"If there is a worse place than hell, I am in it."

And since his time, it has only gotten worse.

If you are in pain and suffering, what you come to find out is that no one really has the ability to care.  People are too busy.  In enormous pain, all you can do, like Lincoln, is get off a quick quip.  And even then, people will be too self-absorbed, and, not to blame them, too busy surviving, busy dealing with their own problems to even begin to relate to your own suffering.  Rather they will keep you in the same place they have always had for you, the habitual.

Attachment is what it is.  A place for them to come to,  to talk about all their own stuff.  You are little more than a familiar point in their routine, a friendly territorial mark on their way through their own affairs.   "How can I continue to use you," their thoughts go.    Your guts might be falling out, but they are not disposed to care, beyond your patience and your entertainment value.

Only if you are Lincoln will they stop to record what you say, if you are lucky and important enough.

Gregor Samsa woke up as a giant insect, and not a pretty one, one morning, one morning of recognition.  An insect we all tend to loath and fear, the large cockroach, suddenly there, flicking on the kitchen counter, in the bathtub, climbing behind the garbage can...

Do not mistake your own humanity, the work of your tolerance, kindness and sympathy for what the consumer customer wants.

To them, you are just a widget, an application even, in their lives.  There is little wonder about how such devices came about.  Usefulness, ease, impersonality, removal, the divorce from one's own humanity, the collective shallows...

A sign that there will always be war amongst human beings.


That is what I realized, one morning, as I woke, perspiring in stress, uneasy, having been tossed out of the old apartment of twenty years.  And what the hell was I doing anyway, in this life, in such a job as "neighborhood barman wine soothe."   The move had gone poorly.  No room on the twenty six foot truck for the bookshelves, they told me, truck is full, suddenly.  It was snowing.  Bye bye old house, old friend, old memories, old objects of art.

It all hit me at a weak point, when I needed time to travel up to check on my mother, an eight hour drive away, as she slowly held it together and fell apart at the same time.


The sweating continued.  What could I do at the end of every shift to ease the tensions, left alone by the rest of the staff  but have a glass of wine, maybe a bottle.  Go home to the new apartment, write nonsense after an epsom salt bath, worrying about everything.



The pieces of life are very hard on a person.  They are completely most difficulty hard to pull together, to reconcile.

...painfully dragged out, dragged out in such a way as to show one his own great foolishness all along the line, all the way through, when the pieces of this prince that one once was have shredded into pieces, each, like plastic bits, embarrassment, the shameful self consciousness of a great talent treated with the greatest of neglect and stupidity.



The great writer, fanciful, a steadfast and honest traveller of hyperspace and theosophy, the attempted observer of the most clearest and deepest actions of a christian and buddhist servant, found himself misused. As if it was all a joke now, like he was pretty much a corpse now, having once been alive.   Where were one's children?  Wife, family?  Where a career?  Where a useful use of that goodly education he had known so well and purely through chapel windows reading poetry carefully with large and tender old men much like his own father?  Where the subtlety, all the years he'd helped his mom out on her feminist way of literacy, letter writing, history...  The great writer had blown all that like a clown, and even Conrad couldn't tell a tale of how strange that all felt, how even old friend's customary chat seemed now like part of the great betrayal, unwitting, of letting all his family down, all their work, all their labor, all their achieved comfort, and  yes, now what...


It's Tuesday.  I won't have much help.  The weather is finally nice, agreeable, even warm.   They have opened the regular door to the restaurant, not just the blue door.  The door in between:  I hear it click shut.  It's early.  I just opened it.  Now it's closed shut again.  No flow, no light, no "great, this restaurant has upstairs and downstairs.  No, wow, cool, even airs passing, friendliness up and down."

So, I the klutz go downstairs, after hearing the door click shut, the one between the dining rooms.  "Look," I say, "if the weather is nice, there's no reason to close the door...   I've been here twenty years, the door is always open."  But my friend, she has the eye on me again.  "I've been here two years, and the door is always closed."  Okay, great.  I have offended her.

But, through the night, the door stays open.  Only in inclement weather, do we need to shut the door.  When it's so cold or so hot...  Come in through the blue door, the main front door closed, heater or AC blasting...

Shitty staff meal.  A bit of chicken on some end of bone, rice soggy with potato, later, after the shift, not the beginning, no time to eat, a bit of ginger in it.  Not inspiring.  What did we taste?   A rose Bordeaux.....