So, if you're week is strange, and out of synch with the normal rhythms of daylight rather than jazzmen, isolated, so will be the days off, the days of recovery and groceries.
You get in off the bus, crash, wake up, have a glass of wine around 4 AM to have the energy and the calmness to start looking in your brain's thought juice, as all the memories of all the faces that have dropped by, friends old and new with whom one has interacted with either five minutes or twenty five years, random visits, regular ones, made a friend of, shared the awkwardness of life's moments and the strange what-am-I-to do-now gut sense, best captured in books of wanderings like Moby Dick, or All Quiet on the Western Front, or in the Gospels about Jesus traveling and his words and his acts all a strange development to an incomprehensible to the sensibilities death on the cross... all of it flashes through your mind, the last week, the memory of remembered things rising in a way sudden and surprising....
Even the next day, after a long decent sleep run of three or four dream sequences, followed by another one later on the couch after eating a drawn-out sandwich of Boars Head, slice by slice, roast beef with thin slices of Bermuda onion, dipping the same knife into the prepared horseradish on German health bread organic 100% rye.
I never knew how to be a journalist. The details one has to record are always slippery, and if one thing is examined in truth, then another layer emerges, strange connections, another thing; how can a a story that remains truthful to its subject, say, a day in the life of John F. Kennedy, not end up with an examination of the poem he would quote, Frost's Two Paths Diverged in a Wood and And Miles to go before I rest..., the constant and completely shifting recognition of non-duality...
I can only journal about the things that I know, and I think they are fair enough, honestly come upon given the un-planning disorganized nature of the being put to work with bureaucratic things to oversee as well.
Kerouac had something right about Jazz. That a good horn going on in the forefront most top three background of the mind could set free the thoughts, particularly the thoughts of a prose writer, wishing for his imagination and its connection with the rest of the thinking mind to have some inspiration, a work-out partner, if you will, some freedom with which to go and do the actual work, as a woodsman must approach the first log of the day, needing firewood or some other wooden usefulness...
At some strange time then, out of sheer frustration of being put away from it, you let go a bit. And it's not good to tackle down or be overly critical of this spirit, this artistic urge, the wish to catch a thought like a fish in an ever-moving stream..
My grandfathers and grandmothers worked in the restaurant and bar business. I've always seen it as exactly the same kind of work a writer does.
Go and catch a falling star, catch with child a mandrake root, to catch a decent sentence, that's all you can do, what it's built of, made of.
The best teachers would be practitioners of their art, except that they don't have time but to go on explaining without chance of explicitly teaching, their trade one of the Universe, but not of the economy but for the enlightened parts of it.
One is often drawn to the creative process. Places, habits... A kid who loved to draw all the time becomes a part of the restaurant bar business, something hugely more interesting and varied than the insurance clerk office downtown...
Friday, August 30, 2019
Thursday, August 29, 2019
The week ends, catching a ride on the late D6 bus with a lady bus driver. I sit up front and talk with her. It's just us two, westward out of Georgetown. She takes the curves with patience, swinging the long bus carefully through the turns, easier at this blank hour of night, all having gone to bed, few cars, little traffic to speak of. Stopping by the hospital, ambulance and emergency blinkers in the lane ahead of us, she pulls us round and through, then sweeping the long bus onto the descent of Foxhall Road.
I've treated myself to a cheese steak, stopping at Manny and Olga's down the street from work, talking with a man with a red tee shirt Grub Hub, who will soon drop off the last order, go home, sleep, hopefully, for five hours, then rise and go to work with Metro on the new Purple Line, doing "environmental." His son wanted to go to a particular school, so he moved recently, and he's working the two jobs now. "Yeah, it's hard to go straight to bed, without unwinding."
Fog comes as the bus draws near to my stop, trees lit by street lamp casting shadows in the air. The driver has been friendly, just the two of us chatting, me sitting up on the front right side close to the front door, the big machine grrrrr-ing rumbling underneath us as we sit in its steel upper cage. The door swings open and I step down. She is from Tennessee, near Bristol. Good night, thanks for the nice ride.
It's been a long week, the day had an air of sadness around it somehow, and I open the clear plastic to go container and tear in with a fork soon after getting in and dropping my backpack. There is not much substance to a steak and cheese, but enough, the tomatoes are good and fresh, warm soft onion, and after tearing through half of the super sized sub, it's hard not to want to appreciate the sweet soft warm sub roll part of the steak and cheese with its mayonnaise spread and the hot acidic peppers. I must now lay back on the couch, and an open window brings in the fog, and I drift off to sleep soaked in sweat. An hour later I wake, strip off my jeans, shower, try to sleep again, but now not only am I still soaked, but feeling bloated, at a loss to digest the heavy late sweet succor of the cheap late night pizza place fare.
Was not an easy night. Mom calls, just before the door opens, the last shift of the week. It's Labor Day Weekend, coming up, just not so much for me. I'll have Monday off, but that's it.
How do we solve all this? "What am I supposed to do?" she asks. And she remembers how parents would come and visit, even as they had jobs too, they'd come, and then later on we would drive out their way... "I've come all this way, and no one even drops by to take me out to lunch for ten minutes..." She starts to cry. "Whatever you want me to do... I'll do it..."
And I feel the same way. Maybe it's the ragweed, maybe it's true difficulty of five night shifts that shouldn't seem to add up as they do, or the distance... But, one asks, what do you want me to do... The mind shouldn't obsess over things, anyway. Let bad thoughts go. And maybe I simply called mom too often in one day, too much mood sharing on my part without the actual connection of physical presence...
Then, after I rise from the call, giving myself an extra minute laying back on the back banquet. I have a coffee, and no one to pester me yet sitting at the bar with smiling anticipatory presence.
It gets busy soon enough. A. driving hard. The busser, M. appearing only sporadically. One doesn't always feel like entertaining. We're getting busy, the boss bringing up tables, seating different parties without telling us a word, who is who, in bullying mode, it seems. He stopped earlier to give A a little polite bisous, but says nothing at all to me, as if I am invisible, much the same way as the night before. Monday, he kept me late, to serve his family three courses. After they cut us down to one. Me. On Jazz Night, to follow it up with Wine Tasting Night, after Sunday, diners showing up right at nine, at pitching closing time on a dead night.
The regulars, and the old regulars who've moved up to New York, they see it. "How's your night going," the young man with a pretty woman of style as a date asks, loud as is his fashion. "Oh, just fine," I mutter. I contemplate a little pour for myself, but nah.
Bill and Ceci, down from New York, haven't seen them together in ages, East Village now, they used to be Sunday night regulars. I refrain from telling them of the accidental death of one of their acquaintances from those days. The anniversary about to come up, one year. The Carolina couple, headed to the lake near Clemson, for a three stay, a good conversation amidst the intermittent, A. clearing dirty plates from the back tables, stacked in her hands, silverware; I spend much of my evening down on my knees, stooping to brush the plates of leftover food with the silverware, stacking, washing my hands over and over.
Eventually, I warm to the three little parties before me, as I always do, as I fend off the little interruptions, all the things I must do to keep the dining room flowing. I make my rounds to the tables up front and back, I do what I'm told, I clear tables, offer a quick quip or chat about, say, the veal shank special over flageolet beans...
The boss comes by later, into the bar area, asks if I've seen any rats, but my mind is too wobbled, to muster, more than no, no sightings, and he tells the story of the large one caught in the glue trap that he killed by stomping down on a milk crate upon the head of the rodent... He puts the check for the jazz trio on the computer terminal cash register, most likely on his way out, and it's getting later now and I might need a nerve un-jangler sip of the red.
On the bed, but it doesn't work, I give up on sleep and rest for the time being, pour out a little wine, on the rocks, with a dash of bitters. I need to go see mom soon. It'll be two months almost, since the last visit. I rise restlessly, the floorboards creaking underneath my soft weight. The downstairs neighbor...
The last twinkling star to the east fades away as the jets lift off with lights on, banking then leveling off.
Daylight comes, too early. I am tired. I want to rest.
The end of the week, the end of having to deal
with a parade of people, energetic, closed
to their narrative, too oblivious
in their lives to get
that constant companion of all of us,
now, earlier and in our ripe old age,
the broken part in us.
Another week done of having dealt with the rolling crowd, and there's always those who don't seem to get it, and they, according to themselves, certainly, are not broken, but well on their way, not by fluke, to being successful, hard smart work, while the real of us, humanity itself, burn within with our despairs, our wish for the subtleties night rather than the brightness of day. "Go and cut him out in little stars," as Shakespeare said, that the world would fall in love with night and avoid the garishness of the day...
Mom gets the broken, gets the tears. Gets the lonesomeness. And somehow it's always healing to go through the terror with her: where will we end up? I was feeling just the same, and without getting to talk about it, not intelligently, not even with my therapist on the other end of the line, without it knocking you down at gut level, you don't get it, you don't go through it, you don't process it, you don't come out the other end.
Poor Old Kerouac, Poor Old Lincoln, their mothers, their wives, their step moms, that helped them get there, realizing the universal pain spread across the face of humanity. Another birth, another gestation, another feeding at the breast of the sudden forms of life that roll now and will keep rolling ever out of the Universe with its stardust and physical rules, all of it conscious too
(And this is why idiots like Kerouac and Yeats, the poets, the Leonard Cohens singing Suzannes Half Crazy who then themselves will dabble in the simplicities that will lead them to be either Greek Island or California Zen Monks, get it, because they are naif enough to be, to be, to be just what the Universe of That Which Is and ever will be and Which Will Ever Keep Changing and us equivalent to the moss that grows green and lovely on rocks by streams or on the bases of trees... Such people will get the brokenness and speak little truths that then will be eventually picked up, as birdsong, birdsong truth, simple truth, real and eternal...)
And all hide from that, in their quick ever on the move success stories, always in motion, one way or another.... so it seems at this hour before I can finally go to bed, and then I sleep all day.
I've treated myself to a cheese steak, stopping at Manny and Olga's down the street from work, talking with a man with a red tee shirt Grub Hub, who will soon drop off the last order, go home, sleep, hopefully, for five hours, then rise and go to work with Metro on the new Purple Line, doing "environmental." His son wanted to go to a particular school, so he moved recently, and he's working the two jobs now. "Yeah, it's hard to go straight to bed, without unwinding."
Fog comes as the bus draws near to my stop, trees lit by street lamp casting shadows in the air. The driver has been friendly, just the two of us chatting, me sitting up on the front right side close to the front door, the big machine grrrrr-ing rumbling underneath us as we sit in its steel upper cage. The door swings open and I step down. She is from Tennessee, near Bristol. Good night, thanks for the nice ride.
It's been a long week, the day had an air of sadness around it somehow, and I open the clear plastic to go container and tear in with a fork soon after getting in and dropping my backpack. There is not much substance to a steak and cheese, but enough, the tomatoes are good and fresh, warm soft onion, and after tearing through half of the super sized sub, it's hard not to want to appreciate the sweet soft warm sub roll part of the steak and cheese with its mayonnaise spread and the hot acidic peppers. I must now lay back on the couch, and an open window brings in the fog, and I drift off to sleep soaked in sweat. An hour later I wake, strip off my jeans, shower, try to sleep again, but now not only am I still soaked, but feeling bloated, at a loss to digest the heavy late sweet succor of the cheap late night pizza place fare.
Was not an easy night. Mom calls, just before the door opens, the last shift of the week. It's Labor Day Weekend, coming up, just not so much for me. I'll have Monday off, but that's it.
How do we solve all this? "What am I supposed to do?" she asks. And she remembers how parents would come and visit, even as they had jobs too, they'd come, and then later on we would drive out their way... "I've come all this way, and no one even drops by to take me out to lunch for ten minutes..." She starts to cry. "Whatever you want me to do... I'll do it..."
And I feel the same way. Maybe it's the ragweed, maybe it's true difficulty of five night shifts that shouldn't seem to add up as they do, or the distance... But, one asks, what do you want me to do... The mind shouldn't obsess over things, anyway. Let bad thoughts go. And maybe I simply called mom too often in one day, too much mood sharing on my part without the actual connection of physical presence...
Then, after I rise from the call, giving myself an extra minute laying back on the back banquet. I have a coffee, and no one to pester me yet sitting at the bar with smiling anticipatory presence.
It gets busy soon enough. A. driving hard. The busser, M. appearing only sporadically. One doesn't always feel like entertaining. We're getting busy, the boss bringing up tables, seating different parties without telling us a word, who is who, in bullying mode, it seems. He stopped earlier to give A a little polite bisous, but says nothing at all to me, as if I am invisible, much the same way as the night before. Monday, he kept me late, to serve his family three courses. After they cut us down to one. Me. On Jazz Night, to follow it up with Wine Tasting Night, after Sunday, diners showing up right at nine, at pitching closing time on a dead night.
