It's a hard balance for a writer to get work done while remaining social. Anthony Bourdain is a very social person, though his comments would have you believing differently. Claiming to be a misanthrope, he thrives in social circumstance, from kitchen to dining room to bar. The kitchen was a way to support himself as he followed his subliminal dream to be a writer.

Writing in the cafe has been one classic solution, of course the modern equivalent being Starbuck's. Enough background noise and people going by to satisfy a basic human urge, enough being left in peace to let the juices flow. Someone starts to pry, asking 'hey, what are you writing,' you have to shut them down. You need to protect your creative sphere. The talk will come later. As Hemingway put it, replenishing the well.

A conspiracy theorist might offer that between canned music tracks that hijack the brain and a lack of sidewalk cafes in the old Paris style, it's hard to write here in America, on top of whatever other complaints a writer might classically have, of struggles for pay and time enough to write. (Poverty, lack of a mainstream job, it all can make you a loner.) Interesting to note, that instead of the considered thought that writing for it's own sake brings, the bandwidth of the American mind is given over to the shouted agendas and hatreds of Limbaugh, Beck and Palin. Lincoln is turning over in his grave today. "Let us bind up the nation's wounds," he wrote.

A problem for me, when I get done with my work week manning the bar until they've all gone home, is feeling social enough to want to go out on a Friday night. You also have to feel you have enough money to go blow. And a city ain't cheap.

That's always been my mistake, not being able to balance the time needed alone, with the time of work's imposed social hour. Shyness is a problem. Not helped by the fact that a writer can seem to other people a really weird person, enough so that the writer begins to feel a little self-conscious of the clothes he is wearing, the air of being a bit apart from the rest. This is Bourdain's gift; he doesn't give a crap what the mainstream might think. He has self-confidence, doesn't mind being a little gonzo weird.

But the rest of us, we have to care what other's think a bit too much. We have our natural gentlemanly constraints as well, conversation with a passing neighbor, even as we're on our way off to write what we don't know we're going to write yet, thinking of somewhere, holding a fragile thing with care, hearing it, but not yet getting it down yet.

It's a real fault of his if he can't stick to a schedule, allowing peace and work by day, a social life at night. And odd hours, like those of a chef or barman, can be tricky.

Ahh me, a writer is a lazy person, who thinks his craft is enough to add to society.

Bourdain is an interesting guy. He observes, in his new book, if he hadn't fallen into drugs, he never would have had the string of lousy restaurant jobs to write Kitchen Confidential, experiences that must make the book what it is.