It is a necessary skill, in this modern life, and I must be very bad at it, the skill of negotiating. By nature or by nurture it feels foreign to me. Is it the mode of restaurant work, of waiting on people with limitless patience, my 'professional life' bleeding over on to me and my days off? I cannot negotiate a text, or comfortably handle email or Facebook, and barely the dishes. Particularly not until I have sat down and tried, in my misery, to write something. And each day it is random thoughts, and how can a random thought have much overall value, except if you manage to catch them one small one at a time and manage to bring it back.

Smarter people talk about choices, and certainly there are choices. Smarter people know that you have to make choices if you want a decent life, and they are right.

The lonely voice--the title of a lovely book by Frank O'Connor on the short story form--of the pen across the blank page, remembering, creating hypothetical people and circumstances, or stuck with his own pasts seems a comfortable space away from all, from the poker game of seeking out what one wants, from the lies of thinking one deserves a particular, from all the signing on the dotted line.

Life, it always seemed to me, was an endurance effort of being a decent person, kind to strangers and acquaintances, that this ultimately would get you recognized and rewarded, instead of cast out, removed for not being able to keep up with the competition. This passive life.

I gather my voice was too small and quiet, too vague, too selfless, even when I knew what I wanted. My words, my actions were too symbolic, too much something in need of being interpreted, not coming out clearly enough. I wanted my answers to life's questions to be meaningful and true but could never get the explicit stuff right, except in remaining personally true. And one gets overlooked for that sin or error, misunderstood. He's taken to be someone who is 'acting out,' and maybe, to an extent, he is, that portion of it being uncontrollable.

I work in a restaurant not because I love wine, but because I wanted to be a writer, which the job does indeed sometimes allow. But you get sucked in to the misinterpretation. People don't see a writer, they just see a barman, a fellow who's made odd choices in life, painted into a corner. My time to drink wine, anyway, would be at the end of the night, when all the people have gone, and then wine is a substitute, a picture of a woman as opposed to an actual presence, the pretense of a crowd to perform to when there is no one watching or listening, the pretense of a happy feeling when one is not happy. And the next day the wine is just another thing the body rises up to fight away, producing a low feeling.

One keeps at it, in secret. There is something lastingly and organically satisfying for the creature, the task of getting something vague and in the air down on paper, even if it shameful things, of then being able to look back at the expression and feel some achievement of honest recollection about a time, a place, a feeling, a personal moment. It can, after all, hurt to do such, in the sense that it is work and labor and often not pleasant, a strain of endurance, a realization that one must carry on with the task every day for the rest of his life in order for it to have some meaning and reach a proper end.

Oh, the poor creature, humanity, his unenviable place, the problems he creates, the pain he endures alone...




Behind everyone there is a story. As Fitzgerald put it, show me a hero and I'll show you a tragedy. Behind the picture of JFK, who was after all a magnificent specimen of humanity, there was for all the good health, some less than perfect health. Behind the barman who has so many loyal friends where he works, there is someone who goes home alone, who is unable to socialize, for one reason or another, as the world does. The trick is, I would guess, to be open about it all, that a picture of the true riches which are within and given to humanity and the human form would shine forth. Like the dark nights of Abraham Lincoln, the troubled psyche, that nevertheless led a nation in a difficult highly contentious time, the tender side of a man compelled to order bloodshed. Maybe another expression of our scarily sensual sides. (Perfect people we naturally find hard to trust. Be wary of claims of perfect empathy, perfect wisdom...) These days, the News of the World would get the goods on anyone. The best of us are that much farther from being perfect as the rest; anyone can be revealed with internet speed. Maybe not being perfect is something of a last refuge for the honest, even, to the point of being a Faulknerian idiot.

Behind any clean line a writer makes, like those of a Donne or a Shakespeare or a Dickinson or a Yeats, there lies a soul seeking the light out of clouds of trouble, finding footing along a stony pass, a satisfaction for words, words saying something, putting something well so that a matter may bear some better examination, even as confusion and troubles continue to stir and swell and circle. And so will the life of Lincoln during his wartime presidency, and in particular his address at Gettysburg, keep as a quintessential model of the writer's life and works. He had problems to work through, and he said what he wanted, what he thought appropriate without letting anything get in the way.

Time to take the corpus out for a walk in the woods, as one walks a loyal patient dog. And I hope no one will take it personally if I, curmudgeon-like, avoid people and interactions, wine and restaurants and, god forbid, bars... The last six nights straight at the bistrot have taken it out of the jolly barman, bearing the lies and truths that are commensurate to the job.