Yeah...  I had a history of drinking.  In a solitary way, sometimes, or sometimes just too much.  Tending bar some of us find a lot to be on top of, and so, well, I'd get stressed out, and then I'd feel like I needed something to calm my nerves.

Oh, sure, I'm not one to discount certain modes of Irish creativity, but they should happen in company, not alone.  Well, of course, practicing an instrument enough, trying out a singing voice, that's something that has to be done in private, but...

In the frustrations and nervous things of life, three quarters of a bottle of Beaujolais, twelve percent in alcohol, it seemed to me to calm the beast.  But then, you know, it begins to take a toll on the mind, on your nutrition, on your mood.  I must emphasize the apparent difficulty of my job as it seemed to me, and how the wine began in a healthy way, a social half a drink with last of the customers, when the night was pretty well packed up.  The busboy would come up and jostle me in my space as he swept and grabbed all the things he wanted to take downstairs to be cleaned and sorted and put away in the kitchen, the laundry bin and the trash, and that I found nerve-racking, an invasion, and it was easier to just go around to the other side of the bar until all his sound and fury had absented itself.

Now I am not a good writer, not by any means.  A sketcher of half-baked formless half connected thoughts.  Again, simply a writer's notebook.  An unguarded attempt to get a few more words out of the richer than one thinks out of the hidden inner ecosystem of biological thinking, memory, dreams, impressions, loose thoughts emboldened by some basic need of self-entertainment, spending too much time alone.


But I will say that given the state of journalism needing to pander to the market forces of the algorithms of powers that be of social media traffic, I found it not an unpleasant to be, writing pieces that would never fit in to the slightest form of a promotable readership.    Writing is free, giving it away is free, and I do not care much beyond all that.  I paid for it in other ways, that lack of financial return, by tending bar, by having a sort of odd life, that sort of thing.

But I will also tell you, that when anyone takes it upon himself to harness the practicality of market forces, of being shrewd enough to write something that in anyway pleases the beasts of marketplace self-interest, whatever will be gained is irretrievable lost in basic underlying truth and sensitivity to the human condition.  The corporate sensibility, the one that doles out all the rewards there to be had in the great pie, will never be true to the human soul.  Bottom line.   The old camel through the eye of the needle rich man rule of The Gospels, always vigilant upon the truths of our deepest intentions.

Humans, of course, we are selfish.  I suppose we must be.  That's just logic, right?  Can't end up with nowhere to lay your head like Old Jesus, can you now, it would be neglectful and irresponsible to your own family, first of all, you don't want to end up like that.

And thus one hopes that art is the final untouchable realm, that will never respond to the number of clicks you get on the web traffic counter scale...  Art is the spiritual thing.

Attempts to make a living in the hospitality business were problematic, and perhaps that meant I needed to refine my thinking...


Do you have to go through the whole process of being scapegoated in order to appreciate all this?  Does the Christian tradition go just a step farther in offering a vision of a scapegoat who gets a second chance, at least a sketch of what that might be like?