Trappist monastery;  do you become a moralizing writer (if you had the money) like Tolstoy;  do you recognize a moment with all prophets;  do you embrace Buddhism close and closer?  Do you write self-help books, like Tolle, and try not to act hypocritically, or rather, understandingly?  Or do you become a cultural historian, positing about how Christianity was a big hit in wine friendly Europe?

I have a glass of wine and go play some Pogues songs out in the backyard under the moon, liberated by a good run of Sun Sessions, James Super Chicken Johnson, and Austin City Limits, Roseanne Cash doing 'the list' followed by Brandi Carlile, on good old PBS.

It could only seem like a vestigial appendage we would no longer have the circuitry for, the ability, like Muhammad, to go up on the mountain and hear the voice of the angel.  We've become modern people, in charge of many powers and many things, but no longer able to receive divine thoughts, no longer believing, skeptics.  Anyone laying any sort of claim of such we would of course, perhaps rightly, be immediately suspicious of.  But like that of myth-making, it seems that somewhere along the line we've lost our powers for that mode of activity.  It seems we might go hike up the mountain, but what would we possibly receive, as we peeked from time to time at our phones, as if the prophecy or divine guidance should come through them.

The world of Islam choses not to aggrandize images of the prophet, a point made clear in the PBS documentary "Life of the Prophet Muhammad, Peace Be Unto Him."  It is the divine message, not the mortal messenger, to acknowledge and celebrate.  Our world seems instead to go for personal fame, even though a person is balanced when allowing the divine to flow through him, superseding the personality.

Muhammad, by the excellent account, was dissatisfied.  He was unhappy with society.   He had deep questions about the nature of creation.  He felt troubled, and he sought peace in meditation and retreats to the mountains above Mecca.  He need to get away from its tribal society, having experienced all levels of it, displeased with its treatment of the poor and marginalized.

"Read," the voice of the angel said to him as he awoke from a dream with a feeling of being stifled.  Twice he replies that he is not a reader, that he does not know how to read.  Finally, at the third urging from on high, from the angel who has caught him, the prophet asks, "what shall I read."  And it is the words themselves which, when transcribed, carry the prophecy, simply by their own nature, coming from God, such that a sensitive but not necessarily learned type might be perfectly able to take their dictation from the recitation of God.  So it is the word itself which has inherent importance.

"Read: and your Lord is the Most generous,
Who taught of the pen,
and taught man that which he did not know."  Qur'an (96:3-5)

Muhammad, after this first revelation, was of course frightened and agonized, needing the sheltering comfort of his wife and family, wishing to tell no one.  He would admit that he 'abhorred' poets and madmen in particular, and would never want to be one, just as he had told the angel Gabriel that he was not a learned worded type.  And the angel had wrestled him the first time and the second time appeared to him as if straddling the horizon as Muhammad had returned to the mountain, telling him that he was 'the messenger of Allah.'

Bring this to modern times.  What is it that man does not know?  What are the things that are worthy of such a pen?  What would the relevance of such words be to such a world, one we often think of as so advanced beyond the tribalism of the prophet's time (who so eloquently, in his last speech, given in Mecca at Hajj, reiterated the thoughts of how God, Allah, had created many different peoples so they could get to know each other, without infringing, without terrorizing, but to peacefully get along) or at least considering ourselves as civilized, but others less so.

Bringing the divine out of the personified myths of tribal paganism, the deeper human psyche's working its way out through storied tales, may have seemed to require some shift, anyway.  God, now one force, had to directly speak over all such tales, to say finally, more directly, what was good and bad, as far as behavior and ways of thinking, applicable to all facets of life.

How would a writer, with the same basic reluctance and suspicion, see his role, see the point of writing in the world, perhaps particularly there is so much writing in it already, and when anything he might say about the need for peace in the world would come of as juvenile editorializing, and who is he anyway but some punk kid, when compared to an expert like, say, Henry Kissinger.  Overwhelmed by all the feuds of the world, bombings, etc., what could we do but leave it up to the television itself, hoping that wise leadership or the better angels of our human nature might win out as if at the end of a grand morality play broadcast live, capable of fixing the vast complexities of the economic world too.

