I went and did some yoga in the backyard.  Mid-October.  Sunny.  Blue sky.  My lower back stiff and compressed, slowly going into the simple basic easy poses to take at one's own pace...  the satisfaction of receiving the sun's rays and the beauty of daylight.  Back too tight for a fully reaching Plow pose, but a good headstand.  Muscles work together, though for the practitioner yoga is always a welcome mystery.


Of many yoga poses one feels strong in the Lotus.  The back is straight, chakras aligned.  A warmth going through the pelvis and gluteus.  The torso has a sudden fresh strong feeling brought over from Warrior Pose and Tree.    The serpent flame is lit, keeping the nervous system invigorated, as it can only be by motion and body alignment and bodily activity.


The lotus flower of translucent reality shines through.  Perhaps there is no God, a personal bearded guy in the sky, in particular, but yet still, and always, there are wise people, ones who can express that which seems fictional, is like a fiction, like all things human beings must believe in to cooperate in systems, religion, government, banking, tribe, nation, but which is in keeping with the deepest and truest understandings we are capable of in considering our greater reality as living in this existence we share.

To tell, to speak of, deeper reality, one will never be paid, never be rich upon financial terms for doing such work, but yet will be rewarded, in kind, only asking for a modest occasional understanding, along with a basic sense of what is right and true and good.


Tending bar, aside from its physical delivery of all things of a good dinner, had the deeper, the spiritual element, the serving of a fundamental need we must include in all standards of life.

Tending bar was a good thing.  A thing of the Mohammed's welcoming and inclusive community Mosque as originally intended, no judgement, no requirement of particular belief in order to find belonging.

Tending bar might have even been exactly what I'd been looking for in life, though, like yoga, it remained strange and refreshing.


In a way it was gratuitously easy to be nice to people, to smile and have fun with them, to allow for some irreverent humor.  The old Dying Gaul was the perfect place for it.  In that I always had great faith in.  John F. Kennedy's a place to go to every day, to not go crazy.

The humor and hospitality combined with the precise motions and movements of keeping bar, of keeping water glasses filled on the tables, clearing plates, pouring wine, making the occasional gimlet or martini, comedy of physical and verbal kinds mixed with a mild non-violent martial art...  Only the tediousness of trying to get everyone in and out of the bar's mouth, its opening out on the dining room, complicated by the passing on of dirty plates and the dishwasher needing to be door down and open to clean the next load of glassware coming out warm and in need of being wiped with cloth napkins.

At the end of the night dodging the busboy as he huffed and puffed, sweeping up, taking out the bottles in the recycling bin, the trash bag, the dirty linens, as quickly as he could.  Included in the list that things that made me nervous, as nervous as the arrival of the late night people...


Growth in anything has the potential to be of the organic kind, the growth of a sapling into a tree.  I figured so when I left one restaurant life and moved on to another more personal one.   Does the living being in the state of evolving through growth and increasing in maturity know particularly where that might take him?



The original homo sapien, a forager, had many talents, much expertise, great dexterity, knowledge of his world on an intimate basis.   On top of that, he was in decent shape, and nor did he have too many possessions to weigh himself down.

The restaurant was the closest kind of a life to that, that I could find, for better or worse.  I found this inherent honesty toward the original and still living creature that had evolved, having evolved in a natural setting.

I'd say by my birth, in 1965, this original creature was about to go through changes to the world which would bring great stress to him.  That's why I looked up to Shane MacGowsn, as a vestige, a surviving member of those original talented human creatures, before we all got industrialized..: