You do wonder from time to time why be a writer. Why do you keep odd hours, have a fondness for seclusion. I'm good at bartending, I suppose, because in a way I don't mind it. I don't mind the hours and the isolation, a life lived drifting against the tide of a city and all its people who work by day, off at night. I must not. I've been doing it a long time. No, I'm not trying to be dramatic, I'm just sorting out why such a marginal life.

It's a hard job, though it wouldn't seem to be, front of the house at a restaurant. Dead dog tired at the end of the shift as the last few chores are done, you get yourself home, and then, even if you've had some already, you need some wine. Oh, sure, in a perfect world, you wouldn't have had the drink at work to combat the mental fatigue at the end of a night talking with people, being on, as on a stage, and you'd just go home and go to bed. Hell, you almost fall asleep in a chair sometimes at the end of the night, when you just wanted to stop and catch your breath for a moment. Anyway, you'll be up for another five hours after you come home, and I haven't found a way around that. Nine to fivers don't fall asleep straight away either. I might envy that their bodies don't have to fight against the natural cues of daylight.

Yes, it's a tiring job, and the shifts of a week add up, just like they do for everyone. I must admit that sometimes I don't get up much before I have to. Meaning that I don't write much those days I work, shamefully enough. I used to be a bit better at it. Maybe a certain discouragement comes with age. Maybe you find exercise, a little yoga, more essential to maintain.

In an ideal world, we'd write like Updike. Up, go the office, break for lunch, back at it, then finally home. Brilliant. Then, of course there's the Dostoyevsky model, of getting up at one in the afternoon, and finally after the house has gone to bed, sitting down at the desk by the light of candles (having a hatred of electric lights), rolling cigarettes that he's not allowed to smoke to pass the time when inspirations run back out to sea.

You begin to live this way, and it easily becomes your life, who knows why. Maybe you should completely change everything, be a schoolteacher or some form of worker with some form of pension. Yet, all those intricacies seem to intricate, and the writer prefers a job to be at least mentally simple, or am I wrong. Yes, you could look at the bar man's job talking to all those people kind of an interruption, but yet maybe they feed him too, in a way he's not so aware of, even as he gets tired out.

No, maybe it's just that he isn't fit for any other job but writing, and that he'll do anything just to keep his claim staked. Even if that job drags him away far too often, takes his energy away.

Clint Eastwood, now he gets being a writer. You can see it the characters he creates, the cop who works at night, who doesn't give a fuck about normal doings. A musician, an athlete, an actor, an inn keeper, a director... he's found out how to make it work for him. Not too far off from the way Shane MacGowan does what he does, knowing that all his life he wanted to be a professional musician and would do what it took.

Yeah, with any path or following, as they say, any dream, comes some punishment that you just have to live with and be grittily proud of.

Now, of course there is a certain amount of masochism in it that a lot of people just want no part of. But that apparent masochism of going through a performance of a song of, say Brendan Behan's, The Auld Triangle, is a way of working through the stuff of life. That's just a matter of taste, but it could be such stuff a writer needs.

Realizing that you/he/she a writer, that is the greatest act a writer will be able to pull off. There comes a feeling of no longer needing to apologize for who you are, for what your tastes are, for what you can read from the soul, and all that is bedrock. After that, maybe, it's easy.