The regulars, and the old regulars who've moved up to New York, they see it. "How's your night going," the young man with a pretty woman of style as a date asks, loud as is his fashion. "Oh, just fine," I mutter. I contemplate a little pour for myself, but nah.
Bill and Ceci, down from New York, haven't seen them together in ages, East Village now, they used to be Sunday night regulars. I refrain from telling them of the accidental death of one of their acquaintances from those days. The anniversary about to come up, one year. The Carolina couple, headed to the lake near Clemson, for a three stay, a good conversation amidst the intermittent, A. clearing dirty plates from the back tables, stacked in her hands, silverware; I spend much of my evening down on my knees, stooping to brush the plates of leftover food with the silverware, stacking, washing my hands over and over.
Eventually, I warm to the three little parties before me, as I always do, as I fend off the little interruptions, all the things I must do to keep the dining room flowing. I make my rounds to the tables up front and back, I do what I'm told, I clear tables, offer a quick quip or chat about, say, the veal shank special over flageolet beans...
The boss comes by later, into the bar area, asks if I've seen any rats, but my mind is too wobbled, to muster, more than no, no sightings, and he tells the story of the large one caught in the glue trap that he killed by stomping down on a milk crate upon the head of the rodent... He puts the check for the jazz trio on the computer terminal cash register, most likely on his way out, and it's getting later now and I might need a nerve un-jangler sip of the red.
On the bed, but it doesn't work, I give up on sleep and rest for the time being, pour out a little wine, on the rocks, with a dash of bitters. I need to go see mom soon. It'll be two months almost, since the last visit. I rise restlessly, the floorboards creaking underneath my soft weight. The downstairs neighbor...
The last twinkling star to the east fades away as the jets lift off with lights on, banking then leveling off.
Daylight comes, too early. I am tired. I want to rest.
The end of the week, the end of having to deal
with a parade of people, energetic, closed
to their narrative, too oblivious
in their lives to get
that constant companion of all of us,
now, earlier and in our ripe old age,
the broken part in us.
Another week done of having dealt with the rolling crowd, and there's always those who don't seem to get it, and they, according to themselves, certainly, are not broken, but well on their way, not by fluke, to being successful, hard smart work, while the real of us, humanity itself, burn within with our despairs, our wish for the subtleties night rather than the brightness of day. "Go and cut him out in little stars," as Shakespeare said, that the world would fall in love with night and avoid the garishness of the day...
Mom gets the broken, gets the tears. Gets the lonesomeness. And somehow it's always healing to go through the terror with her: where will we end up? I was feeling just the same, and without getting to talk about it, not intelligently, not even with my therapist on the other end of the line, without it knocking you down at gut level, you don't get it, you don't go through it, you don't process it, you don't come out the other end.
Poor Old Kerouac, Poor Old Lincoln, their mothers, their wives, their step moms, that helped them get there, realizing the universal pain spread across the face of humanity. Another birth, another gestation, another feeding at the breast of the sudden forms of life that roll now and will keep rolling ever out of the Universe with its stardust and physical rules, all of it conscious too
(And this is why idiots like Kerouac and Yeats, the poets, the Leonard Cohens singing Suzannes Half Crazy who then themselves will dabble in the simplicities that will lead them to be either Greek Island or California Zen Monks, get it, because they are naif enough to be, to be, to be just what the Universe of That Which Is and ever will be and Which Will Ever Keep Changing and us equivalent to the moss that grows green and lovely on rocks by streams or on the bases of trees... Such people will get the brokenness and speak little truths that then will be eventually picked up, as birdsong, birdsong truth, simple truth, real and eternal...)
And all hide from that, in their quick ever on the move success stories, always in motion, one way or another.... so it seems at this hour before I can finally go to bed, and then I sleep all day.
Wednesday, August 28, 2019
The old MacBook Pro heats up, so I talk with Heather, Ph.D., over the iPhone screen, my face down in the lower righthand corner. The usual hemming and hawing about when to end this which is torture but supportive...
Relief when she lets me go, five minutes early. Got to eat, got to get to work, got to get my mind around...
I face her with that which I've been suffering from a long time, since college really, that feeling of being taken as "weird," generally ostracized.
To whatever extent, incidental, accidental, to get a taste of that has an effect, such that you might often, if not always, be looking around, as if, "should I say this, or that; should I have said?"
The artist, or any thoughtful mind, really, entertaining thoughts that are a little extra curricular...
And when such little thoughts, ways of expression, little jokes get bludgeoned, taken humorlessly, it leaves a burn, it leaves a sting.
And who might you then turn to for support, given that feeling, "everything you do is weird, out of the ordinary, not worth the normal compensation, the normal friendship and reward.."
Then it is the people who are--as Hemingway, a natural scientist, described--broken in some way, out of having courage, the people with a good sense of the vivid reality of life enough to be broken by it, thereby all the less able to fit in but by their own mending, stronger--as Hemingway put it--in the broken places, better able to offer help and support to the rest of us, as we are all, secretly, or not secretly, broken.
(Therefore, a corollary: Less recognition, less identity, the less of the truth of brokenness will one be able to share with those who regard themselves as unbroken.)
In the course of finding all this out, you see that it's those who claim not to be broken, functional in life and business, wreak the main damage against their fellow sentient human beings, useless, really, as far as being able to help and offer support.
Relief when she lets me go, five minutes early. Got to eat, got to get to work, got to get my mind around...
I face her with that which I've been suffering from a long time, since college really, that feeling of being taken as "weird," generally ostracized.
To whatever extent, incidental, accidental, to get a taste of that has an effect, such that you might often, if not always, be looking around, as if, "should I say this, or that; should I have said?"
The artist, or any thoughtful mind, really, entertaining thoughts that are a little extra curricular...
And when such little thoughts, ways of expression, little jokes get bludgeoned, taken humorlessly, it leaves a burn, it leaves a sting.
And who might you then turn to for support, given that feeling, "everything you do is weird, out of the ordinary, not worth the normal compensation, the normal friendship and reward.."
Then it is the people who are--as Hemingway, a natural scientist, described--broken in some way, out of having courage, the people with a good sense of the vivid reality of life enough to be broken by it, thereby all the less able to fit in but by their own mending, stronger--as Hemingway put it--in the broken places, better able to offer help and support to the rest of us, as we are all, secretly, or not secretly, broken.
(Therefore, a corollary: Less recognition, less identity, the less of the truth of brokenness will one be able to share with those who regard themselves as unbroken.)
In the course of finding all this out, you see that it's those who claim not to be broken, functional in life and business, wreak the main damage against their fellow sentient human beings, useless, really, as far as being able to help and offer support.
Sunday, August 25, 2019
Waiting, waiting... I've been waiting all night. J showed up, a pleasant surprise, someone to help me out up at the wine bar. Moral support, I hardly get these days, too much estrogen at work, everyone else perfect. Took him two hours to drive in from Annapolis. Construction, weekend... We get the first few sat, but soon enough he's up and downstairs, helping them out, the two women servers, Lm, and MR, and there is one busser between the two floors, or, in our case, upstairs, a food runner. It slows, and I walk my beat, two four tops out front, a four top in back, who ordered Negronis to start, cool, except I had to run down to the basement for the liquor room as there was no sweet vermouth on the rail..., while a nice couple we had conversed with--she's from Turkey--was getting ready to go and another couple is getting impatient at the bar for a glass of wine perhaps, but you have to take things in order, and J has disappeared down the stairs at an inopportune time, that's how it always is, as she shores up the service downstairs.
Finally, the parties have reached the dessert point, except for the four in the wine room, and then, and then, here comes MR, leading an older couple and five younger people up the stairs, pitching to the seven top arriving at 9PM, that they should sit upstairs, even though there is table space that's just opening up down in the main dining room. This is awkward, because they wanted to sit downstairs, but the party has made the false the conclusion that sitting up here is somehow easier on everybody, agreeable, Catholic types, with grown children. I'm jee-hawing the back tables around to put four in a row.
Soon, by the time I'm coming back from having watered the seven, MR is seating another table, a two top, quite happily and agreeable, and oh, I'm so nice I'm going to take your water order... I'm so French, agreeable, polite, confident, detached, disappearing.
And how many times has this happened. MR sticking the upstairs with the last tables, and this is much farther away from the kitchen... the thought burning in my mind and growing bigger.
I don't even want to be writing about his. Day two, headed to work, and I'm already tired. I'd rather be writing about something else, say, our little perspectives, looking back on the universe, all things, consciousness...
But I am too irritated...
Up, I call my mom, round 2;30, having made coffee in the little Bialetti, only green tea is in little bags, flavorless...
It ate at their souls, their health, my mom tells me, about her parents, who worked in the restaurant business.
Yes, she warned me. She cried, and told me it would break my heart, and I was still a very young man then, and I did little about it.
Monday, at work, I'm dragging, and MR shrugs off my concern of her promoting the upstairs for any diner after nine PM. "They sit where they want to sit," in her carefree laissez faire way... Perfect common sense, but of course.
The boss, who dressed me down for coming in at 9:45, has dinner with his family back in the wine room, keeping me with a dessert order at 10:15. And I feel the great pointlessness of my trying to be personable with them. Stone.
The restaurant business, abuse of a depressive, down on his academic luck, caught for a moment having a bad attitude...
Finally, the parties have reached the dessert point, except for the four in the wine room, and then, and then, here comes MR, leading an older couple and five younger people up the stairs, pitching to the seven top arriving at 9PM, that they should sit upstairs, even though there is table space that's just opening up down in the main dining room. This is awkward, because they wanted to sit downstairs, but the party has made the false the conclusion that sitting up here is somehow easier on everybody, agreeable, Catholic types, with grown children. I'm jee-hawing the back tables around to put four in a row.
Soon, by the time I'm coming back from having watered the seven, MR is seating another table, a two top, quite happily and agreeable, and oh, I'm so nice I'm going to take your water order... I'm so French, agreeable, polite, confident, detached, disappearing.
And how many times has this happened. MR sticking the upstairs with the last tables, and this is much farther away from the kitchen... the thought burning in my mind and growing bigger.
I don't even want to be writing about his. Day two, headed to work, and I'm already tired. I'd rather be writing about something else, say, our little perspectives, looking back on the universe, all things, consciousness...
But I am too irritated...
Up, I call my mom, round 2;30, having made coffee in the little Bialetti, only green tea is in little bags, flavorless...
It ate at their souls, their health, my mom tells me, about her parents, who worked in the restaurant business.
Yes, she warned me. She cried, and told me it would break my heart, and I was still a very young man then, and I did little about it.
Monday, at work, I'm dragging, and MR shrugs off my concern of her promoting the upstairs for any diner after nine PM. "They sit where they want to sit," in her carefree laissez faire way... Perfect common sense, but of course.
The boss, who dressed me down for coming in at 9:45, has dinner with his family back in the wine room, keeping me with a dessert order at 10:15. And I feel the great pointlessness of my trying to be personable with them. Stone.
The restaurant business, abuse of a depressive, down on his academic luck, caught for a moment having a bad attitude...
Thursday, August 22, 2019
In the dream at the end of the week I find myself kidnapped. A man who came by work I see driving by, he is swarthy, powerful or rich, and in the his car, as he is not the driver, there is a woman brought along just to accompany, and she is wearing black in a revealing way under her light black blouse there in the back seat, and with the promise of them taking me to work, as I must go to work, I get in too. But in the drive along the quiet main street they do not stop, and keep on going, and then, even as I protest (I must still take them to be reasonable somehow) they are driving across the bridge over the river, and the river is brown and rising, swollen up to the lanes of the bridge, such that crossing itself is a great risk, one not sure if the bridge can even hold.
And they are taking me to some sort of business opportunity, perhaps another restaurant set-up there on the other side of the river, a popular place, sort of akin to, say, Bethesda, if one were to travel on foot or by bus or cab solely around NW DC... A line of restaurants... These will be hot spots... they tell me...
But even wasting the night over, no immediate way to get back until morning, I want no part. But leaving, it is awfully hard to gather my things, stacks of books I must carry out to a family car that I am delaying... And I have to drive my own car, but now there is a great snow storm, and I can barely see out of the window, blind to the sides, and everyone seems to be driving like a mad person, fast, despite being barely able to see, traffic circles of ice and uncertain plowing... and I wonder how to get back to the main road... There is a young woman, Wendy, I vaguely know and vaguely like much, and she is charge of plowing and road treatment and tells me the best road...
