Thought sketch:

It was the weekend of Restaurant Week, and Friday night was the start of six straight night shifts for me, and I had a cold.  A  hacking cough in the night, hard to get up, and each night at work busy busy.  Boss happy and engaged.

The routine:  get up, take a pill for the cough, out of cough syrup.  Green tea, shower, heat up breakfast, and each day feeling like calling in sick.   The great relief, then, of getting through the night's shift and the time for a glass of wine to ease the mind and body.

And after it all, after tending to a business meeting dinner, former Deutsche Bank guys now in the aircraft business, and having a drink with them, I feel I might deserve stopping off up the street to cap off my week, see my buddies at Breadsoda, and maybe the college kids will be back to liven the place up a bit, where I immediately run into a friend of mine, a former somm I know through our restaurants.  Waiting for my ride home finally I speak with a homeless guy, tall,with strange green eyes and no teeth left, from Maine, just out of prison, a brief chat of homeless woes and the impossibility of reentry into society...  I guess I was looking if there was anything open to find a bite to eat at such an hour, on that old block where I worked long and hard.  I am glad when my ride pulls up, after learning he killed a man, in Portland, that his family has disowned him.  I put a frozen pizza in the oven when I get home, and it is good to have a job, and even a job one likes.

So, finally a day off.  I sleep and I sleep.  And what an odd life.  I finally get up just as the light is leaving the sky, hot shower, yoga, and by the time I get to the market, where young folks and cyclists and people coming from yoga relax outside, it's almost ten o'clock, closing time, and now I have no friends to hang out with, and groceries to get home, and not much money to play around with anyway.  The town, late August, is dead anyway...


But it is evident, what a strange strange life.  And given that, who, who? would enjoy dating or being married to such a person, well intentioned and kind as he is, and even, who really could hold up to being his friend.

It is no small wonder then, that one might pick up a book like Moby Dick, of which I have several copies, and find the native American friendship that Melville believed in, the great mixing pot of life and the world, introduced to us in the cold drizzling weather of November when Ishmael, choosing to go find the watery part of the world, ends up sharing a bed with Queequeg, a random savage type person from a land very far away.  Amazing how they lived in the Nineteenth Century.

And like Melville, I too am a stubborn sort of guy.  Someone who will stick to that strange sea voyage kind of a life, in search of a home somewhere amongst real humanity as it is.  I have no idea whatsoever how I became such a person, but I guess it was always running in my blood, the adventure of meeting the people of the world, which is probably why I cried and remember the funeral of Louis Armstrong as it was expressed by the New York Daily News that day, with an overhead shot of his Cadillac hearse, surrounded by the respectful, as they took him to his final rest in Queens, a man who played and played, and wouldn't leave the stage up til the very end, despite doctor's warnings, old Satchmo, good will ambassador of jazz, who my grand parents met once in a New York hotel in their travel lust.

Yes, there are the different lights of people that one finds in the course of experiencing humanity, and all people have the light, you just have to look for it sometimes.  But I am one who felt you should always, as a duty, show your light, and that this is given through hospitality, even, or particularly, to perfect strangers.  The light of people who struggle to bring you hospitality and graciousness even in the difficulties of their own lives...

These are the important people to me now...  the ones who share.  Could perhaps this be what Kerouac is speaking about, when he discusses the Roman Candle People, the person in himself..  Mad enough to be your friend, without much of an economic equation model imposed upon it.

This is why I feel emotional about Bourdain's passing.  He was one of those good will ambassadors.  His sketches of towns and the dining life therein...  works of art and friendship out of the random.


In the morning, the lonesome restaurant worker's workweek, the odd early hours of waking when the body has no intention of getting up, and less ability, awake, with nothing to do, but live in the body, because one is so lonely, so isolated from the broad pattern of society and its wakings and so forth... well, you're out in the ocean...

I have worked pretty hard.  I don't do it quite to the extent my body, perhaps could, not that I would so much even mind that--I like my job, I might even love it.  My job releases to me the ability to see the world in a way to comprehend the tribal behavior and character of the humanity I come across.  My world is not far away from the world Caesar might have written about in Gallic Wars.  Indeed, the people of the world are quite tribal on all sorts of levels, macro and micro.  And in old D.C., I've come across a lot of them, whatever "a lot" means, and perhaps it is a Biblical term as well as a practical one.

However many millennia we might survive, the tribal identities are in our blood, a good reason to rail against the cookie cutter approach to life, as that goes against our grain, as blues men, jazz men, French restaurant people, rebels, the "inchoate masses..."

Why does one write... who knows...


Anthony Bourdain... Nice guy.   A gentleman of the world.  A nice guy.   A searcher.  What got him?  The pending news of a pay-off to protect a person he deeply cared about?  His last show from Rome, manly, fatherly, husbandry, very tender...  Great literature of film, in an hour episode.  Argento is a beautiful woman inhabiting a great soul...  as you would expect from a filmmaker...


As a worker, you find you cannot control the times you can enjoy good deep sleep.  You are awake, why, what to do, who to talk to, when you need a guitar, yoga... Totally out of synch with all of striving humanity of D.C.