Can the world be solved by 'the transcribed' words of the divine?

Have we lost, then, a belief in the ultimate importance of the word, its power, its ability to convey the guidance of the divine?

One can only know his own dissatisfaction, his own disappointment in himself for fitting too eagerly into the modern world of personal fame, the cult of pleasure and luxury, the don't ask/don't tell of professional lives of monetary existences.  It was never his own personality that mattered, but the yogi presence within, and if he emphasized the former he was in for bad health and angst, and if he emphasized the latter he felt calm and in good health and did good things.

Fortunately the small profile of this "writer" as "barman" included his habit of wishing to listen to people in particular, to their trials and travails, shared over the vino's veritas, and how that was the most priceless for him.  He did not come to work in a bar to pour the latest cocktail, nor even to make money beyond the bit given to him, prizing the time and the labor for its own sake, perhaps for keeping him around other beings thus somewhat sane.  In his confusion, in his long harried night, unclear of his role in life, he too fell into the vanity and the desire for wine and fun and dancing company;  he too drank too much, so as to suffer the next day;  he too fell for tasty food and things beyond the simple, the good, the nutritious (though it could have been far worse.)  Perhaps it led to a greater understanding of the human condition, even as he knew not what to do with his own life.  But even the thought that he was 'a writer' too had much vanity to it, though I suppose a writer is always saved by allowing things, perhaps the subconscious, speak through him, impersonally.  (Writers who are forced into the awkward spot of having to be publicly a writer ego are in danger of falling into a falsehood, if they do not hang onto their journalism of the self behind the ego, which would entail disowning most popular images of the writer who is worldwide explorer and interesting personality.  Kerouac, he fell victim to the fame, to the portrayal of his personality, and to his credit his sensitivity and realness hung in there a long time;  it's obvious the poor guy wanted to escape, though of course it would be very awkward, publicly for the writer to escape his role, as society has done away with the old comfortable roles of myth tellers, prophets, bards, troubadours, 'poets,' scholars, philosophers, that gave writers acceptable roles and duties.  Kerouac, who was deeply religious, presents a very real and interesting problem, and it seemed that he had indeed come to a kind of safety with his Buddhist works, finding a real role for himself, which was not easily come by;  it must have been chemistry, past a tipping point, a lack of sufficient help protecting him against his drinking, on top of years of abuse when out in the wilds, that got him.)

That which he had done reluctantly, as if forced, knowing not what else to do, turning to words themselves, like Milton's Adam when expelled from the Garden of Eden in Paradise Lost, turning to that blind and amorphous project of "writing," as if to lay out the only few things that were observable, became a kind of habit.  And whereas none of it would ever go anywhere, at least it would inform him about how the words in gospels and sutras and other revelations might have come about.

Fortunately, today, obviously, we have a large body of religious texts to rely on, we have law and order, some of us anyway, we have educational systems, we try our best to bring equality.  Perhaps, the prophets are no longer necessary, as if we have figured everything out.  The only thing we might complain about is our own selfishness, our own egotism, our own pursuit of materialism beyond what we need, all the things that get in the way of our own reflections, our own desire to go meditate somewhere and make gentle the ways of the world, things we all might have access to in due time, our own ability to inhabit the high words of the visionary and make them truer.

To me, yes, maybe he, Rick, that cool iceberg of a person of Casablanca, was, god forbid, at one point a writer of some sort.  That one quip of his, about the part of coming to Casablanca "for the waters," says it all.  "I was misinformed."  (Coincidentally the title of a good NY Times blog.)  He doesn't do it anymore.  He quit.  He runs his business, helps out where he can, keeps himself out of trouble, tries to live as neatly as he can, no clingy broads getting tipsy on him and causing a scene without getting promptly escorted home.