At the end of the last, the second jazz night of quite an 'oh boy' week that started with the crazy Saturday night of Restaurant Week, which proceeded through an ornately complicated Bordeaux wine dinner back in the room, then a slow Monday night with an artful but very loud trio of a kind of progressive jazz hard to define conventionally, vocals, electric violin, percussionist playing at hight levels... after a rather busy wine tasting night, because its only LM downstairs, one busboy, H, and me running my ass off like a loaded pinball game shot, out of the bar, back, around, further, pulling all kinds of moves out with precision and samurai yogi simplicity of motion, serving and clearing, here's the wine discount thing... The four top, neighbors, friends on Facebook, just back from fantastic travels in Italy, and having brought in the fancy couple, he's tall and French, she's tall too, USA and blond and upper crust, who they've traded Air BnB houses to stay in, an extra song and extra primate recognition dance, has just left the bar, and at this point I'm getting no help and foundering, as another table comes in, and then little Lynshka shows up, telling me that she's bringing in a mutual friend for dinner (and I've just been banned by the boss for coming in on my night off, and about to start mumbling different curse words anyway)... and I'm still turning and turning, left and right and around, to fend off the enemy chaos... And Oh Jesus I know how this night is going to turn out, because now I have to turn into, or back into, some personable, conversational and friendly, which I'm not feeling now, and nor do I want an attitude adjustment of a beverage kind... Lynshka cleans off the bar for me, loads the dishwasher, and I'm dealing with a table that is already a bridge too far...
And soon it turns into an excellent conversation, with our friend Nick, who has taken good care and put his friendship out there for us at a club far from my usual neighborhood with DJ music and rooftop deck, and the world is reconnected, from Persia, Iran, to Crimea, to my own familiarity with restaurant people and 9:30 Club back in the day... Turns out he would be as happy at a Toby Keith concert than listening to the latest DJ from Barcelona or wherever, though he knows with discriminating taste this music they play at the music club... Whatever it was, this chat, it is worth the damage and the glass of whisky...
Then it's the Hot Club... And I get to work with the kid, nice kid, who did not hold back on any info when the boss called him wondering about how the stove behind the bar was left with a knob open, a potential gas stove burner disaster, mentioning my reaching for a bottle so my old friend from a long way back, my most intellectual friend, Aziz.... the band rounding out the week, pumping along like a Popeye cartoon with their Gypsy Jazz Swing... and our lovely friend and neighbor Cathy has come in, ordered a bottle of bubbly to mark her husband's birthday who is no longer with us, a hard working lawyer... She's there still at the bar, at the end of the night after everyone else has packed up, not having finished her bottle, and I talked her into a little bit to eat, crusty boneless pig's feet... And in order to eat my calves liver, rare, I come around the bar and have a nice chat. "Your mom did a good job raising you," she tells me, and that's the nicest thing I've heard in a long time. I change the Pandora station from Cool Jazz to Judy Collins, and when Leaving on a Jet Plane comes on, she remembers seeing her husband off to Vietnam at the airport. We talk about her background, a bit of the Sicilian, and the eventually the guitar comes out for a little session for the Irish in both of us... "I love this music. My kids grew up listening to the Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul and Mary..." (The old house was walking distance, short walking distance, to the lawn of Wolftrap.)
The lady is garrulous. The boss, tall, rises from the table where he was looked over a younger couple, probably European, now that they have left and comes by the bar, and she asks him, what was the first movie he ever saw, and he explains that it was a small and quiet town, a small city back in the South of France, D'Oc, that did not have a movie theater, but he remembers seeing Jungle Book, and he smiles, and says it was the best movie he ever saw, with his quiet polite and manly sense of humor, and my mind, not having any soothe of late, nor a glass yet, goes back to thirty years ago, when, looking back on it, I should have showed up to the college weekend movie night, the very same film shown, but I blew it, I forget what the hell I did, maybe just went back up the hill and fell asleep, and the nice chat from Friday afternoon turned into a total shunning in the dining hall by Sunday brunch... "I wish I was free of that," I might have said to myself, seeing the sad beauty, the good, the sad, of all deeper conversations, not that they happen very often, and maybe this is why that is basically so...
The next morning the boss texts me a picture of the dirty plate I left behind, left on the little table at the top of the stairs... He sends it around ten AM, when I'm still out cold, and when I see it, after mom's helper texts me about mom's cable TV bill, action needed, mom had called before that, and the AC somewhere over there in the foreign apartment is whirring... I can't get up out of bed to do anything more than pee before past Three in the afternoon....
That's how far the plate got in my effort to get everything back in place, the closer, there at the end, turning off the lights to head across to the Safeway... I talk to my pal Bruce late night checkout aisle 7, about remembering Woodstock, and Jimi and the National Anthem, and another woman who works there sings a few lines from Hendrix with a deeper knowledge, and Bruce played the snare drum in the high school marching band, then an Uber cab home early in the morning.
Okay, so that was it, my worn-out mind body remembers. I took the gentlemanly act of walking our neighbor down the stairs. In fact, she stumbled once, on bottom steps, and hurt herself, though it was not us who had served her alcohol of any sort that night. The lights were low, I got her out and down the stairs, offering to walk her down to the corner, and I've learned a lot, a lot about the neighborhood and her way of life and being in this world, and how she worked with the Shrivers in Special Olympics, and took the Shriver kids to the McDonald's in Rockville a long time ago, paying for it herself with cash from her own pocket, having to drive the big Cadillac, later reimbursed, told by little Maria to go down the hallway and up the elevator and back to the boss, and once seeing Sargent coming by in his business suit, pushed into the swimming pool, throwing out his watch, his wallet, his shoes...
Somewhere in all the riches and fond thoughts and the sharing of memories with this good Catholic feminine spirit from some old country, my brain rewired itself, back into the transporter and holder of the imagination and memory like carrying a good and sacred ring, forgetting to take down, in the darkness, the last dirty plate, mine own...
And they are taking me to some sort of business opportunity, perhaps another restaurant set-up there on the other side of the river, a popular place, sort of akin to, say, Bethesda, if one were to travel on foot or by bus or cab solely around NW DC... A line of restaurants... These will be hot spots... they tell me...
But even wasting the night over, no immediate way to get back until morning, I want no part. But leaving, it is awfully hard to gather my things, stacks of books I must carry out to a family car that I am delaying... And I have to drive my own car, but now there is a great snow storm, and I can barely see out of the window, blind to the sides, and everyone seems to be driving like a mad person, fast, despite being barely able to see, traffic circles of ice and uncertain plowing... and I wonder how to get back to the main road... There is a young woman, Wendy, I vaguely know and vaguely like much, and she is charge of plowing and road treatment and tells me the best road...
At the end of the last, the second jazz night of quite an 'oh boy' week that started with the crazy Saturday night of Restaurant Week, which proceeded through an ornately complicated Bordeaux wine dinner back in the room, then a slow Monday night with an artful but very loud trio of a kind of progressive jazz hard to define conventionally, vocals, electric violin, percussionist playing at hight levels... after a rather busy wine tasting night, because its only LM downstairs, one busboy, H, and me running my ass off like a loaded pinball game shot, out of the bar, back, around, further, pulling all kinds of moves out with precision and samurai yogi simplicity of motion, serving and clearing, here's the wine discount thing... The four top, neighbors, friends on Facebook, just back from fantastic travels in Italy, and having brought in the fancy couple, he's tall and French, she's tall too, USA and blond and upper crust, who they've traded Air BnB houses to stay in, an extra song and extra primate recognition dance, has just left the bar, and at this point I'm getting no help and foundering, as another table comes in, and then little Lynshka shows up, telling me that she's bringing in a mutual friend for dinner (and I've just been banned by the boss for coming in on my night off, and about to start mumbling different curse words anyway)... and I'm still turning and turning, left and right and around, to fend off the enemy chaos... And Oh Jesus I know how this night is going to turn out, because now I have to turn into, or back into, some personable, conversational and friendly, which I'm not feeling now, and nor do I want an attitude adjustment of a beverage kind... Lynshka cleans off the bar for me, loads the dishwasher, and I'm dealing with a table that is already a bridge too far...
And soon it turns into an excellent conversation, with our friend Nick, who has taken good care and put his friendship out there for us at a club far from my usual neighborhood with DJ music and rooftop deck, and the world is reconnected, from Persia, Iran, to Crimea, to my own familiarity with restaurant people and 9:30 Club back in the day... Turns out he would be as happy at a Toby Keith concert than listening to the latest DJ from Barcelona or wherever, though he knows with discriminating taste this music they play at the music club... Whatever it was, this chat, it is worth the damage and the glass of whisky...
Then it's the Hot Club... And I get to work with the kid, nice kid, who did not hold back on any info when the boss called him wondering about how the stove behind the bar was left with a knob open, a potential gas stove burner disaster, mentioning my reaching for a bottle so my old friend from a long way back, my most intellectual friend, Aziz.... the band rounding out the week, pumping along like a Popeye cartoon with their Gypsy Jazz Swing... and our lovely friend and neighbor Cathy has come in, ordered a bottle of bubbly to mark her husband's birthday who is no longer with us, a hard working lawyer... She's there still at the bar, at the end of the night after everyone else has packed up, not having finished her bottle, and I talked her into a little bit to eat, crusty boneless pig's feet... And in order to eat my calves liver, rare, I come around the bar and have a nice chat. "Your mom did a good job raising you," she tells me, and that's the nicest thing I've heard in a long time. I change the Pandora station from Cool Jazz to Judy Collins, and when Leaving on a Jet Plane comes on, she remembers seeing her husband off to Vietnam at the airport. We talk about her background, a bit of the Sicilian, and the eventually the guitar comes out for a little session for the Irish in both of us... "I love this music. My kids grew up listening to the Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul and Mary..." (The old house was walking distance, short walking distance, to the lawn of Wolftrap.)
The lady is garrulous. The boss, tall, rises from the table where he was looked over a younger couple, probably European, now that they have left and comes by the bar, and she asks him, what was the first movie he ever saw, and he explains that it was a small and quiet town, a small city back in the South of France, D'Oc, that did not have a movie theater, but he remembers seeing Jungle Book, and he smiles, and says it was the best movie he ever saw, with his quiet polite and manly sense of humor, and my mind, not having any soothe of late, nor a glass yet, goes back to thirty years ago, when, looking back on it, I should have showed up to the college weekend movie night, the very same film shown, but I blew it, I forget what the hell I did, maybe just went back up the hill and fell asleep, and the nice chat from Friday afternoon turned into a total shunning in the dining hall by Sunday brunch... "I wish I was free of that," I might have said to myself, seeing the sad beauty, the good, the sad, of all deeper conversations, not that they happen very often, and maybe this is why that is basically so...
The next morning the boss texts me a picture of the dirty plate I left behind, left on the little table at the top of the stairs... He sends it around ten AM, when I'm still out cold, and when I see it, after mom's helper texts me about mom's cable TV bill, action needed, mom had called before that, and the AC somewhere over there in the foreign apartment is whirring... I can't get up out of bed to do anything more than pee before past Three in the afternoon....
That's how far the plate got in my effort to get everything back in place, the closer, there at the end, turning off the lights to head across to the Safeway... I talk to my pal Bruce late night checkout aisle 7, about remembering Woodstock, and Jimi and the National Anthem, and another woman who works there sings a few lines from Hendrix with a deeper knowledge, and Bruce played the snare drum in the high school marching band, then an Uber cab home early in the morning.
Okay, so that was it, my worn-out mind body remembers. I took the gentlemanly act of walking our neighbor down the stairs. In fact, she stumbled once, on bottom steps, and hurt herself, though it was not us who had served her alcohol of any sort that night. The lights were low, I got her out and down the stairs, offering to walk her down to the corner, and I've learned a lot, a lot about the neighborhood and her way of life and being in this world, and how she worked with the Shrivers in Special Olympics, and took the Shriver kids to the McDonald's in Rockville a long time ago, paying for it herself with cash from her own pocket, having to drive the big Cadillac, later reimbursed, told by little Maria to go down the hallway and up the elevator and back to the boss, and once seeing Sargent coming by in his business suit, pushed into the swimming pool, throwing out his watch, his wallet, his shoes...
Somewhere in all the riches and fond thoughts and the sharing of memories with this good Catholic feminine spirit from some old country, my brain rewired itself, back into the transporter and holder of the imagination and memory like carrying a good and sacred ring, forgetting to take down, in the darkness, the last dirty plate, mine own...
Saturday, August 17, 2019
Okay, so soon it's Saturday night, back to work, and it didn't really feel like much of a weekend. Ah, you clean the kitchen, cook a bit more, leaving it not completely clean, you do loads of laundry, take the recycling out, didn't even get out for a walk under the moonlight, how it was.
Well, Restaurant Week, at least the point will be decent. Will help bring down the bills, the Amex.
