Crap:

I guess some days you write in a state of uncertainty as to whether or not you've said the thoughts that pass through the brain.  Did I say that, or maybe I didn't...

Perhaps some day one will look back at their work and see it as a state of being "on the road."

The bar is like a river.  It's never the same, always flowing.  You put your foot in it, but it is change as much as it is the same.  No mood is the same.  No conversation, no spark of hospitality is ever the same.

I have an affection for restaurant people.  Chefs.  The front of the house people.  I felt a need;  I wanted to help them out.  And I thought, perhaps in being able to help them out, in whatever small way  I could, I would be then closer to discovering the things of deeper meaning and that sort of a thing.


After work I went to the Safeway.  I'd been on the road for a week, visiting with mom, helping her out.  The downstairs server had told me she would be floating between to the two floors, and I was busy from the moment the door opened, and held back from doing certain last minute things on account of being bitched at by the boss for getting frustrated one night and lightly punching the door to the bar closet a week or so before toward the end of the shift, the downstairs person leaving me to be.  She took it upon herself to tell the boss of my failings.  We were short staffed that night.  And then here we are, again, unprepared for the surprises of a night, the walk-ins, and the place is filling up and it's jazz night.  My back is sore from being compressed in the car, and too many potatoes.  My server helper is gone, from what I can tell, about 9:30, at which point my credit card tips haven't been entered and there is everything left to clean and still miles of glassware.  I'm there 'til 3:00 AM putting the bar back together after my week away,

My Uber friend turned out to be Liberian.  We have a good chat.

Somewhere along the line I've learned that some people take to being helped out.  And there are other people who are less gracious, more expectant perhaps.  And who knows which kind of person one is himself.  Perhaps there are people, perhaps like me, who are so intent on helping other people out that they are so stubbornly independent that they have a hard time asking.  Thinking, I mean, it's a given.  Of course people need to be helped out!  Don't be so selfish...

To paraphrase Wilde, no great artist ever sees things as they really are.  If he did, he would cease to be an artist.