I always found it heroic, just to go tend bar.  It always made me anxious, nervous.   There was a lot of action to it.  You were always having to go grab something, realizing something needs restocking.  In effect, you soon get caught up in it, in the tasks at hand, and you forget.

I'd done that, starting out as a busboy, when I first came to town.  Running around, which kept my mind off things.


But it just gets scarier.  My irresponsible decision to be a heroic writer...

You can only hope the Universe has a way of making the most natural things work out.


You aren't a hero, you can't be, unless someone, maybe even you, has done something stupid.  Mistaken.  Off.  Sometimes it's other people's mistakes, like war, and you're just stuck doing it, going off to it.   Then it can be your own dumbass thing.  A bad choice.

A hero is up against something.  Maybe he knows what it is, maybe he doesn't.  But I've always found, the most important thing to be, a life lesson I learned a bit late, is to be at peace, to be at peace with other people, to be peace, in your actions, in your words.

I was able to carry off all that pretty well, and I had a good job to do just that.  It happens to be the only way you can do it, turns out.  I found out early on, even.  You have to be at peace with things you might otherwise not wish to be at peace with.  There are all sorts of characters who will habituate a restaurant bar.  And yes, you have to suffer them.  Often benign people who otherwise you wouldn't have met in your life, but shared a mutual respect with.  Me being a kid amidst a gathering of French chefs, a club owner...  People who like electronic music...

And as I grew to some form of maturity in the job, perhaps less so in life, I realized over again how heroic it was, what a struggle it was, and how I faced a grim future life, never an owner, always a renter, uncertain, never able to retire on top of all the other facets of normal life I could not enjoy at this age of my life...

That's what I always saw in the writers I liked, the kind I was drawn to, the heroic quality.  Wordy heroism.  And this in a world where the next moment is not always expected or predictable.

I do my little hour of yoga out on the slate flat stone patio.  Chef Bruno has been in town.  Three thirty AM one night, including clean-up, ant the last night up at the strip club with Bruno's chef buddy Y., a lovely large generous man.  I'm doing okay on a Tuesday, beautiful weather, not hot nor sticky, eating a couple of Hebrew National hotdogs with a bit of the chili I made.  Not as good as down at the boat house when you are hungry on a day off...

Reading the beautiful passages from Dharma Bums of climbing Mount Matterhorn with Gary Snyder...


I've always felt a sense of doom, I don't know exactly why...