I've made it up to chapter four of Being Peace, Thich Nhat Hahn, called "The Heart of Practice." Since we are all connected, each of us carries within the whole of societal problems. One enters into meditation not to be separate, not to become removed from society, but to reenter it. And as I drink a tea brew of different good roots, turmeric, licorice, ginger, and sip from yesterday's left out pot of Moroccan Mint green tea, as the window AC unit puffs away on fan mode, I will reenter society soon enough, via the D6 bus and back into work to face the night but also the redresses from the boss and the small society of the Gaul.
Never go out when you are hungry, unless you can afford to eat.
The judgments are the boss are true and righteous altogether.
That said, I'm the one who gets to close the restaurant every shift I work, and where they, except for the busboy, go home, I need to eat. I get a thirty percent discount on my dinner. I'm feeling some bitterness, I'm feeling very much alone, therefore lonely--it will be okay to go through the ritual of going back, and being back, at work--but now I will make my coffee, on top of the tea, shower and shave, fold a shirt, put it in my knapsack, try to reach my old lonesome mom on the phone, feeling like a big loser as I do, check if a slice of the very rare bison new york strip I cooked last night and kept cold in the fridge might somehow make for a palatable breakfast... Stop off at the little Korean-run friendly local neighborhood market for a sub on the way to the bus to work...
And work will be a meditation... Or something...
After shaving in the shower, looking in the mirror at my Whitey Bolger mugshot face, I take the Harry's razor to the stubble on my cheek I've missed. The Prodigal sum of society's troubles...
I turn on NPR for some background, a comedian shouting rapid fire like Seth Myers, along with the whirring AC, and looking down into my iPhone at Facebook and mail, nothing that does more than barely assuaging the isolated feeling of being so, a human being...
I get to work. It's going to be very busy. Restaurant Week, after all.
LG comes up the stairs, passes me as I put everything in the bar into place, including silverware back-ups for serving the tables. "Could you do me a big favor?" Hmm... "Sure," I say, thinking she has something to ask me about the schedule, covering a shift. "Could you not do any tastings, for LM, not even for your friends..." I nod, but inwardly, the insult is lodged. Even as LG smiles. "Oh, sure..." Of course. Do you really take me for being such an idiot, really? I've seen what the reservation book shows... I've done this a few times before, yes. Are you questioning my judgment? I see. I know how it's going to hit. I know exactly what time it will turn into chaos.
I don't even want to go downstairs and eat now. Foods ready, busboy says, as he comes up the stairs. What is it? I ask. Fish, and polenta. Okay, tilapia... I have time, things are pretty well set, the wines are open, ready to go, pretty much even if nuclear war happens, I'm more or less ready, so I go down, and the chef comes out and gives us the specials sheet. Peach tart, I ask. Yes. I eat, and go back upstairs.
And it's pretty much that way the whole night. Toward the end, LM is explaining, what to do when it's two and they only order one dessert. The check is up on the screen. "There's just the Isle Flottante..." No, L. Look, there's the croquant. They ordered it to go.
The boss is by later, to eat at the bar. Earlier he asked me how I was. Given the usual reproach for being such a giver of free drinks late at night. I gave him a quick thumbs up, as I turned away. And he had swung by earlier to stand over me explaining how the Bordeaux dinner will go...
Later, after he's ordered his grilled salmon with spinach from the kitchen, and sits down at the bar, he asks me more explicitly, if I'm okay with the getting dressed down for the last kerfuffle, and truly, I am, fine, and I tell him, you know, I hadn't even showered, I get a call, I tried to catch a bus... I shrug. Wasn't premeditated, any of it. Just wanted to go get something to eat, got thrown off, just trying to be a... whatever... not worth any more words. I might have talked with him a little more, whatever kind of chat, but mom calls and I have to answer it, tucking away behind the bar, talking her down off the ledge of whatever small but understandable crisis can blow up in the mind.
But to be unnecessarily ratted out, over a detail, adding to my getting bitched at, and then, now, tonight, Saturday night, toward the culmination of Restaurant Week, to be treated so... an idiot... It's not good for your own morale to feel everyone's watching your every move, thinking you don't know your job. There is and was, always, each night, a tremendous support of the appreciation of the people who come to the bar, who get you, get your little humorisms, follow the speed and accuracy, the ability to put out lots of products of all different sorts, who get your Ninja, and who get you as a human being as you get them as a human being, and always, a kind of surprise kindness, the joys of being Present together, in a place, in a moment in time.
A barman... Good Christ. How did I get into this sordid mess anyway, a mind might ask of itself.
The last night of Restaurant Week comes. There's not much on the books for the wine bar, but there is a complicated Bordeaux Wine Dinner, five courses, five wines, and I'm in a tired place when I get in on the bus in the real August DC humid falling heat, a low lasting bitterness stewing in my stomach, but I'm in early, I've chilled the reds down, and now decanting each of them, carefully watchful for sediment shining the flashlight from iPhone upward through the bottle necks as I slowly pour the wines, easing off as I see the cloudy trail of tartaric precipitations. From which I get some satisfaction.
Three servers downstairs, and me left alone to do set-up, but when LM comes up to the bar she's in a helpful mode, it seems, and tells me just to call when they are sat, sat back in the wine room for the dinner and the wine-makers talk. And the whole thing has been delayed, as the importer is stuck in 95 traffic coming up from Richmond, and when he arrives, immediately asks for two glasses of rosé, frazzled and sweaty. No worries, my friend, it's all set up, all ready to go. Survival stress the world over... In the meantime, I've got the party up and running, serving the first wine, a Right Bank... Frenchie might want the barman to be completely socially inert in the background, but I've got the boss's wife a bottle of room temperature Badoit bottle of sparkling water, and the customers soon arrive, including a friendly couple familiar with jazz nights... and the parties, two by two, are coming upstairs, none with reservations, and soon I'm running.
(I might gather that to standard French hospitality and ways of serving--very polite, aloof, very proper--my form of friendly American barman hospitality amounts to a difference, a weather pattern. Immediately it was understood that my services provided a good general atmosphere to the wine bar, even if it wasn't perfectly French...)
As the night develops, just around 8:30 as the walk-ins end up, inevitably, upstairs, and another, 3 women, a reservation downstairs, also end upstairs, just then the computer system goes off-line. The boss is back enjoying the wine dinner, and LM tries to get the thing back working again, so checks can be printed, orders sent down to the kitchen, etc., I'm left with the last orders, meaning I have to go downstairs, sign back in each time, just to do the smallest thing, including firing the different courses, and now the orders, as happens with later people, the orders are subtly stranger and more complicated, and the women are asking for bread, and I have bread ready, but must go downstairs, and by the time I get back, the bread-obsessed busboy, who's just now telling me not to use any extra bread, because it's all we'll have for tomorrow, he's thrown the bread at and it's hard not to yell at him...
Meanwhile, after the third time the power goes out, the boss comes out and turns off the AC unit that is plugged in, blowing its exhaust through a tube you might see on a laundry dryer out the window, sending the temperature back up to 80...
Waiting for the last entree of restaurant week, the last deserts, to come up from the kitchen (and H the busser is now focussed solely and resetting the wine room now that the party has left and moved on except for the boss and a small group) Mom calls in lonesome crisis mode, having only lousy pizza in the fridge, unable to figure out the air conditioning unit, in tears, apologizing...
Well, Restaurant Week, at least the point will be decent. Will help bring down the bills, the Amex.
I've made it up to chapter four of Being Peace, Thich Nhat Hahn, called "The Heart of Practice." Since we are all connected, each of us carries within the whole of societal problems. One enters into meditation not to be separate, not to become removed from society, but to reenter it. And as I drink a tea brew of different good roots, turmeric, licorice, ginger, and sip from yesterday's left out pot of Moroccan Mint green tea, as the window AC unit puffs away on fan mode, I will reenter society soon enough, via the D6 bus and back into work to face the night but also the redresses from the boss and the small society of the Gaul.
Never go out when you are hungry, unless you can afford to eat.
The judgments are the boss are true and righteous altogether.
That said, I'm the one who gets to close the restaurant every shift I work, and where they, except for the busboy, go home, I need to eat. I get a thirty percent discount on my dinner. I'm feeling some bitterness, I'm feeling very much alone, therefore lonely--it will be okay to go through the ritual of going back, and being back, at work--but now I will make my coffee, on top of the tea, shower and shave, fold a shirt, put it in my knapsack, try to reach my old lonesome mom on the phone, feeling like a big loser as I do, check if a slice of the very rare bison new york strip I cooked last night and kept cold in the fridge might somehow make for a palatable breakfast... Stop off at the little Korean-run friendly local neighborhood market for a sub on the way to the bus to work...
And work will be a meditation... Or something...
After shaving in the shower, looking in the mirror at my Whitey Bolger mugshot face, I take the Harry's razor to the stubble on my cheek I've missed. The Prodigal sum of society's troubles...
I turn on NPR for some background, a comedian shouting rapid fire like Seth Myers, along with the whirring AC, and looking down into my iPhone at Facebook and mail, nothing that does more than barely assuaging the isolated feeling of being so, a human being...
I get to work. It's going to be very busy. Restaurant Week, after all.
LG comes up the stairs, passes me as I put everything in the bar into place, including silverware back-ups for serving the tables. "Could you do me a big favor?" Hmm... "Sure," I say, thinking she has something to ask me about the schedule, covering a shift. "Could you not do any tastings, for LM, not even for your friends..." I nod, but inwardly, the insult is lodged. Even as LG smiles. "Oh, sure..." Of course. Do you really take me for being such an idiot, really? I've seen what the reservation book shows... I've done this a few times before, yes. Are you questioning my judgment? I see. I know how it's going to hit. I know exactly what time it will turn into chaos.
I don't even want to go downstairs and eat now. Foods ready, busboy says, as he comes up the stairs. What is it? I ask. Fish, and polenta. Okay, tilapia... I have time, things are pretty well set, the wines are open, ready to go, pretty much even if nuclear war happens, I'm more or less ready, so I go down, and the chef comes out and gives us the specials sheet. Peach tart, I ask. Yes. I eat, and go back upstairs.
And it's pretty much that way the whole night. Toward the end, LM is explaining, what to do when it's two and they only order one dessert. The check is up on the screen. "There's just the Isle Flottante..." No, L. Look, there's the croquant. They ordered it to go.
The boss is by later, to eat at the bar. Earlier he asked me how I was. Given the usual reproach for being such a giver of free drinks late at night. I gave him a quick thumbs up, as I turned away. And he had swung by earlier to stand over me explaining how the Bordeaux dinner will go...
Later, after he's ordered his grilled salmon with spinach from the kitchen, and sits down at the bar, he asks me more explicitly, if I'm okay with the getting dressed down for the last kerfuffle, and truly, I am, fine, and I tell him, you know, I hadn't even showered, I get a call, I tried to catch a bus... I shrug. Wasn't premeditated, any of it. Just wanted to go get something to eat, got thrown off, just trying to be a... whatever... not worth any more words. I might have talked with him a little more, whatever kind of chat, but mom calls and I have to answer it, tucking away behind the bar, talking her down off the ledge of whatever small but understandable crisis can blow up in the mind.
But to be unnecessarily ratted out, over a detail, adding to my getting bitched at, and then, now, tonight, Saturday night, toward the culmination of Restaurant Week, to be treated so... an idiot... It's not good for your own morale to feel everyone's watching your every move, thinking you don't know your job. There is and was, always, each night, a tremendous support of the appreciation of the people who come to the bar, who get you, get your little humorisms, follow the speed and accuracy, the ability to put out lots of products of all different sorts, who get your Ninja, and who get you as a human being as you get them as a human being, and always, a kind of surprise kindness, the joys of being Present together, in a place, in a moment in time.
A barman... Good Christ. How did I get into this sordid mess anyway, a mind might ask of itself.
The last night of Restaurant Week comes. There's not much on the books for the wine bar, but there is a complicated Bordeaux Wine Dinner, five courses, five wines, and I'm in a tired place when I get in on the bus in the real August DC humid falling heat, a low lasting bitterness stewing in my stomach, but I'm in early, I've chilled the reds down, and now decanting each of them, carefully watchful for sediment shining the flashlight from iPhone upward through the bottle necks as I slowly pour the wines, easing off as I see the cloudy trail of tartaric precipitations. From which I get some satisfaction.
Three servers downstairs, and me left alone to do set-up, but when LM comes up to the bar she's in a helpful mode, it seems, and tells me just to call when they are sat, sat back in the wine room for the dinner and the wine-makers talk. And the whole thing has been delayed, as the importer is stuck in 95 traffic coming up from Richmond, and when he arrives, immediately asks for two glasses of rosé, frazzled and sweaty. No worries, my friend, it's all set up, all ready to go. Survival stress the world over... In the meantime, I've got the party up and running, serving the first wine, a Right Bank... Frenchie might want the barman to be completely socially inert in the background, but I've got the boss's wife a bottle of room temperature Badoit bottle of sparkling water, and the customers soon arrive, including a friendly couple familiar with jazz nights... and the parties, two by two, are coming upstairs, none with reservations, and soon I'm running.
