You get to work.  You take the wines out of the main ice bin and into the sink, transferring the main ice to the sinks, then cleaning out the main ice bin.  Mineral water stocked.  Dining room set up, silverware backups ready to go.  The reservation sheet.  Lemons, limes, olive and cherry back-ups, iced tea, hot water for tea, coffee.  Butter and bread.  Pitchers filled with ice water.  The sound system.  A final wipe of the slate bar top.  Cloth napkins ready to wipe the glassware coming out of the bar glass dishwasher.

What would have possessed you to be a writer were it not for some act of faith...  That it was in the name of being a kind of priest, then it all made sense.  Your life would be on the constant order of sacrifice.  It would be little like the mainstream picture of life, family, duty.  It would be a life as one might imagine of a benevolent alien arriving from some faraway planet.

The things of higher wisdom, completely intuitive, come to the cultures of the world, and there amongst people they are adapted and regularized.  Institutions are set up, earthly ones.  Human.  Full of ego.

The only system Christ brought with him was that of the shepherd looking over his flock, going in search of the lost sheep, a fisherman saving human souls.  Upon this, a whole Church was built, with codified liturgical practicer and so forth.

It is always looking at things to wrong way to try to adapt to human systems.  Stay away and out of them as far and for as long as you can.   Whatever is true in a worldly way, be cautious of it, be wary of it.



He was a bartender because he was by preference or nature always working.  Even to have a social life was to be working hard, burdened with making sure everything went right.  He was a writer, too, because he was always working.  And when he was given a night off he did not take it naturally as a chance to go out and have fun but as a call to go back to the work of writing.  He wasn't good at it, but it was work to him, and for some stubborn organic reason, written in the genes of the particular kind of animal he was, he had, as long as he could remember, been at it.

It was now nine at night rather than three thirty in the afternoon when he rose off the couch and finally felt up for a shower.  Sitting on the toilet, with the hot water tap of the shower on, he listened to the sound of the water drop toward a bass octave as the water ran warm, then hot finally.  Unlike a water glass filled, with the note rising, for some reason, hot water likes a note lower as it pours than cold.

The night off had given him a chance to gain and hold for a moment a fleeing thought, that what he had done professionally had extended further the work he had put into his earlier book.  There was something ostracizing about being taken as an eccentric in college years, but over the years after that period written about he had gone further into the life of the servant exiled from the normal pleasures of a successful modern life.  His life was an impressionist portrait of the polite man behind the bar in all his native isolated inner life.  To reach certain material, it depends on your position, your walk in life.  And he could not be completely displeased with the position he had for the view it offered him, upon a humble working class.

Sacrifice, of course.  That's what life is.  A search for humanity.

But it was, it came as, a huge relief not to work.  The windows had been opened in the clear air of the previous night, and the pollen had come and gotten to him again.  The night before had been a hard run.


Perhaps there are psychological reasons for such a choice.  A fear of being hurt, a fear of intimacy and friendship.  But that acknowledgment could be theorizing, from a textbook, rather than reality, particularly for one who'd been immersed in the intellect of religion and spiritual thought from an early age...

The view of the restaurant worker, patiently serving from behind his bar, taking all comers, can be viewed academically, part of a sociological survey.  But that is not all there is to see.  Just as Picasso took to African and Asian influences in his art.  Just as the Impressionists took to seeing life as it actually is.  Life in the city.  Alienation.  The complete disregard for the emotional life of a neighbor humbly serving you with politeness on the part of the striving, the well to do, the normal city palate of people.

The man is not able to answer the dinner hour of normal people, nor their happy hour, and to do would put him out, put him into a prolonged period of attempted relaxation...

But the truth lies, less inhibited, in fiction, in fiction more so than straight factual telling.