Two nights into a shortened week, the barman, and he's already thrown way off.  Way off.  Tired.  What's Thanksgiving...  Just another reason to be lonely.

"Don't keep people late tonight, eh, Ted," the boss says, tersely.  The busboy expressed concern when he asked me, coming into the shift, how late the people stayed the night before.  Oh, I don't know.  I was so tired I took a nap, I tell him.  "That's late," he says, in such a way as to express disapproval.  That's how my shift starts out.  After all I do, I'm the bad guy, giving away the house.  A couple had come in after kitchen closing, and the downstairs server set them up with a cheese plate.  Now I'm blamed for the step halfway up the stairs to the bar not being fixed yet.  A thick rubber pad to be glued, blue.

Looking back at a shitty night, and a late couple coming in,  the Uli people coming in at a bad time, mourning him, here from Germany, his high school girlfriend.  Goddamn.  Jeremy coming late, I've got to do the goddamn set up all by myself, me opening the wrong Bordeaux, stressed, setting up fro the private birthday dinner party.   (The private party turns out to be its own story...)  Then the stupid stream of wine night, and then, shit, the night wouldn't give up, not until I climbed on top of it, like on a safari, outlasting them, a bottle of Chinon as a cudgel.

Called upon to share a few tales about our friend for those who loved him.  The late cheese plate couple, it turns out, have come from a dinner party of a regular of ours who lives in a big house around the corner from us.  Earlier I shrink their wine tastes, down to the old middle of the plate Chinon.   They're cool.  The guy is a cyclist.  Doesn't take long to be friends.  And, Mr. Boss, from a business point of view, not only had he purchased a gift certificate for our neighbor, he's asking about having a dinner party for his Fiftieth.



Yeah, Happy Thanksgiving.  Wednesday night, the most complex band, Hot Club of DC.  Five dinners for them.  Drew wants to get them a nice Bordeaux, like the Mongravy, Marguax he had before with Kyle and all late night.   I've got an open Canon Fronsac, only a sip out if it or two.

No, I won't keep them late.  And then Doctor A. comes in for the last half hour sitting quietly, having a glass of bubbly, cool.  He gets it.  He takes in the guitar jam session.  Then later, some guitar talk, John McLaughlin playing a Fender on Spanish Key on the album Bitches Brew over the bar's speaker system.

It's been a night, clearly a strain on me, to be kind.  It's the eve of Thanksgiving.  Hi, happy Thanksgiving, the neighbor couple says, says the couple that comes in at 5:40.  The second one, as they come in early, brusquely, "what do ya want..."  (aka, fuck you too.)  But still, I manage to be hospitable.  The first I speak of, she does holistic medicine across the street. the later couple, again I resurrect my gracious humanity by the skin of my teeth.  Eve of Thanksgiving.  A travel day.  If not, a day to feel very sad and lonesome for not traveling.  You're fucked either way.  Visiting mom the week ago doesn't do it on Thanksgiving Day.

Don't keep people late.  Okay, bro.  Boss leaves without saying good night when we still have a long ways to go.

On the ropes, now you let the night become part of the shitcake blur, the first few innocent sips of wine, richly deserved.

But we have fun, me trying to drown him in champagne, me in leftover Beaujolais Nouveau, after a small bite of salmon tartar.  Watching Manuel figure out how to cut a new blue rubber step, glueing it down.  I shine my iPhone light down on him so he can see better what he's doing, needs to cut it again, but the glue won't set for awhile, so no big deal as he pulls it off, to cut its forward end so its snug as a step.  Doing so, the top of my iPhone screen looks like it's about to fall off, and the little home button key floats up inside, detached from its place above a metallic button.

The good doctor wants to take me up the street for this lavish bite to eat at Breadsoda.  They might still have a chili dog at this hour, a good one.  So we walk up there.  I don't have the strength to go to he Safeway for last odds and ends for a proper Thanksgiving dinner.  I have one glass of pinot and talk to my old bar buddy Matt, largely about our mutual friend, who is now dead.  No, they closed the kitchen, shoot, that's how it goes.  There aren't many young women here, contrary to my hopes.

I figure out later, the quickie burger place is open up the old shitty avenue, about five doors up from where I used to torture myself as a bartender at the old Austin Grill under the EAT sign.  For way too many years.  I get a cab home with a double hamburger wrapped in foil in a paper bag.  I eat it whole, bun and all, sitting there in front of the television, a green towel on top of the Ikea coffee table.  All the experiences of life washed away like Days of Wine and Roses...


If you ever write something down, for whatever reason, amusement, vanity, ambition, the wish for a new career, one more spiritual, less of a physical burden, or simply just to process, you will find out the inadequacy of words.  Truth and reality are things that cannot be expressed, and if they could be, it would by only out of human err.  For every side of everything, there is a yin side, and then also, coexisting, the yang opposite.   And even if you got both sides, the terms you worked so hard for themselves would complete fall short and fail, out of the basic universal non-duality in the existence of all things.

Blind shadow work is what we do.

And after realizing all that, maybe it's now then that you can retire from the writing game.  Without a hint of smug self-satisfaction, but knowing, in some way, that you've told the story of the undefinable of yourself, as if, on a good day, you were working on a form, a negative space into which reality could thence be poured into and moulded quietly.  The secret being, to the mould, that there is nothing there, empty, to be filled by the precious substance of thoughts beyond thought.