(I might gather that to standard French hospitality and ways of serving--very polite, aloof, very proper--my form of friendly American barman hospitality amounts to a difference, a weather pattern. Immediately it was understood that my services provided a good general atmosphere to the wine bar, even if it wasn't perfectly French...)
As the night develops, just around 8:30 as the walk-ins end up, inevitably, upstairs, and another, 3 women, a reservation downstairs, also end upstairs, just then the computer system goes off-line. The boss is back enjoying the wine dinner, and LM tries to get the thing back working again, so checks can be printed, orders sent down to the kitchen, etc., I'm left with the last orders, meaning I have to go downstairs, sign back in each time, just to do the smallest thing, including firing the different courses, and now the orders, as happens with later people, the orders are subtly stranger and more complicated, and the women are asking for bread, and I have bread ready, but must go downstairs, and by the time I get back, the bread-obsessed busboy, who's just now telling me not to use any extra bread, because it's all we'll have for tomorrow, he's thrown the bread at and it's hard not to yell at him...
Meanwhile, after the third time the power goes out, the boss comes out and turns off the AC unit that is plugged in, blowing its exhaust through a tube you might see on a laundry dryer out the window, sending the temperature back up to 80...
Waiting for the last entree of restaurant week, the last deserts, to come up from the kitchen (and H the busser is now focussed solely and resetting the wine room now that the party has left and moved on except for the boss and a small group) Mom calls in lonesome crisis mode, having only lousy pizza in the fridge, unable to figure out the air conditioning unit, in tears, apologizing...
Friday, August 16, 2019
It's Thursday, and I'm getting a text from my friend who's birthday it is. I look at the clock. 9:20. If I hustle I might just be able to catch the bus up there, to work, hmm. I haven't even taken a shower yet. Turns out it's already gone by, I find out from two young women speaking Portuguese, talking on the sidewalk in the light of the Korean market. So I get an Uber, an Ethiopian cat who has NPR on, a piece about the supremacist ranchers out West, and get dropped off about 9:45 in front of the restaurant just as my friend is showing up. It's Restaurant Week. They've had a busy night. I don't see but one busboy, and there isn't any other server in sight.
Ten PM and there are tables still. I don't want to be in the way, but, more out of habit than anything else, we sit down, doing what's familiar to us in this place, and the barman is kind enough to pour us one, and we sit and chat with the two other regulars. My friend who is a regular doesn't have a drink in front of him, and I don't want to bother the barman so I reach for a bottle and a glass and pour him a little bit of scotch. A. the server had brought her brother in for a visit earlier that week, could see that I was frazzled, and told me, don't worry, I'll just order myself. And she did. Serving herself, coming behind the bar finally to pay her check, after getting bread and set-ups for the table.
But I know, it's stupid to be there, and I know I'm stupid doing this, but by now the need for the sugary water has stricken... I'd already poured myself a glass back at the apartment, for some energy to think about dinner.
In an attempt to compensate for bothering him, I let the young guy go, telling him, you get out of here, I'll clean up, and I put the bar mats through, load the dishwasher with the last of the glassware... wipe down the bar, etc.
The latest stupidity in the barman's work life... As a sign of eating poorly over the week, cold cut subs, steak n cheese, as I'm enjoying the conversation from behind the bar, four very well-educated and interesting people speaking in turn, I have an immediate need to go to the restroom, in a gut sickly way... But I come back and finish up cleaning the bar, and keeping my quiet birthday friend company, as she keeps a good sense of humor about things...
As we drive down the street, under the full moon, to park by the late night pizza delivery counter, things are chill. We've had many a soulful conversation my friend E and I on such summer evenings in August before the work starts up for her. And she has amazing stamina, as far as I can tell.
And then I get a text, from the boss, just as I'm tentatively getting up... Please call me. Thank you. Uh oh.
What happened last night...
Uhm, well, it was E.'s birthday... She wanted to meet up... Who's E? You know, she's a school teacher, been coming to the wine tasting night forever...
Well, tell them to come by when you are working...
Okay, well, anyway, two things, the boss says, not happy with me, obviously. First of all, one of gas burners of the stove behind the bar was left on, we discovered it this morning, and good thing there wasn't a fire...
Second, it's Restaurant Week, people are tired. (I know... ) And you reach behind the bar to pour A. a drink...
Okay, sure, yes, be happy to pay for it, the scotch in question. I think you should, the boss says. Fine. I love the guy, but I don't want to be giving away free drinks.... Sure. (He doesn't get free drinks.)
(The boss must have called around, and in so doing, getting the story. I knew it was a stupid thing to do, and sensed at the time it would come out this way. And anyway, seeing that the kid was busy and probably tired of customers I didn't want to bother him, nor trouble him by asking for a check before he closed out the cash drawer... The kid is fit, works as a trainer, gets up early, hardly drinks at all... Sweet kid, good with people, easy going... Wednesday night was a hard-fought battle, me and the kid, and we did it together, and my not having to deal with a female co-server for once. And with such simple joy did I walk out of work that night, walking down to the late night food counter, pizza, wings, steak and cheese, then getting the bus home, with enough wine to chill out with after having climbed the mountain since Saturday, closing every night, then reaching the summit, and then to rest and have time for the body to have to itself.)
You come by on your night off, people are tired, you drink... And if you fall, or something happens... We're screwed.
Ted, I love you, but, you come by... you drink on your night off... No.
Sure.
Well, no skin off my ass, that's how it goes. Shouldn't be going there anyway. Wasn't my idea.
And never once, never hardly ever, did I turn away a late guest, nor not allow for some therapeutic conversation the bar, whether or not I was involved with it so much, or whether it was just me and poor old departed from this world Uli, just the two of us, and hell I'll have a glass of wine anyway while we listen to Dire Straits, and do you think I'm sorry for any one of those moments of nights he, ostensibly, kept me and parts of the kitchen late, to have a civilized European style Sunday dinner in good company...
The effects of meditating and good readings, you take everything circumspect, fulfilling a certain unanimity, perhaps of an almost fatalistic kind. Sure. No problem. That's how it is. I agree with you, that's what happened, I'm fine with any outcome, any judgment. That's how it is all the way along, each moment, really, in the barman's life, achieving a certain kind of magnanimous unity of letting the people think they are leading themselves. I don't give a rat's hindquarters, God will let it work out as it is to work out. And goddamn Jesus knew all this anyway, as does the good Buddhist monk, "is that so?" from the famous Zen tale.
Anyway, it was nice the boss could, in the midst of doing his duties, allow for the expression of his appreciation, along with the old "watch it" sort of thing. That is not lost on me. We've been through a fair amount together, and there are things we cannot say, in manly form, when we are out hiking up on the ridge of Big Schloss with a fire going.
Attempts of those who never get lonely and alone, to disparage the Good Samaritan, who does what he can to take in the lonesome, those needing an ear listening, who do not see the forest for the tree...
As well as a chance to, proverbially, come clean... How little we know each other. How little effort we make...
And I'm tired and dehydrated to begin with. And feeling guilty, and how is mom's cat... anyway... So, that's how much of the day off is going to go, a bad feeling, and not enough energy to go out and do yoga. I knew it at the end of the night, staring up at the full moon, tired out, something would come out of the night's visit to the bar upstairs at work. I don't have many friends outside of the place, really, except for the nice guy, fellow Irishman in background, who takes me out to Clyde's sometimes, buddy of mine, otherwise that's pretty much it.
Connecting, well, it was good conversation, but... comes with a cost... if it's all built around drinking...
Feeling stupid, the awkwardness of time alone again... Laundry to do. Too down to really get much out of Thich Nhat Hahn today in world of drunken lies and excuses and getting very little accomplished...
At the end of the day, though, whether rightly or wrongly, you have a sense of why Jesus might ask of his Disciples, what do they think of me, who do they say I am, who do you think I am, what would you call me. And Peter, of course, has the right words, the Son of Man, meaning, more or less, the son of God, meaning more or less, a person educated somehow in the nature of deeper reality, and of the sciences that we entrust to people of more and greater spiritual insights than that of what we might normally come up with ourselves, would we have the time to do so.
Ten PM and there are tables still. I don't want to be in the way, but, more out of habit than anything else, we sit down, doing what's familiar to us in this place, and the barman is kind enough to pour us one, and we sit and chat with the two other regulars. My friend who is a regular doesn't have a drink in front of him, and I don't want to bother the barman so I reach for a bottle and a glass and pour him a little bit of scotch. A. the server had brought her brother in for a visit earlier that week, could see that I was frazzled, and told me, don't worry, I'll just order myself. And she did. Serving herself, coming behind the bar finally to pay her check, after getting bread and set-ups for the table.
But I know, it's stupid to be there, and I know I'm stupid doing this, but by now the need for the sugary water has stricken... I'd already poured myself a glass back at the apartment, for some energy to think about dinner.
In an attempt to compensate for bothering him, I let the young guy go, telling him, you get out of here, I'll clean up, and I put the bar mats through, load the dishwasher with the last of the glassware... wipe down the bar, etc.
The latest stupidity in the barman's work life... As a sign of eating poorly over the week, cold cut subs, steak n cheese, as I'm enjoying the conversation from behind the bar, four very well-educated and interesting people speaking in turn, I have an immediate need to go to the restroom, in a gut sickly way... But I come back and finish up cleaning the bar, and keeping my quiet birthday friend company, as she keeps a good sense of humor about things...
As we drive down the street, under the full moon, to park by the late night pizza delivery counter, things are chill. We've had many a soulful conversation my friend E and I on such summer evenings in August before the work starts up for her. And she has amazing stamina, as far as I can tell.
And then I get a text, from the boss, just as I'm tentatively getting up... Please call me. Thank you. Uh oh.
What happened last night...
Uhm, well, it was E.'s birthday... She wanted to meet up... Who's E? You know, she's a school teacher, been coming to the wine tasting night forever...
Well, tell them to come by when you are working...
Okay, well, anyway, two things, the boss says, not happy with me, obviously. First of all, one of gas burners of the stove behind the bar was left on, we discovered it this morning, and good thing there wasn't a fire...
Second, it's Restaurant Week, people are tired. (I know... ) And you reach behind the bar to pour A. a drink...
Okay, sure, yes, be happy to pay for it, the scotch in question. I think you should, the boss says. Fine. I love the guy, but I don't want to be giving away free drinks.... Sure. (He doesn't get free drinks.)
(The boss must have called around, and in so doing, getting the story. I knew it was a stupid thing to do, and sensed at the time it would come out this way. And anyway, seeing that the kid was busy and probably tired of customers I didn't want to bother him, nor trouble him by asking for a check before he closed out the cash drawer... The kid is fit, works as a trainer, gets up early, hardly drinks at all... Sweet kid, good with people, easy going... Wednesday night was a hard-fought battle, me and the kid, and we did it together, and my not having to deal with a female co-server for once. And with such simple joy did I walk out of work that night, walking down to the late night food counter, pizza, wings, steak and cheese, then getting the bus home, with enough wine to chill out with after having climbed the mountain since Saturday, closing every night, then reaching the summit, and then to rest and have time for the body to have to itself.)
You come by on your night off, people are tired, you drink... And if you fall, or something happens... We're screwed.
Ted, I love you, but, you come by... you drink on your night off... No.
Sure.
Well, no skin off my ass, that's how it goes. Shouldn't be going there anyway. Wasn't my idea.
And never once, never hardly ever, did I turn away a late guest, nor not allow for some therapeutic conversation the bar, whether or not I was involved with it so much, or whether it was just me and poor old departed from this world Uli, just the two of us, and hell I'll have a glass of wine anyway while we listen to Dire Straits, and do you think I'm sorry for any one of those moments of nights he, ostensibly, kept me and parts of the kitchen late, to have a civilized European style Sunday dinner in good company...
The effects of meditating and good readings, you take everything circumspect, fulfilling a certain unanimity, perhaps of an almost fatalistic kind. Sure. No problem. That's how it is. I agree with you, that's what happened, I'm fine with any outcome, any judgment. That's how it is all the way along, each moment, really, in the barman's life, achieving a certain kind of magnanimous unity of letting the people think they are leading themselves. I don't give a rat's hindquarters, God will let it work out as it is to work out. And goddamn Jesus knew all this anyway, as does the good Buddhist monk, "is that so?" from the famous Zen tale.
Anyway, it was nice the boss could, in the midst of doing his duties, allow for the expression of his appreciation, along with the old "watch it" sort of thing. That is not lost on me. We've been through a fair amount together, and there are things we cannot say, in manly form, when we are out hiking up on the ridge of Big Schloss with a fire going.
