It ain't a bad job, being a barman, don't get me wrong. I've met tons of nice people. I've shared some fine moments, some good laughs, good stories, life's events. But you don't always feel like going in. For all you do, you really don't get much respect for your work. Anyone could do it, society at large holds. It's not like being a doctor. Of course. I agree. But there are deeper reasons why one might have fallen into the barman life, and they are real and honest, even if there's a horrible lack of future and pension. Well, you'll always be able to find a job, if you want one. Great. You get to go on playing a lackey from a Chekhov story, and not being a real man. You can't afford otherwise.

And writing, the same thing. You're just a self-indulgent wimpy type, fancies himself as poetic. Like, where is that going to fit in usefully to society? Write something useful to people. Write something that will sell. But, who else stands up for your inner life? Who else is helping you protect it? No one reads you, though. No one offers much moral support. Silence. I guess this is something that a lot of writers get used to, though it's shocking, in a way. The dignity the writer possesses is a fallen one, an ignored one. Like Boris Karloff tells Gary Cooper in High Noon, people just don't care, they just don't care. They'll come by the bar, they'll be nice, maybe they ask about your blog or your book, but, you'll continue to live in a vacuum. Because it doesn't have enough to do with money and security and things of that sort. It's not practical enough for them, so why spend the time.

When a birthday comes, you almost don't know what to do with the kindness. You end up feeling, often, whether fair or true or not, that it's the image of a personality someone else has concocted and created for you the in the three dimensional world of PR that's being celebrated. A small day that comes in the face of all the silence and ignorance of all the good work one does, of all the work that the spiritual being is doing. Maybe that work is invisible, but if so, it really shouldn't be. However, the spiritual being, I guess, gets used to that silence, the muteness, the lack of attempts to appreciate, the being-unrecognized.

The disastrous faithlessness of Marxism came about at a time when it seemed no one could recognize the inherent goodness, the spiritual quality of the human being, as if in the age of the factory's hours and the machine all that had become rather irrelevant. So, the attitude was, well, if we can't notice that spiritual aspect of daily life, you know, fuck it, forget about it, pretend it never existed and go on with life in the cruel world and make it the best you can. (Classical music was, consciously or not, all about kindness, even if only a certain few got to really enjoy it, in the age before Marxism. Chivalry, even earlier, was celebrated even as it became a kind of children's story of purity and King Arthur with somewhat increasing irony but still with respect by Cervantes.) But you can't make it the best of it if you're forgetting that key element to begin with!

But if, if, one could raise a small ripple, just a tiny tiny one, of an example living of a true act of kindness emanating from the spirit and proceeding outward and even having nothing to do with the 'real world and all it's goals, aims, desires, wants,' then maybe that ripple would stand a chance of being like Robert Kennedy's, proceeding outward, joining and joined by others, a hope becoming a wave that would knock down the mightiest walls of oppression and coldness and inhumanity. That is the purpose of the poem, the moment of a story, say when a boy meets a girl in tender hopes, or when someone is met by a great generous teacher, and of all the little kind acts of sad daily modern life.

Or maybe I just got a bad attitude. Chalk it up to having a birthday coming down the pike.