You almost see it in his hunch, the night he takes to the bottle upstairs, the solitary habit, almost see a notepad in front of him, as if he were to attempt to write someone a letter, sorting his thoughts out.  But he must have quit, at some point, grown tired of being the exasperating dumb fuck at the whims of the world.  And maybe this is why he came to, of all places, Casablanca.

My moment of internet fame coincided with a trip to the Hamptons, passing through New York both ways.  I found myself indulging in a look at paths not taken in the past, rising vaguely above me like the city skyline, towers of mysterious activity and adulthood and real jobs, the hedgerows of time closing in on me, my life like the song, "The Days of Wine and Roses."  Not necessarily a healthy proposition to dwell in the past, obviously, but a conscious thinker is inevitably aware of the thoughts in his head, even as he might not be able to control them.

The neat access point to adulthood and big cities is after college.  I chucked all that fresh opportunity away, at least I think somedays.  But was my path directed, in part, by a lack of something, a deficit of oxytocin that led to unhealthy behaviors of the sort that got me into the restaurant business. I fell into a cycle, of some form of work, stress, the seeking of quelling the stress, and the resulting depression (if not combined with an actual headache) the next morning which itself led me to write, as writing is an attempt to get the good chemistry flowing in the brain if not simply the reflection of some kind of dopamine imbalance.  I felt like I'd fallen into a vicious cycle, that made health hard to come by, as if there were some kind of powerlessness about getting out of such a routine.  Healthy things like yoga and calming aerobic exercise, those always help.  They improve self-confidence.

But the lacking of good chemistry led to the background of the book I wrote, about a self-perpetuating situation, an unintentional misunderstanding that did not get addressed, two young people almost comically denying each other the oxytocin of a good friendly meaningful hug.  The writing, the effort to understand, work on that which I have a psychological issue over, led to the work I do.  But writing about it didn't seem to really help.  It didn't solve anything.  Like other parts of my professional life, it revealed a lack of a plan where everyone else in the world does have a plan.  Who could blame me for trying to find through my own readings that maybe there is a way out of such a mess, related to its initial causes, for whom no one is to blame but the chemistry of the creature.

In the end, the final analysis, I hope one writes not so much to whine, but to, perhaps in some crude and unprofessional way, to share.

from the pages of Sketches From A Barman's Album

Casablanca is a movie that works, says a man, a director himself, grey haired, wearing glasses of the classic horned rim style, clear framed, after a short discussion on Truffaut's Jules et Jim.  The jazz trio is sitting down now in the corner, eating trout, while a small gathering mingles around the bar having passed through how the different parties know each other.  "We're both retired military.  We've worked on some projects together," the taller of two men says, comfortable with the venue.

Bogart's Rick, I ponder over him from time to time.  How would you describe him?  He's a bit of a loser, in some ways, in that he's not a doctor, nor is he married.  But give him credit, he runs a business out in a far strange corner of the world.  He's clever.  Though we might ask, what has he done with his life, it seems he is a survivor.

There are some shady things going on about him.  There are the bad guys, the Nazis, killjoys; there are the corrupt local officials, more or less amenable to better humor;  people trying to escape, etc.  We see the cold side of Rick, when Peter Lorre's character asked to be saved;  we see the good side of Rick, when he switches the money flow at the roulette wheel around to help out a young couple;  both sides are impersonal.

But his main reality, which has haunted him, shows up at his bar/club/hybrid casbah casino restaurant.  Ingrid Bergman's character.  In the course of events, some of his faults, his ego's feelings, will come out.  Sentimental, he takes to the bottle, even if normally he is a picture of self-control.  She will then take him to task for his short-comings, telling him that he is not the same man, after he expresses some bitterness of being left at the train station, not knowing the full story.