Attempts of those who never get lonely and alone, to disparage the Good Samaritan, who does what he can to take in the lonesome, those needing an ear listening, who do not see the forest for the tree...
As well as a chance to, proverbially, come clean... How little we know each other. How little effort we make...
And I'm tired and dehydrated to begin with. And feeling guilty, and how is mom's cat... anyway... So, that's how much of the day off is going to go, a bad feeling, and not enough energy to go out and do yoga. I knew it at the end of the night, staring up at the full moon, tired out, something would come out of the night's visit to the bar upstairs at work. I don't have many friends outside of the place, really, except for the nice guy, fellow Irishman in background, who takes me out to Clyde's sometimes, buddy of mine, otherwise that's pretty much it.
Connecting, well, it was good conversation, but... comes with a cost... if it's all built around drinking...
Feeling stupid, the awkwardness of time alone again... Laundry to do. Too down to really get much out of Thich Nhat Hahn today in world of drunken lies and excuses and getting very little accomplished...
At the end of the day, though, whether rightly or wrongly, you have a sense of why Jesus might ask of his Disciples, what do they think of me, who do they say I am, who do you think I am, what would you call me. And Peter, of course, has the right words, the Son of Man, meaning, more or less, the son of God, meaning more or less, a person educated somehow in the nature of deeper reality, and of the sciences that we entrust to people of more and greater spiritual insights than that of what we might normally come up with ourselves, would we have the time to do so.
Thursday, August 15, 2019
I get through the work week, and it has been busy, and the boss, who was running, delivering plates of food upstairs to be passed on to the tables, just as much as we were, is happy in that certain animal way of the busy restaurant, the adrenal high, the sense of mission accomplished, diners leaving pleased, the center holding in the amped-up whirlwind that the barman knows through his many years. The week is looked back upon, and even the night of the wine tasting of Restaurant Week, when a server we could have used was let off, becomes part of a good week, a week we're finally making some money again, thank god.
A steak'n'cheese from Manny and Olga's down the street. I always have a chat with the man taking orders behind the hot counter. "Prince of Thieves," he says. Hmm. A few times ago it was who was more significant, Michael Jackson, or Prince? This time he has me stumped. (An incredibly talented man he is, and there behind the counter, his work floor is at least two steps down, so he has a special stage, really, and one that should be celebrated. Oh, it's from Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves... he tells me. Along with how Presidents don't use words you have to look up in Webster's Dictionary when giving a speech... The man had balanced how Presidents talk, with his ability of conversations, with how, and this is really interesting, to get great policy across, you should avoid, or rather, you don't need, big words. I know this. JFK... We're all too young to remember the Cuban Missile Crises, JFK on TV, laying it all out in plain language, quite clear. (Which leads to some talk about the current one on Adderall, who reads from the teleprompter, not giving a shit.) Turns out he's referring to me, as the Prince of Thieves, I guess because I tip and add some genial conversation to his evening mix. Remember the old PLO Cafe? I ask. Arabian Nights!
And then across the street by the gas station to catch the D6 back to the apartment under the full moon.
I sit down, and have a glass of wine. Maybe I'll go for a walk, to see the moon.
But before that, having some wine that tastes absolutely delicious, as everything holds, I call Mom.
And good thing. She's concerned about the cat, who, to her sense, appears to be at death's door. Mom, that may be so, but maybe she's just doing her usual hiding thing. I calm her down. The cat likes to retreat to her little corner in the cluttered room full of books that mom uses as an office. Mom thinks the cat is dying, very sick, blaming herself for not taking her to the vets... Mom... If the cat is that sick, there's not much to do anyway, it's not your fault. It's like when Cricket (the Corgi) had her kidney or liver cancer whatever it was, and you couldn't reach her. She is calmer now.
I ingest my extra long steak and cheese, enjoying its sweet perfection, of gooey creamy mayonnaise, the texture of flat top thinly sliced steak with the softness of cheese, the acidity of hot peppers, the soothing bits of lettuce, the quietly earth sweet soft sub-roll cradling it and all, along with a glass of wine, and as I read in bed before sleep mom calls back, and miraculously the cat has come down the stairs, to investigate her food bowl, she reports. Okay, cool. I thought so, and we are happy for the moment, the time-being, I should say.
If not napping, Jesus, curled up in the ropes of the boat on the lake, is meditating. And then the sudden storm blows up in the falling darkness of dusk, a thunderstorm, pelting downpour, raging winds, and the men on the boat look at Jesus, who is meditating, and go to rouse him, Master, the boat... we're about to be sunk... lost... And Jesus, the master, who knows about storms, as we all do really, knows that the strong ones cannot last forever, and that this one will pass soon. And, saying as much, as he rises, the violence of the storm passes on along its way. Jesus, and his followers, a meditation group...
Some are born to see the light. That's close to Blake, I know, but it's one way to put it, the instincts some of us have. And it's probably a strange thing to be born with, one would imagine. And maybe even Jesus would need a little bit of the wine to say things and be things so rather contrary to the prevailing attitudes, particularly those around wealth, wealth as an aspect of the order of empire. Even today he would be denounced, told to stop preaching and get a job. (Picture him fitting in to the modern economy, having to be, to afford his lifestyle and travels, a conservative tele-evangelist preaching and promoting his own name, perhaps under an alias, as the oil, snake or otherwise, it wouldn't happen... or by being a sort of stand-up comic laughing at the idea... The poor bastard would have asked karma to put him into the world as the son of a scholar, who then took up a rather simple but useful common task, a carpenter, a story teller, a bar tender, an inn helper, a general good mensch...)
And Jesus might particularly have needed the fruit of the wine that night of the Passover, as he stood on the verge of completely defying conventional concepts of self and purpose through a sacrifice so imaginative that it is always deeply painful to comprehend, to just take a shot at that.
The Buddhists and the societies in which they might exist seem more open to the concept of monk and spiritual teachings, of Buddha, Dharma and Sangha.
Meditation is, of course, but the tip of the iceberg of the Jesus Buddha philosophy of the perennial nature. Deeper down, what would you find? Buddhism spells this out, and in Christianity such things are told through parables, for poetic comprehension.
But how to do it? How to connect? How to connect that which is so real, so true, so goes-without-saying, the bedrock of existence as seen through the prism of thought and imagination, completely divorced from the things of financial security and prosperous gain, how to connect such and other things with the realities of the lives of people living in society?
A steak'n'cheese from Manny and Olga's down the street. I always have a chat with the man taking orders behind the hot counter. "Prince of Thieves," he says. Hmm. A few times ago it was who was more significant, Michael Jackson, or Prince? This time he has me stumped. (An incredibly talented man he is, and there behind the counter, his work floor is at least two steps down, so he has a special stage, really, and one that should be celebrated. Oh, it's from Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves... he tells me. Along with how Presidents don't use words you have to look up in Webster's Dictionary when giving a speech... The man had balanced how Presidents talk, with his ability of conversations, with how, and this is really interesting, to get great policy across, you should avoid, or rather, you don't need, big words. I know this. JFK... We're all too young to remember the Cuban Missile Crises, JFK on TV, laying it all out in plain language, quite clear. (Which leads to some talk about the current one on Adderall, who reads from the teleprompter, not giving a shit.) Turns out he's referring to me, as the Prince of Thieves, I guess because I tip and add some genial conversation to his evening mix. Remember the old PLO Cafe? I ask. Arabian Nights!
And then across the street by the gas station to catch the D6 back to the apartment under the full moon.
I sit down, and have a glass of wine. Maybe I'll go for a walk, to see the moon.
But before that, having some wine that tastes absolutely delicious, as everything holds, I call Mom.
And good thing. She's concerned about the cat, who, to her sense, appears to be at death's door. Mom, that may be so, but maybe she's just doing her usual hiding thing. I calm her down. The cat likes to retreat to her little corner in the cluttered room full of books that mom uses as an office. Mom thinks the cat is dying, very sick, blaming herself for not taking her to the vets... Mom... If the cat is that sick, there's not much to do anyway, it's not your fault. It's like when Cricket (the Corgi) had her kidney or liver cancer whatever it was, and you couldn't reach her. She is calmer now.
I ingest my extra long steak and cheese, enjoying its sweet perfection, of gooey creamy mayonnaise, the texture of flat top thinly sliced steak with the softness of cheese, the acidity of hot peppers, the soothing bits of lettuce, the quietly earth sweet soft sub-roll cradling it and all, along with a glass of wine, and as I read in bed before sleep mom calls back, and miraculously the cat has come down the stairs, to investigate her food bowl, she reports. Okay, cool. I thought so, and we are happy for the moment, the time-being, I should say.
If not napping, Jesus, curled up in the ropes of the boat on the lake, is meditating. And then the sudden storm blows up in the falling darkness of dusk, a thunderstorm, pelting downpour, raging winds, and the men on the boat look at Jesus, who is meditating, and go to rouse him, Master, the boat... we're about to be sunk... lost... And Jesus, the master, who knows about storms, as we all do really, knows that the strong ones cannot last forever, and that this one will pass soon. And, saying as much, as he rises, the violence of the storm passes on along its way. Jesus, and his followers, a meditation group...
Some are born to see the light. That's close to Blake, I know, but it's one way to put it, the instincts some of us have. And it's probably a strange thing to be born with, one would imagine. And maybe even Jesus would need a little bit of the wine to say things and be things so rather contrary to the prevailing attitudes, particularly those around wealth, wealth as an aspect of the order of empire. Even today he would be denounced, told to stop preaching and get a job. (Picture him fitting in to the modern economy, having to be, to afford his lifestyle and travels, a conservative tele-evangelist preaching and promoting his own name, perhaps under an alias, as the oil, snake or otherwise, it wouldn't happen... or by being a sort of stand-up comic laughing at the idea... The poor bastard would have asked karma to put him into the world as the son of a scholar, who then took up a rather simple but useful common task, a carpenter, a story teller, a bar tender, an inn helper, a general good mensch...)
And Jesus might particularly have needed the fruit of the wine that night of the Passover, as he stood on the verge of completely defying conventional concepts of self and purpose through a sacrifice so imaginative that it is always deeply painful to comprehend, to just take a shot at that.
The Buddhists and the societies in which they might exist seem more open to the concept of monk and spiritual teachings, of Buddha, Dharma and Sangha.
Meditation is, of course, but the tip of the iceberg of the Jesus Buddha philosophy of the perennial nature. Deeper down, what would you find? Buddhism spells this out, and in Christianity such things are told through parables, for poetic comprehension.
But how to do it? How to connect? How to connect that which is so real, so true, so goes-without-saying, the bedrock of existence as seen through the prism of thought and imagination, completely divorced from the things of financial security and prosperous gain, how to connect such and other things with the realities of the lives of people living in society?
Saturday, August 10, 2019
"What am I supposed to be doing?" Mom is on the phone, amplifying my own thoughts of uselessness and doubt, after resting the day away.
It's five in the afternoon. I've not had much energy all day. Well, I was up 'til late at night, after the workweek at the bar was over, doing my "pointless" writing activities journaling, after starting to learn the guitar part to The Byrds, Turn, Turn, Turn... 1965, the year I was born.
Mom's bored with her books, even the 19th Century women writers... Yeah, I know the feeling... I am feeling the pointlessness of literary work myself, on such a day.
Do I want to read Pema Chodron again today? Mom, I'm feeling the same way...
You should go for a walk, my mom tells me, awakening from her aloneness and isolated thoughts.
Yeah, maybe I should go for a walk...
You like the river, Mom says. We can help each other out.
Yes, I've been subjected to the wandering monkey thoughts of my own isolated mind.
I know nothing. I'm not an expert in anything, but as a waiter, a barman... labor, physical... Nothing to be proud of, really, so it seems..
"What should I do, should I just kill myself? I don't know what to do? Should I just wait here? I don't know what I'm doing... Is someone going to invite me for dinner?"
I'm feeling the same way, Mom. Must be August. We sense the school year coming... the last chance for vacations, and I can't get out of DC because of work.
I'm up finally, make a pot of green tea. Dress, across the street for groceries at the little market, my friends, and she has quarters for me, a roll of them so I can laundry, and they give me some peppers, the kind they put in their subs, after I ask quietly about them. Yeah, wine, why not. Just in case. Yeah, right. Sliced roast beef. Tomato sauce to make a quick ragout with the ground bison...
And then, making a plan, after dropping off the groceries, I catch the 7PM bus headed westward, so I can take back overdue books someone has placed on hold, a Wendell Berry, and Suzuki's Zen Mind Beginner's Mind at the Palisades Library. And since the market had run out of coffee at such an evening hour, perhaps I'll stop at the independent coffee shop, along the avenue, give mom another try on the phone, tell her I'm doing okay...
