I was drawn to restaurant work, and liked bartending, because I found it offered simple understandable relationships, in keeping with the O blood (the oldest type) that courses through limb, organ, sinew, bone, nerve and brain. It's the same reason a maintaining a journal of daily thoughts, upon which to feel secure, is healthy for me. The diary of the animal keeping in touch with his own nature as he deals with the complexities of modern society. One goes and does something, interacts, goes out, etc., and there is a reaction, a need for grounding, a way to combat nervousness and anxiety. The human creature, however gloriously adaptable and resourceful, intelligent beyond belief or any of nature's wildest hopes, is round and organic, an animal, ever being forced to degrees into the square, the cubical, the non-relativistic modern maintenance of time that lives not in the moment, thereby complex.

I'd be very glad to hear that most people don't have such problems, but in the meantime I'll continue attempting to sort out my confusion.

As I say, being a barman is a job I can relate to. Basically, a public house, a gathering place with tribal tones of belonging, as ever since chimps the creature recognizes immediately difference in faces and more than that. It's a job that fits with the organic understanding of time the human being within can keep up with. You've got a task to do. A tiring one. You go in and do it as much as you can in a week's course without messing yourself up too much.

Going out, though, I don't like so much. Too many pretenses, too many lies, too much complexity and hidden nuances, mysteries female, male posturing, aggressions, an uneasy peace. All I can do is slip into the kindest mode possible, if not retreating into a corner to passively observe and let the effects of this strange thing of alcohol by turns relax, energize, make sentimental and reflective, stimulate and deaden, making coping easier in ways, making the animal sorrowfully sluggish and eventually, off to bed, once having dragged myself home where I am happier and far more productive. If I could bring a notepad and sit in a corner, taken care of and undisturbed, observing, I'd be happy. Would that there would be more mellow sidewalk cafes where one could sit for hours, as I hear there are in Europe.



A journal is a chance to seize the day. One wakes up with a theme from past experiences fresh and not so fresh, an idea to develop and let play out. To me it's largely a dialog between nature and modernity and all its products and habits. For an O, at least for me, dealing with the television and the newspaper is a constant trick, a battle requiring the resourcefulness of the hunter-gatherer to put such flickerings and shouts into perspective, to tone down in importance and come back to life directly and its textures and basic needs. How to meet the immediate need for protein.

Would that the historian would account for a subject's blood-type. Why did Darwin suffer such gas, and come up with such a broadly applicable theory? Napoleon? What was Jack's, what was Bobby's? What was Lincoln's? What was Hemingway's?

("Figure it out," my brother, a Type B, said to me once with regards to my writing, referring to the successes of Dan Brown, perhaps hinting that my problems were psychological, ones of laziness maybe. Of course, he was expressing greater concerns of love and things of far greater depth to go into here. I have seen other's reactions to my dumbness, as if to say to me, 'you just don't get it, do you,' and truly, I'm sorry, I don't. All I can do is try to behave according to that person's individual rulebook toward me, even as the creature within might buck and squirm. Even I, though, take pleasure in belonging to the social contract and the world beyond that extends all the way to workers in China and what-have-you. Maybe there's a related dumbness in someone like a Gaudi, who goes on building his wild crazy cathedral no matter what {until hit by a street car.})

So, it is a thing of blood type, I think anyway, why one writes, why one shares. Other people might find such a thing grossly inappropriate.

However, teaching and learning must continue beyond the classroom. Schools, after all, must reflect organic and natural human society and endeavors.

And even in a barroom, there are teachers and students, people who want to learn and partake of wisdom, reaching out hopefully for a greater good and a just and lasting peace.



The Tour de France, it makes this anxious creature happy, as I watch the climb to Station des Rousses. There's something comprehensible about it. I don't need to ask many questions about its basic whys and wherefores. I look at my bike, parked in its trainer stand, and the creature somewhere goes, "ugh," with some satisfaction, as if bone in one hand, wiping meat juice off the side of my mouth with the back of the other. But before a ride, I must go grocery shopping, a complexity I fear, but I have my list, and anticipation is rising in my gorge already. Don't forget figs.