The movie ends in an interesting scene.  It's obvious he's doing the right thing, and her emotions come fully to the surface.  And to the deeper savage tribal subconscious eye, perhaps what he is doing is to bring forth the impersonal deep force of the Universe which is inclusive of what we beings call love.  Perhaps there is tension in the scene, in a G rated way, and in a deeper way, the eye sees some completion of the relationship between the two, despite the minor detail of everyone doing the right thing for the world at hand by whisking her away with the great war hero of free peoples, her husband.   We read that the plane is on the runway, revved up, fully charged, and that it will lift off, magnificently, but that for Rick there is still business to take care of, even while enjoying all this, which is to shoot the bad guy dead, a brave move, matter of factly without much orgasmic hoopla.  Rick preserves his energy, and it's a beautiful love scene all the way around.  The world will survive.

It's a fine cinematic few moments, of Rick's 'thinking for the both of them' selflessly without ego, and perhaps of a kind of Tantric energies.  And through it, Rick is reconciled, in the end, with his past and will now, presumably, live in the present.

A writer is obliged to look at things from beyond the horizon, from a higher dimension.  The three dimensions of the present of what is taken for reality is sometimes nerve-wracking, and the writer will write to maintain perspective and calmness.

I chose to admit the basic nervousness I feel when proceeding out of a routine.  Traveling is something I'm not used to, and it is strange and novel for me to break out of my work and get down to the train station.  I feel the same way about packing.  For that opens up possibilities.  Many people seem to me to have absolutely no problem getting on airplanes and going places, but, to a primitive like me, it's all very strange as it is eye-opening with regard to the size of the world.  Fortunately, I have a good sense of direction, or at least my mother tells me this.

I find that even a little task, like staking up, retying a tomato plant out in the garden has psychic complexity.  Until I remind myself to not mind the mosquitos, to get out there with a piece of kitchen string and scissors, that I am armed with the knowledge of how to tie at least one basic knot, that I can, in short, 'figure it out.'  Which I go do.  But it always seems to me, such a venture would not be possible unless there really was a great Universal force out there emanating through all creation and all reality that is on the side of people trying to do complicated things for the general good, the general flow of Nature's good offerings.  Life is possible, the Universe whispers (or I make up), and if you try, put some common sense to it, you'll be able to get something accomplished.  Even if somedays it seems harder than others, like when I procrastinate over train schedules and wonder how the night's shift will go...

I don't suppose people could ever even write letters without that sense of things being doable.  Yes, you can say what needs to be expressed in a few simple lines, if you sit down and try it.  No matter the complexity, just boil it down to what in your heart you want to say.  And then, at least, like every body else, at least you are trying.

I know full well how the complexities of things can psych you out sometimes, pushing you back from trying to, for example, say the things you'd like to say to someone to gently start a conversation.  All you have to offer anyway is quite simple, though the confusions of personality and inner voices can make it seem very complicated.  The offering is to with your own humble being try to represent or bring out the greater force, the power of the Universe and all creation and reality, which we can usefully refer to as, well, love, I guess.

Short of brain injury and other bad things that can happen, no one really would, in a right mind, attempt harm.   And yet people do cause great harm.  Misunderstandings?  Fallacies of selfishness?  The political world is often a mystery.

There's a time, brought on by obvious maturity--ha ha ha--when you find out that it's okay.  It's okay.  The entire Universe is built on something, some law, something that we could, perhaps, if feeling religious, call love, or, if you prefer, something grand and inclusive.   Sometimes referred to as Quantum Physics, of which there is no limit, an excess, a complete applicability.  That law might not care particularly about our corner of things, Earth, the way things are going here, seemingly quite disinterested, but still applicable when you consider life and nature and the shape of things.

So, given the reality of the great excess, the great energy of love behind manifested reality, so what if you just kissed her.  Something that happened once.  And then because of sweetness, irritating sometimes, nothing ever happened.  The great force behind it all had no need of anything particular, no need for anything dramatic, but the good sweetness that young people, full of life, bring to their dealings.  Okay, sure, it had its foolish immature sides, dumb, a waste, but you can only live in the present.  Love just is, a presence, a deeper reality.  It's not all meant to go strictly into reproduction of a species, obviously.  The force behind the reality is naturally channeled into a lot of things, art, poetry, kindness, the art of everyday life.  It wishes the best for us.