So I get my coffee, in no rush, in a to-go cup, regretting the plastic lid, and sit outside facing the street, along the bench, and there is a striking woman having a salad, looking through a little book of poetry, reading them one by one, quietly. And I ask her, after standing up and trying to reach mom again, with my earbuds ready, after sitting back down with my notebook, if she'd been to the library... I should go, she says, a missing Jackie.
Obviously organized. She asks me about the books I returned...
Oh, essays by Wendell Berry, farmer poet, proponent of local family agriculture... Dharma Bums... maybe not doing me so much good anymore... Do you think of him as a member of the patriarchy, that's what a friend was telling me...
No, I don't think so...
Yes, that's nice when someone in Washington, D.C., is not particularly judgmental over a Kerouac type.
And then, I explain, the other ones, Zen, peace, meditation, that sort of thing... With the enjoyment of nature, meditation comes up, and I tell her about my pine trees back over there, and sitting in Lotus pose... Seems to help...
Do you belong to a meditation group?
Well, I'd like to... I'd like to get up to Tara Brach...
I bring up local bookstores, after mentioning I'm a barman, Frenchy, etc. Local independent, they're doing well... Kramerbooks...
I met my therapist there, she was bartending... (I'd mention my job at the Dying Gaul...)
No kidding...
Going back to school is fun. You get to read what you enjoy... talk about it, write about it... She's a therapist too, I find out. After I mention seeing mine, and how she's moved away...
There's lots of good stuff to talk about with this person, under no illusions, walks down by the river, oh sure, and she went kayaking recently, and another time she saw an owl...
It was one of those conversations, transpiring easily, and later on it keeps a meaning. Parts remembered, in no particular order, like a crossword puzzle, back and forth. Beneficial echoes. Remembrances from an encounter with a being vibrating at a higher more spiritual frequency, such things stand out in your sense of things.
Yes, when I talk to my mom I tell her, you know, that's just a thought, that's all it is.
Afterward, with a coffee refill I probably don't need, after stopping at the CVS to put more money on my metro fare card, I walk home, an orange sunset back over the reservoirs. And I think, yes, maybe that is it, therapy, just like mom has always told me I'd make a good one.
It's not about serving up drinks, it's about the therapy behind it all, offered freely, as it should be, and even the writing, comes down to a certain point, I guess.
Later, after putting together supper, and a bloated feeling nap, it's quiet time, and I hear an owl above in the trees.
It's five in the afternoon. I've not had much energy all day. Well, I was up 'til late at night, after the workweek at the bar was over, doing my "pointless" writing activities journaling, after starting to learn the guitar part to The Byrds, Turn, Turn, Turn... 1965, the year I was born.
Mom's bored with her books, even the 19th Century women writers... Yeah, I know the feeling... I am feeling the pointlessness of literary work myself, on such a day.
Do I want to read Pema Chodron again today? Mom, I'm feeling the same way...
You should go for a walk, my mom tells me, awakening from her aloneness and isolated thoughts.
Yeah, maybe I should go for a walk...
You like the river, Mom says. We can help each other out.
Yes, I've been subjected to the wandering monkey thoughts of my own isolated mind.
I know nothing. I'm not an expert in anything, but as a waiter, a barman... labor, physical... Nothing to be proud of, really, so it seems..
"What should I do, should I just kill myself? I don't know what to do? Should I just wait here? I don't know what I'm doing... Is someone going to invite me for dinner?"
I'm feeling the same way, Mom. Must be August. We sense the school year coming... the last chance for vacations, and I can't get out of DC because of work.
I'm up finally, make a pot of green tea. Dress, across the street for groceries at the little market, my friends, and she has quarters for me, a roll of them so I can laundry, and they give me some peppers, the kind they put in their subs, after I ask quietly about them. Yeah, wine, why not. Just in case. Yeah, right. Sliced roast beef. Tomato sauce to make a quick ragout with the ground bison...
And then, making a plan, after dropping off the groceries, I catch the 7PM bus headed westward, so I can take back overdue books someone has placed on hold, a Wendell Berry, and Suzuki's Zen Mind Beginner's Mind at the Palisades Library. And since the market had run out of coffee at such an evening hour, perhaps I'll stop at the independent coffee shop, along the avenue, give mom another try on the phone, tell her I'm doing okay...
So I get my coffee, in no rush, in a to-go cup, regretting the plastic lid, and sit outside facing the street, along the bench, and there is a striking woman having a salad, looking through a little book of poetry, reading them one by one, quietly. And I ask her, after standing up and trying to reach mom again, with my earbuds ready, after sitting back down with my notebook, if she'd been to the library... I should go, she says, a missing Jackie.
Obviously organized. She asks me about the books I returned...
Oh, essays by Wendell Berry, farmer poet, proponent of local family agriculture... Dharma Bums... maybe not doing me so much good anymore... Do you think of him as a member of the patriarchy, that's what a friend was telling me...
No, I don't think so...
Yes, that's nice when someone in Washington, D.C., is not particularly judgmental over a Kerouac type.
And then, I explain, the other ones, Zen, peace, meditation, that sort of thing... With the enjoyment of nature, meditation comes up, and I tell her about my pine trees back over there, and sitting in Lotus pose... Seems to help...
Do you belong to a meditation group?
Well, I'd like to... I'd like to get up to Tara Brach...
I bring up local bookstores, after mentioning I'm a barman, Frenchy, etc. Local independent, they're doing well... Kramerbooks...
I met my therapist there, she was bartending... (I'd mention my job at the Dying Gaul...)
No kidding...
Going back to school is fun. You get to read what you enjoy... talk about it, write about it... She's a therapist too, I find out. After I mention seeing mine, and how she's moved away...
There's lots of good stuff to talk about with this person, under no illusions, walks down by the river, oh sure, and she went kayaking recently, and another time she saw an owl...
It was one of those conversations, transpiring easily, and later on it keeps a meaning. Parts remembered, in no particular order, like a crossword puzzle, back and forth. Beneficial echoes. Remembrances from an encounter with a being vibrating at a higher more spiritual frequency, such things stand out in your sense of things.
Yes, when I talk to my mom I tell her, you know, that's just a thought, that's all it is.
Afterward, with a coffee refill I probably don't need, after stopping at the CVS to put more money on my metro fare card, I walk home, an orange sunset back over the reservoirs. And I think, yes, maybe that is it, therapy, just like mom has always told me I'd make a good one.
It's not about serving up drinks, it's about the therapy behind it all, offered freely, as it should be, and even the writing, comes down to a certain point, I guess.
Later, after putting together supper, and a bloated feeling nap, it's quiet time, and I hear an owl above in the trees.
Friday, August 9, 2019
I found that during the workweek, the new one, five shifts, closing every night, I didn't have time to write much.
I spent a lot of time alone. Which might be okay, in some ways, given the steady stream. But that was hard. To go from lots of people, to none. To go from seeing so many people having conversations, talking amongst each other, than when you feel you might be ready for your own, what? nothing, isolation, odd hours...
The neighbors didn't seem too thrilled with me, when I moved in. It was a shitty snowy weekend in early March, and I'd been through too much to want more than just to sleep. And when I brought out my natural defenses, such as trying out new songs on the guitar with a bit of singing attempt, they really didn't like me. The place was new, completely different, and no local friends, beyond the friends I made at the little Korean market. That too was a study in humanity, to walk in there, the little hub. DC Lottery Tickets, a religious homage to the basin of holy water just as you walked in.
Thursday afternoon, first day off, naps, I set an alarm just to make sure I get there for basics before it closes at 8PM. The News Hour wakes me up. From outside, I see through the glass door, a tall giant of an African American woman in spandex with midriff, she's talking into her cell phone on speaker talking about Drake, or someone named Drake, as she waits at the counter, no acknowledgment, ignoring the lady behind the counter, and I order some Boars Head Roast Beef, no nitrates, not too high in sodium--though I wonder about the swollen lymph gland now below my right armpit--get my bottle of decent Sideways South of France Pays D'Oc Pinot Noir, and the big tall woman is out in the street talking loudly into the phone on speaker. "I'm going to behave the way I want to behave." Well, I guess there's nothing wrong with that attitude. Just a contrast from the nice tea room polite Korean women who work from 7AM to 8PM at their little market, six days a week. Coffee, breakfast sandwiches, tuna salad, curried chicken salad, Boars Head deli, sandwiches, specials, produce on offer if you ask, such as celery, broccoli, little packets of handy frozen parsley... Old school, but very good, and a deluxe cold cut sub I have fallen for, sub roll with olive paste, hot and sweet peppers...
The other morning, two guys come in from across the street, after I've sheepishly ordered my cold cut sub, still feeling furtive about it, but rather sick of the flavors of The old Dying Gaul, even the veal cheeks osso bucco, and one of them is talking in a friendly way with the nice ring leader lady about how his haircut and look must surprise her. "I'm auditioning for a role that takes place in the Forties, so I had to get a haircut." His friend is tall too, quiet, polite, and it turns out he's looking to be cast into something for the 1850s... bearded. My mind is working on a Ken Burns Civil War little friendly quip, but, it's stinking hot out, blah, and I gotta get to work, lot of good it fucking does me, no retirement plan, no plan at all, and they willingly abuse me and my soul and my goodness, and no wonder when I walk up the alley behind the old Yassir Arafat PLO Embassy rear quarters, with the mulberry trees, with the fences, with the back end of the Chinese restaurant, and the odd abandoned yard, no wonder it's my Via Dolorosa, as if wearing a crown a thorns too, that vanishes from view when I enter the garage door at the basement of the old restaurant, to say hello to the kitchen guys napping, enter the hallway, lemons and limes and an orange from the walk-in, knowing no one else is capable of stocking...
Most people have some form of recognition in this humble neighborhood, the Palisades, regardless. In the market, out on the street. But not always. And because of my music, and my hours, persona non grata. That's how it goes.
I don't necessarily hold myself in high regard, you know. I think that comes with the territory. You look back at some episodes and crucial turning points of the kind that were not always as well thought out, and you see more a passive person than an aggressor. And unfortunately, the world needs, if things are going to turn out well, good people to become aggressive. Fighters. That attitude never occurred to me. It's been rather observed in the negative. People don't tend to jump to the side of the peaceful and the kind. They're still too busy trying to plan and overrun, or keep up, however they see it.
Well, I'm in such a state, one I shouldn't really be in, given my background, therefore proving my slacker laziness, my misguidedness, my Elie Weisel stand up for what's right or the bad people will take the selfish day and be horrible and evil... which I never got, being a peaceful person.
I guess war is the story where the peaceful people suddenly find themselves shipped off to this... I mean, Good God, the trenches, the worst you could imagine. Masai African elite athlete warriors sent to face off against the German machine gun... Always the story, the brave men, the Irish brigade, the six hundred, Picket's charge, they keep coming, even unto the bullseye, and then slaughtered, ripped limb from limb by object of physics far far out of scale with anything human and directly available, the tree, the daffodil, the grass, the primula, the lilly, the cattail, the bird, as to be utterly ridiculous. Unlike horse and carriage... like the highway, the beltway... stop for a second, you are dead and a lot of other people nearby you will probably be so too.
It seems so little a payoff, to be able to deliver a small story from the struggles of the workweek and the commutes and the phone calls and the other stuff, decisions not made that will then be made for you, poor mister forest dweller, to then be able to sit down, even hunched over like St. Jerome at the Ikea plexiglass coffee table and write a bit, to deliver a little Jesus Buddha homage, a little parable, but I too am very guilty for hiding my light under the bushel basket, who does that, not smart, hiding away talents, talent that chicks would have definitely enjoyed, except now I have become as the tree, watching the horizon and the clouds and heavenly objects and small creatures aboding, more and more everyday.
But if you can enter the slipstream, whether or not it will ever sell, or ever be recognized, that's a feeling of a lost decency, of a Jude the Obscure regaining status as a freshman with good roommates and lots of learning to have overlooking the quadrangle...
Yes, if you held to the cliff wall all week, careful with pitons, and then got to a place safe and clear and protected, then you could write a little bit. And you didn't care about some form of magnificent prose or a well-told story, no, you wanted to talk about the loaves and the fishes you had created out of nothing, out of jack,
All one needs is a bit of stimulation, a little entertainment. This is the basic point of education. Get a good grade or not, as long as in, through, the deepest riches of education, at the very point where science falls, disappears into poetry and the art of God, when the political realm and the entire history of diplomacy (along with its subsets of earthly wars, colosseums, open air amphitheaters, shady dealings, imprisonments, exiles, bloodshed, economic tortures, losers and winners) can be reduced to the basic language of the equality of spiritual beings acknowledging their spiritual nature, as plants do every day, the golden rule, the Good Samaritan, Job not blaming anyone but himself, nor Jonah blaming anyone either, do unto others, fear God and divine retribution and justice...
