The Great Crisis of Pandemic Illusion

After years of bartending, I’ve come to see that there really are angels and demons in and around us. Everywhere, good and bad influences, and a bartender can end up feeling like a poster child of being caught up in people’s personalities. Certainly there can be definably good ways in drinking people, and I can’t say people are intrinsically bad, not at all. The problem hearkens back to the basic tenants of Buddhist thought, the illusions of self, the presence of multiple “I”s within a person, all the voices, conflicting and otherwise that drive people to do what they do.

The point of higher consciousness is first to achieve a distance over the illusory motivations that come with personality and all the acts one puts on. So even in good times, as in friendly times at the bar, I felt a sense of suffering, suffering under the capriciousness of people’s whims. I suffered until finally I realized that much of what I saw before me was all the personas, all the “I”s people brought in with them, expecting me to take them seriously. (Don Quixote seems a classic example of a persona you might find in a bar. One day a novel will be written about his opposite, one who sees all the illusions.) All I could do was, as any bartender does, try to maintain order in greatly fluctuating circumstances.

I could easily be ashamed of all my years behind a bar. It hurts to realize that I’ve had many willful “I”s in myself leading me alone where I did not control them. You do feel foolish when you look back on things you’ve done. One didn’t know. You try to use your judgment, but it isn’t infallible. You can easily fall into a situation where there isn’t any control beyond the misleading appearance of it.

But that’s all how a human being learns a lesson, and that’s the way I learned it as well as I did, through a constant failure, through an embrace of illusions, and finally seeing a light amidst my own mistakes. That’s what you call ‘living.’

There are some things that we do which are good for us. Either good for the body or the soul. And I can say that it is a good thing waiting on people, good for the soul, to the point where it is almost tedious to be waited upon, or to make many social claims that one previously felt comfortable with. One can only feel for the aching heart of humanity. And anyway, such self-questioning is in order in a time when solid economic meaning is stripped away, leaving us to redefine usefulness, professions and basic notions of what represents value to us, what’s worth investing in, as ultimately we invest our lives in whatever we do. Indeed, the timing of the great crisis of pandemic illusions is opportune. To me, after all those years of music played in bars and restaurants, a good guitar seems important, a Martin D-28.

I can’t say there was much that seemed so finally important, other than learning, and a few other things that are good for the soul. Writing remained real, as exercise, as something good for the magnetic flow in the electrical fields of the cells. And things, if you will, or rather people, as Jesus Christ and Buddha became more real to me than anything. A time when what seemed to be illusion turned out to be real, and what seemed so real turned out to be illusory.