Off to the kiddie birthday party.  The week starts.

There is a fair amount of anguish getting ready for a Saturday night, in the world of barmen.  Profound worries about getting set up.  The guy the night before did such a job of restocking that I bring up a milk crate full of wine bottles, a six of soda water, two sixes of beer, a round of citrus fruit, and then come to find out he did nothing to set up the wines of the week, there on the top of the page of wines by the glass offered.   This pisses you off.  And then the kid you're working with is a no show until ten minutes before the door opens.  Physical therapy, he explains.  You could have let me know.  The door opens, and boom, there are people, and the person with the phone is filling the tables with last minute reservations.  An old girlfriend is expected to come by with her people, and you've just come from a kiddie birthday party, a fifth at a Mexican restaurant, upstairs, with balloons and such, and for the barman being around Georgetown parents and their kids is a bit like being around dinosaurs, foreign, and inexplicable.  The parents handle it all with aplomb.  And I gotta go to work soon enough, after I help family lug home the load of presents...

Visiting a kid in her own space, listening to them, you might begin to wonder, in terms of the pieces of your own psychological puzzle.  Whereas you yourself have always prided yourself on being a nice guy, in your family's whole sometimes painful tradition of being gentle and kind, educators through and through, perhaps that very successful at the city and the professional world isn't all that sensitive, all that kind, all that generously open to the world of others.  A charmer, sure, able to turn it on at will, when need be, but otherwise, not that very demonstrative when it comes to sustained generosity of spirit.

Well, as we all know, nice guys finish last.  Right?

But then you begin to see that set-up, the dynamic.  Pretty much working on you your whole life.  The time he used your new leather gloves to wipe off the door sill of his new car at Christmastime, don't get any shit in here (that kind of stuff of wintertime up north, salt, road grit from the Mass Pike.)  A looking after his needs, but not yours, the strategic put-down...


Of course you love him, in the deepest way possible.  As a brother, of your parents flesh, with whom you've lived on, your whole life.  The pioneer, the leader, the one kind to you enough, generously letting you tag along.  The one able to get the neighbor girl to pull down her pants, the one who built the great tree houses, the dynamic one, the leader.  Brotherly love is as deep as you get, coming out of the Big Bang.  Jack and Bobby.  No words need be spoken.

The stern Irish cop, well-humored enough, will come out, reminding one of his own most idiotic tendencies...  He's right about you, in general, often enough, and you have your own deeper idiocy and states of poverty in affairs, and he could go at you much much worse, indeed, he is tolerant, turning the other cheek...  But for the kindness little brother must have as a compensation to his head-strong rudeness to keep fellow humanity at bay.  Big brother, the Mafia don, younger brother, the priest, gently taking care of aging mother.

Your own almost perverse kindness, the deferential humbling quality that colors personalities so fortunate to harbor such instincts....  Your own moral stance in life, God help you...


After he wrote, there in the sunlight on the back deck, laptop propped up so that he could write sitting on the old teak bench of his father's garden, he looked down at his bones, his fine wrists, light as air, covered with a gentle forest of golden hair.  Tumeric water with lime, a can of soda water.  The workweek had started.  When his guts had straightened out from rising and hydrating, he would take the rest of his vitamins, and prepare to go to work.   The anguish of starting the workweek, at least that was done and over.  And he'd gotten up at a reasonable hour, more or less, out into the December daylight, the vital dose of nature, Vitamin D...

Well, Jesus, that explains a lot.

Once you start writing, which yes, is brave, people are right about that, insights come, first in flickers, in dumb animal movement toward a light.  The first lines lead to insights, which lead to other  insights, sometimes each deeper than the last.

And so he pondered, yes, this was why he was attracted to meanness, thought it normal, this was why he acted as if kindness from other people was a rare and seldom thing.  This was why here at the flickerings of the prime of his life, supplemented by Chinese herbs and medications to keep the mood calm and positive, he was sprinkling a bit of cornstarch onto the pink rubbery artificial vagina of his Fleshlight to keep it "realistically flesh-like and supple," not tacking as old rubber gets.  A dose of liquid Immodium to protect the first travels of the day.  After the shower, returning to his thoughts.

Women do not have to be kind to you, not initially, but there are ways to read them.  His instincts had always been good, but it was as if he were handicapped in some strange but crucial way, thus the ironies of his life, love life being far too ambitious a term, alas.

It would explain, he thought, as he zombie-like gathered himself for work, the checklist, making a sandwich of gluten free bread and roast beef from the Safeway, socks, a shirt, the tendency to insulate himself, by various means, from other people in general, or why he sometimes took to the wine bottle alone at the end of a shift, to calm the beastie...  No wonder encounters with people in general made him nervous...

Yet, people told him, at work, that he had excellent people skills, that he should consider being an actor, and inside he would say, yes, I am an actor... many talents, but how to use them.  Quisote and Hemingway's old man of the sea were figures of noble defeat, there was precedence in literature for that.

Where do the broken-hearted go--off to live out country songs and Hank Williams and the heartbreak that every Irishman knows is his inheritance...

Maybe he needed a puppy dog, or a prostitute.  One of those lifelike sex-dolls made in Barcelona that cost thousands of dollars he'd come across through an article on Vice.com....