An amiable gentleman who comes to the French wine bar where I work has come up with an intriguing idea.  "Hey, Theodore, I've got an idea for you.  You've been doing this a while, waiting on the high and mighty for a long time, politicians, lawyers, bankers, the high and mighty, the fallen, the in between...  With your credentials and accomplishments, why don't you write, say,  A Bartender's Guide to Sanity, you know, something like that.  With all you know, you'd put a psychiatrist a shame.  Sell it as an ebook, 99 cents."  He appeared to be onto something.  "You'll sell a million of them in the first month, like that woman I just read about.  Women will be lining up, tossing you their hotel room keys... like Wayne Newton and all those little old ladies out in Las Vegas."

What would I write about?  What does one have to say after waiting on people at a small intimate bar for more than twenty years?  Is that even an accomplishment?  Would what you have to say be about the obvious matters of drink service, wine, food, or about the stories that people leave behind either in the tales they tell or through their behavior?  Would it be about how to listen to people, be there for them as a sort of make-shift shrink, a good enough listener?  Would it be about the funny humorous stuff?  Would it be about the passages we all go through in life, the things we can only share with those we know well enough?  (Lord knows how modern life could make us lonely, cut off in our professions.)  Would it even be about that off kilter life of the night shift and waiting on people various and sundry?  Would it touch upon colorful coworkers, the ins and outs of restaurant work, the behind the scenes?  Would it be a practical guide in any way, shape or form even in any respect?

What do I have to do, anyway, with wine?  Once beyond the basics--and there are many intricacies to bury yourself in on the way to sommelier and wine master expertise, in many ways worth pursuing, if that is your passion--of explaining the place of wine in a meal with a bow to all the variation, what then?  (Good wine is good wine, all ye need know.)  What is it all about?

All I seem to be able to think about, or come up with, for the time being is some sort of bartender's guide to Enlightenment, though I'm not at all certain that would even hold water.  But, you might start by saying, that the Buddha was an ordinary person much like you or I, and he achieved Enlightenment and held that you and I could too.  Or, rather, is it all the matter of a strange, long and certain form of education, of a sort, maybe something along the lines of what was an experience, a background, for a younger Abraham Lincoln, that of a tavern, in his case not long lived, as he moved on, even as he left it in no small amount of debt (and I'm pretty far behind too at this point.)

A side point:  how can one aid in the general Enlightenment when at the same time with the other hand he serves the numbing down of conscious awareness?

Do you write about it, or, realizing its futility, do you get out of it, as quick as you can, realizing that you're not a business man, that it paid your bills, kept a roof over your head, provided a crude harbor and a modicum of human warmth while you struck out on your own (an attempt) as a sort of a writer, not quite effectively (and without the monetary rewards of, say, Dan Brown, ha ha ha), though not with any particular drama.  Do you have anything to say about it all, or does the writer's inherent interest lay completely elsewhere?  Does the writer's exile that one could previously locate in a particular condition, existing in the contrast between a nation as it would be and a totalitarian regime such as experienced by Milan Kundera and Josef Skvorecky along with the entire Czech nation, Central Europe along with her, happen now in a stranger more elusive far more confusing way, having co-opted the blood flow of popular culture and the ultimate confusion of all things complicated, overly complicated, too much so, really, for the human mind?

How much anyway would the readership put up with tales of Enlightenment without some stuff of practical interest?  Or, to put it another way, how many books would Kerouac's have sold without the intrigues of crazy Dean Moriarty and all the trappings of 'Beatnik culture, say, if he just simply wrote of insights had while reading about Buddhism and being St. Jack of the Dogs one spring near Rocky Mt., North Carolina?

Yes, I agree with my customers.  What can you do sometimes but have a glass of wine.

Presently I am one for the late nights, and can't do a damn thing about it.

The attempt to be egoless is so often misunderstood, misconstrued.  We attribute this to educators, and we hope it is so.  Who is an educator, then?