Stupid thoughts fill the mind, distractions are myriad, the iPhone is clutched, but it's time, time to write.  Put Facebook aside, the Google news, Tinder...  The Weather Channel in the background, NPR, the background coffeeshop chatter...


If you were a superstitious type, Irish, prone to ghostly and half mystical thoughts, you'd wonder if you'd been played by your grandfather's dark soul, as if his presence in your life dragged you down into the DNA of his life... skeptical of scholars, a man of the school of hard knocks, the restaurant business, viewing his sensitive grandson wishing for a poetic life as laziness, go get a job.  He'd stifled you on the Easter night you'd met the beautiful princess, and that you didn't pick up the phone and call her that night proved to be something to rue over.  And so was a young college graduate dragged down into a certain kind of a life, a bitter quality, an unfriendly quality to it, and the kid had  no defenses against the old man's DNA of life.

I read such a theory somewhere in the gnostic works of a Samael Aun Weor.  It made a certain amount of sense.  How one could fall to such  thing, unprotected, vulnerable, a strong minded dark old man there in the room with you...  The sins of the grandfather are visited upon the grandson...  Not something the logic minded would lend credence to, but in a way, it makes a certain amount of sense, particularly if you've lived it out, sort of scratching your head.  Which is not to speak ill, necessarily of your grandfather, but just a note upon the human condition, fallen nature, sins, bad behavior.



A surprise as I get to work.  The busboy, from Cameroon, announces he is quitting.  This is his last day, this the first jazz night shift, a Wednesday, early in January.  I'm leaving, he says, after his embrace, affectionate enough.  I like the guy.  Why, Jonah?  I want to be at peace.  I am not at peace here.  Everybody talks, Jonah, you didn't do this, Jonah, you didn't do that.  Nobody is perfect.  Nobody.

This does not appear to be good news.  Those doomed to work upstairs, at the Gaul's so called Wine Bar, have benefited from having our own busboy on these difficult and tedious Jazz Nights.  Not a shared one, paying more attention to the affairs of the main dining room, visiting now and again to drop off food or take dirty plates downstairs...

Johan prays over the corner, by the cutting board on top of the stove, in his native language.  He is a Jehovah's Witness, quietly.  He will not tell me anything, just some vaguely stated words about how someone he won't name is 'very powerful,' and that one has to watch himself, and that the boss knows everything that happens in the restaurant.  Of course.  That Jonathan is no longer at peace here, that he just wants to work in peace, is interesting.

It's snowing now, blowing down at a fifty degree angle in the street lamps of quiet S Street as a DC police car saunters around the lot of the Boys and Girls Club parking lot.  "Not good for us," says Jonah as he heads down to change out of his work clothes, to bike home, as I might bike home too, unless laziness overtakes me.  I'd like to get to the Safeway, but I'm running out of gas.  I go down and talk to him down in the basement for a moment, but he doesn't have much to say.  He has thick sweat pants on over his muscular legs.  I put Michael Jackson on on the Pandora as he did the last part of setting up the tables, but a part of him had already gone, and after singing a few lines, returned to praying, eyes clothes, standing upright in front of the cutting board, which seems now to me like a shrine of some sort, and the literary part of the mind cannot help but somewhere think of Melville's Queequeg praying in his own language before his own idols.

Then later, I follow him out in the street, still in my work shirt.  He's locked his bike out on the avenue.  He gets on his bike, turns its flashing taillight on, and rolls away without looking back, without saying a word.  His shouts from the bottom of the stairs announcing his departure, the flashing lights of the bicycle headlight shining up the stairs of to the wine bar, calling out my name are a thing of the past, and I watch his departure in the cold silence, nary a car or a bus or a cab on the street.  Maybe I was his Judas, the one who let him down, though I cannot remember anything in particular, supportive, and it rings as a relief to me, that he told me about how he had expertly opened bottles of champagne, like I showed him, at a holiday family gathering.

And I myself, not so happy there, as they come late and leave early, leaving me, the closer to drift with the last duties.  I'm close to being my own boss, sure, I like that part, but I'll have a glass of wine there, and the next day, wake up exhausted.


It seems, or perhaps one wonders about it, there is an efficiency with which the family patterns are passed on, one could call it the family craziness.   One wonders if perhaps it's not a bad thing that society organizes people, giving them structure, and too bad there are the eternally rebellious amongst us, yet to be bred out of us, better sense prevailing, the ability to join the rank and file and the army coming as redemption.  One thinks of Larkin's line, your mom and dad, they fuck you up, they might not mean to, but they do, and throw in a little extra, just for you, shines out in a new light in moments of introspection.

I look at my little piles in the kitchen, the recycling, in a double grocery paper bag, wine bottles, tomato sauce cans, plastic containers, the Rubbermaid tub for dirty dishes, the drying rack, the stove, the sort of clutter of spices and the toothbrush upon the counters, the little can for green tea.  I look at the small pile of books upon the bed, slowing growing, until one day, it will be like hers.  I try to keep the paper and bits of cardboard moving along, and also, the plastic bags and empty meat wrap.  Just like my mom, headed her way.  There is a beauty to it.  I think of Wyeth, Christina's World.


And who knows when, why, or what, we shall write.  And errands even on a cold day seem welcome, the list drawn up, green tea, razor blades, rubber dish gloves, a charging cable, meat, vegetable, soda water, wine.  Small anxieties as I bundle up, make the last annotations to the list, skin moisturizer.  And the genes, the DNA within, comes up with an old Beatles song, "she was a girl in a million, my friend.  I should have known she would win in the end."