There is now a lot to worry about.  I get back to the apartment on MacArthur after doing my four shifts.  They are as long and intense as any of the shifts when you put my schedule together and compare that with the others.  Tonight, I was lucky enough to have the energy to force my body over to the Wisconsin Avenue Safeway around 1 AM.  Bruce, my friend at the late night check out aisle number seven informs me of the announcement I hear coming in up the escalator, the closing of the registers for twenty minutes to run the numbers.   Yes, I have plenty of time, and I will take my time, that's what I feel like, and anyway, with the medicine I have diarrhea to take care of in the utilitarian restroom, before walking down the aisles to find cold cuts, things that will get me through my three days off here, now that the Palisades Safeway has gone belly up empty, closed, done.  After having been open since 1944, something like that.

Sunday was not at all easy, my first day of the week.  The elder chief of the busboys' son, first communion, and so I'm on my own, and it gets very busy, and lots of regulars, familiar faces to entertain.

Mary Bierworth, why did I not kiss you better when we played spin the bottle back in Clinton, four hundred years ago.  You were eager, I was shy.  The early self esteem problem with girls who just want to have fun, don't you get it, idiot...  Her father was my fifth grade teacher, maybe that had something to do with it.  If I remember, she was sort of dating a friend of mine.

Monday, slow, the singer of the trio, coming in to cover a no show musical group, and she's just about to call it off, we're all tired, when one of her friends comes in, and then, ten minutes later, a couple, to celebrate a birthday, so there's my night, add another two hours, thanks a lot, great.

Tuesday, the wine tasting.  Slow, slow, slow...  But this is what bars are for, such as they are, before they too become bygone, a lot culture, persecuted, replaced by something that looks like them but is not the same.  The professionals talk on and on, academics, history, philosophy, music, jockeying to make their points and hold forth.

I'm eyeing how the paying of rent is  coming along, here at this new place.  It will be hard if I cannot afford it.

The strange wound from the spider bite is healing, but very slowly, so that's a thing, twice a day.  Every day, twice, soap and water scrub in the shower, then hydrogen peroxide and rubbing alcohol, tea tree oil, then Neosporin, to which I may be allergic to, add some sliver wound gel, and then a bandage over it, and maybe it is healing, after the two week run of antibiotics.  One more thing about this apartment, on top of the early welcome of the repaving of the rough above my head up here on the third, top, floor, on top of the big excavation behind the adjacent old GI apartment building, beep beep beep, every time the Bobcat digger backs up, and the bigger bucket digger, yellow, tractor like.   And each noise, I found out earlier today, had a perfect tonal syncopation, or rather dissonance, the airplane whooshing overhead, the tractor digging, the Bobcat, loading the dirt on to a truck, and me going quietly crazy.  Yes, this is what it's all come to, my years of sadness and toiling in the restaurants because of my sins, my being a Jonah unwilling to repent and follow the instructions of the Lord...

One used to think, oh, I will be respected when I am more mature, older.  But this does not feel to be true.  It is the young, the ones with adaptability and the new intelligence, who garner the respect, the ones who fit in.  The old ones, like me, at 54, rather than being respected, they're looking at you, looking at you with the thought that you will wear out soon enough.

You did not conquest the girl when you had the chance, and it is precisely this waiting around, as tender and as sweet as it may have been in its intentions, all that is just stupid crap like the things you sweep up at the end of the night off the barroom floor, the bread crumbs, the french fry, the wine bottle foil, the beer cap, the dirty linens.  And then, like always and everywhere all throughout entire creation, you are left alone, alone, alone.

And only by, only through, the expression of this great loneliness that comes to the thoughtful and the sad, the wistful, the poet, only then, baring the heart, can, I suppose, you reach another human being or two...

My mom, always supportive, always the one who gets me, the kid who wanted to be a writer, not so much an academic, but a writer...  Whereas she became an academic, quite successfully, and in her scholarly prose.  But where has this all led us, led me, but to be, here, with a back up against a wall... and a tough physical job, one like the samurai of Kurosawa's Seven, who cannot win.


Most often, the best I can do to survive is to make certain I have food stuffs, supplies, cold cuts.  I would wish to be a vegan.  Ham and salami to chew on when it's late, that's how it goes.  Keeps up with the wine, the wine of peace at the end of a week of toil, when you need to switch out to a completely different kind of work.

Most of what any writer is going to write includes a good amount of crap anyway, just sounding off...