It's not the greatest of career choices. It's better a hobby than a profession. It's better regarded as something that lets you keep an even keel rather than finding out any ultimate answers to life.

It is always happenstance, the gift of a day, of enough time to sit down and create something spur of the moment. It is some form of exercise for what we don't exactly know, for some inner sense of discipline and training.

It doesn't pay much. It leaves you with dealing with another job entirely. In my case, the night job in the restaurant and more than nineteen years of tending bar. It's not a good job for personal relationships. If you find a schedule that works for you, doesn't wipe you out, it's not lucrative enough to allow you to go out much. So you stay in, cook at home, drink your wine, do your housework, find amusement for odd hours. You wish you felt up for going out when everyone else is. You wonder where everyone goes on Thursday and Friday evenings as you make your way to and from the grocery store. The social being feels sad, deprived.

But you begin to feel you wouldn't be capable or competent at a relationship the way your life is now. And you probably emit that defeatist vibe. Which enhances and contributes to the sense of living on society's fringes, even as you are serious about making a contribution to society.

What was it? Some form of chemistry that came into being in late adolescence, some sort of sense that to be manly and responsible it was some sort of holy duty to write, to write about mistakes maybe, for the sake of others, so that the world would be a kinder more understanding less glossing-over sort of place. You envisioned yourself as some sort of woe-ridden Lincoln and somewhere in your heart a brilliant answer to put all people at peace through the gentleness that you shine out, correcting people's nerves without a word. You wanted to be like Jesus, that original great writer whose words caste out demons and healed the sick.

But if you do so, you do it largely alone, in a place where you feel it is safe to write. Without too much noise, a comfortable chair maybe, not too much of your own clutter around to pull out your hair, and maybe a bicycle or some other form of exercise awaiting you, and trying not to worry about that time when you feel lonely enough to open the bottle of wine to study it and its effects.

People don't really know, I would imagine, about your other life in the course of their experience with you in your other role. They might remember you mumbled something about writing, but they know you mainly as wine-pourer, booze-dispenser, figure of a bar busy and slow, a creature of endurance more than any other skill. The inner life does not exist, and when you've written a book would feel embarrassed to share it with those people. For then they would know the sadness of what you might portray (along with its victories) is something you own, not created out of the blue, and who ever creates out of the blue anyway. No, it almost wouldn't be right to share your tales of woe or whatever and sensitivity, your own failings, your own claim to goodness and decency. That would introduce something inappropriate to any barroom or watering hole except those very fine ones that exist only in the imagination like Rick's Place in Casablanca, Bogart playing the character behind it, muttering 'of all the gin joints in all the world...', some form of pyramid ideal, a ritual tomb to humanity and the Irish and all those goodhearted sorts who open up a bit. In other words, all those things that people find themselves too cool, too serious for, too together, or just not interested in the course of maintaining their careers. No, you can only make very subtle and oblique jokes to reference real struggles and victories that smack of failure and failures that smack of victory.

Mention Kerouac and people might go 'oh,' in an affirmative way, as if to say, "I like that passage from some book somewhere," but that quickly turns to an different sort of 'oh,' an 'oh' of deflation over the impracticality, of the inability of him to, like Van Gogh, fit in with the world, on down the line toward alcoholism and physical ruin. Ahh, but what he did, what he achieved, there is something of achievement, somehow, at least if one respects writers and their work on behalf of the tribe. The great model on the one hand and let's not go there with the rest.

People are busy with their lives. They have lots to do. Even leisure must be carefully parceled out. Why read the lonesome writer anyway? That part I never figured out. Maybe I wasn't supposed to.