And so did the barman do his job, providing that little spark of entertainment, as underestimated, as little compensating as it was, he did his job, entertaining, broadening, allowing for openness...
I spent a lot of time alone. Which might be okay, in some ways, given the steady stream. But that was hard. To go from lots of people, to none. To go from seeing so many people having conversations, talking amongst each other, than when you feel you might be ready for your own, what? nothing, isolation, odd hours...
The neighbors didn't seem too thrilled with me, when I moved in. It was a shitty snowy weekend in early March, and I'd been through too much to want more than just to sleep. And when I brought out my natural defenses, such as trying out new songs on the guitar with a bit of singing attempt, they really didn't like me. The place was new, completely different, and no local friends, beyond the friends I made at the little Korean market. That too was a study in humanity, to walk in there, the little hub. DC Lottery Tickets, a religious homage to the basin of holy water just as you walked in.
Thursday afternoon, first day off, naps, I set an alarm just to make sure I get there for basics before it closes at 8PM. The News Hour wakes me up. From outside, I see through the glass door, a tall giant of an African American woman in spandex with midriff, she's talking into her cell phone on speaker talking about Drake, or someone named Drake, as she waits at the counter, no acknowledgment, ignoring the lady behind the counter, and I order some Boars Head Roast Beef, no nitrates, not too high in sodium--though I wonder about the swollen lymph gland now below my right armpit--get my bottle of decent Sideways South of France Pays D'Oc Pinot Noir, and the big tall woman is out in the street talking loudly into the phone on speaker. "I'm going to behave the way I want to behave." Well, I guess there's nothing wrong with that attitude. Just a contrast from the nice tea room polite Korean women who work from 7AM to 8PM at their little market, six days a week. Coffee, breakfast sandwiches, tuna salad, curried chicken salad, Boars Head deli, sandwiches, specials, produce on offer if you ask, such as celery, broccoli, little packets of handy frozen parsley... Old school, but very good, and a deluxe cold cut sub I have fallen for, sub roll with olive paste, hot and sweet peppers...
The other morning, two guys come in from across the street, after I've sheepishly ordered my cold cut sub, still feeling furtive about it, but rather sick of the flavors of The old Dying Gaul, even the veal cheeks osso bucco, and one of them is talking in a friendly way with the nice ring leader lady about how his haircut and look must surprise her. "I'm auditioning for a role that takes place in the Forties, so I had to get a haircut." His friend is tall too, quiet, polite, and it turns out he's looking to be cast into something for the 1850s... bearded. My mind is working on a Ken Burns Civil War little friendly quip, but, it's stinking hot out, blah, and I gotta get to work, lot of good it fucking does me, no retirement plan, no plan at all, and they willingly abuse me and my soul and my goodness, and no wonder when I walk up the alley behind the old Yassir Arafat PLO Embassy rear quarters, with the mulberry trees, with the fences, with the back end of the Chinese restaurant, and the odd abandoned yard, no wonder it's my Via Dolorosa, as if wearing a crown a thorns too, that vanishes from view when I enter the garage door at the basement of the old restaurant, to say hello to the kitchen guys napping, enter the hallway, lemons and limes and an orange from the walk-in, knowing no one else is capable of stocking...
Most people have some form of recognition in this humble neighborhood, the Palisades, regardless. In the market, out on the street. But not always. And because of my music, and my hours, persona non grata. That's how it goes.
I don't necessarily hold myself in high regard, you know. I think that comes with the territory. You look back at some episodes and crucial turning points of the kind that were not always as well thought out, and you see more a passive person than an aggressor. And unfortunately, the world needs, if things are going to turn out well, good people to become aggressive. Fighters. That attitude never occurred to me. It's been rather observed in the negative. People don't tend to jump to the side of the peaceful and the kind. They're still too busy trying to plan and overrun, or keep up, however they see it.
Well, I'm in such a state, one I shouldn't really be in, given my background, therefore proving my slacker laziness, my misguidedness, my Elie Weisel stand up for what's right or the bad people will take the selfish day and be horrible and evil... which I never got, being a peaceful person.
I guess war is the story where the peaceful people suddenly find themselves shipped off to this... I mean, Good God, the trenches, the worst you could imagine. Masai African elite athlete warriors sent to face off against the German machine gun... Always the story, the brave men, the Irish brigade, the six hundred, Picket's charge, they keep coming, even unto the bullseye, and then slaughtered, ripped limb from limb by object of physics far far out of scale with anything human and directly available, the tree, the daffodil, the grass, the primula, the lilly, the cattail, the bird, as to be utterly ridiculous. Unlike horse and carriage... like the highway, the beltway... stop for a second, you are dead and a lot of other people nearby you will probably be so too.
It seems so little a payoff, to be able to deliver a small story from the struggles of the workweek and the commutes and the phone calls and the other stuff, decisions not made that will then be made for you, poor mister forest dweller, to then be able to sit down, even hunched over like St. Jerome at the Ikea plexiglass coffee table and write a bit, to deliver a little Jesus Buddha homage, a little parable, but I too am very guilty for hiding my light under the bushel basket, who does that, not smart, hiding away talents, talent that chicks would have definitely enjoyed, except now I have become as the tree, watching the horizon and the clouds and heavenly objects and small creatures aboding, more and more everyday.
But if you can enter the slipstream, whether or not it will ever sell, or ever be recognized, that's a feeling of a lost decency, of a Jude the Obscure regaining status as a freshman with good roommates and lots of learning to have overlooking the quadrangle...
Yes, if you held to the cliff wall all week, careful with pitons, and then got to a place safe and clear and protected, then you could write a little bit. And you didn't care about some form of magnificent prose or a well-told story, no, you wanted to talk about the loaves and the fishes you had created out of nothing, out of jack,
All one needs is a bit of stimulation, a little entertainment. This is the basic point of education. Get a good grade or not, as long as in, through, the deepest riches of education, at the very point where science falls, disappears into poetry and the art of God, when the political realm and the entire history of diplomacy (along with its subsets of earthly wars, colosseums, open air amphitheaters, shady dealings, imprisonments, exiles, bloodshed, economic tortures, losers and winners) can be reduced to the basic language of the equality of spiritual beings acknowledging their spiritual nature, as plants do every day, the golden rule, the Good Samaritan, Job not blaming anyone but himself, nor Jonah blaming anyone either, do unto others, fear God and divine retribution and justice...
And so did the barman do his job, providing that little spark of entertainment, as underestimated, as little compensating as it was, he did his job, entertaining, broadening, allowing for openness...
Wednesday, August 7, 2019
Draft:
I find myself in the Safeway on Wisconsin Ave. after work.
When you get older, you'll find things, come across things. A parent is dying. I'm too far away to get there. I'm coming from a work meeting. Blinded, I go to the Safeway...
Saturday, Sunday, Monday in, and each one drawing me into the night sea. I don't know what to do but have some wine after a shower, do the dishes. 5 AM now, pushed further into the night, further into the solitary.
I might have the touch, the common touch, the goodness to great a thousand people easy, and to get to know individuals quick enough, well, that's because I know myself, I've seen my habits, yes I have... And it's always been, I've thought, a noble experiment in being a kind of person, a particular sort of people, who, either are from some ancient place, or maybe even from space, or hyper space, as far as I could gather... I mean, from people who know the soul...
I mean, to know the soul, your own soul, the hyper soul, however you might put it, I mean, these days, that would be odd enough... So distracted, we are by... by the vehicles of expression, this app, that app, the perceived need to respond to some bit of news, take up the offerings of entertainment... I mean, just to speak basically and in full presence...
Such a conversation, even in a barroom, will fall to the thousand different priorities of professional life.
And the week continues.
Tuesday night wine tasting, one of those Air Unhealthy days in DC, and I feel it, walking down to the Korean market for a sandwich before the bus. It's slow, it's quiet. Two moms with kids across the street playing soccer come in for half a glass of wine, so, of course, pour them a taste. They then order half glasses, but by the time I get over there to the table, they have to go, that's cool, no worries at all, come back some other time. I'm walking past them as they get up from the low table, now on their mission, and two glasses roll off the table, crash, breaking. "Oh, Jesus..." I mutter to myself softly... No, no worries, shit happens, we'll catch you next time, one mom tries to give me a ten, no, really, take it easy...
We're tasting a Bordeaux, a Cotes de Bourg, Chateau Bujan, 2015. I go around giving my little spiel about the wine.
And then, Khaos of the Double Ks arrive. I've gotten everyone else calmed down and dined and deserted, it's just not busy at all, some wine conversations at the bar between a Jamaican woman and an older gentleman, Southern, in a linen jacket, who's written a book about Napa, he inscribes it to her... The Khaos guys are already a little bit into it, having come from one bar eatery, and they get sentimental soon enough, but I am, I suppose, too much a gentleman to notice it, and just keeping on top of them, organized, ready with silverware when they want to eat, and then more people come, there's the panic of getting the orders in before the kitchen closes, early, the announcement coming up from downstairs via the trusty old busboy, M., 9, and then ordering blind, not for just the two Italian women who are coming, but for another, and then, yes, for the chef guy, and Khaos One tells me at 9:08 that they need a salmon tartar... and the kitchen is not pleased when I put the order in, no, even the busboy lecturing me. But I'm busy just trying to keep it all straight, and I wonder later, is it in their personalities to demand such attention that takes a large amount of stoic hospitality and the patience of a saint, a saint, who, naturally, likes people, and his friends from down all the years...
Later, after it all, the troubled cleaning up, I find "rare footage" of Kerouac on YouTube, but he is drunk and sweaty and in people's faces, no hero of mine here, and I feel ashamed. Jesus, maybe it is all blowhard crap, even when one appears to write that well as Kerouac did. What kind of a personality would claim such a talent, and now we would look upon such men, Ginsburg, also disheveled, Kerouac, a sweaty drunk in a striped short sleeved shirt, as bums indeed, and maybe I'm one too, for falling for it all. Where does much of narrative fiction come from but stimulants, caffeine, the hungover lifestyle... The work of the man child, the mama's boy, refusing to man up and act with action.
The skies open just as I get on the bus to work, roast beef sub, wrapped in paper, and lightning followed four seconds later by thunder. Drenching, but I keep under the trees and jump over little torrents in the sidewalks and driveways and across curbs, up to work, socks damp, shirt soaked through, knapsack wet inside.
I'm wearied out from the night before, but I know that I've left the bar in good shape. I was there until 1:30 in the morning putting it all back together, the clean up from the last round of conversations after the smoke, to do the math of the checkout report, and the chef guy forgot his wallet, yeah, so it goes. I put the bar together again, stocked, ready to go, cold stuff cold, silverware, mineral water, cutting lime wedges, cloth napkins ready, reservation list, a general order of neatness, a clean slate bar top...
It's busy already, but one spot at the bar when Henri comes in, venerable waiter, close friend of Martin, the old maitre d' from Jockey Club, but it's a just a shade too hectic to have a sustained conversation with him, though I try, as coworker A. literally pokes me. Pigs feet, Veal Cheeks... I've come by to see you, but you're never here, Henri says as he gets ready to take his check. (His fellow French waiter down the street, who also worked with us, sometimes texts me on my work Saturday nights: "are you working tonight?" answer: "no." And sometime he slips in anyway, just as I'm getting rid of the last customers and there he is at the bar smiling at me, and for him, one is never enough, and so I have a right to duck him. I know how it's going to end, nice guy that he is.) There's a check presenter book next to him, the couple who has a story about a major soccer trophy visiting the town, and he mentions, having opened it that I gave him the wrong check, though meanwhile his check is right in front of him, which I advance. "I thought you looked confused," he says. "He's a man of leisure, eh..." ha ha. "That's a dangerous profession, young man," he tells me. Yes, my friend, I know. I told him I was working now an honest man's five shifts, and don't tell him about the rest, but... I can't really argue with him. He could manage to work catering to a law firm, breakfast and lunch, and then go do a restaurant night shift, avoiding the craziness. And it was better money back then, anyway.
And meanwhile, even in the slow doldrums of early August with Congress out of session, the bar is full, an older couple waiting for the two who are just having drinks to move along, and all the while the gypsy swing of the trio is ticking away.
And anyway my mind is recovering from the bleakness of spirit, the dissatisfaction that fell down upon me as the last of Khaos men were hanging around...
A favor to do, when I get back to the apartment. First, a nap, hitting the couch after taking my sneakers off. My friend who works for the real estate company who is my landlord, has sent an email, please light the pilot lights of the gas stove in vacant 201, and it's a greasy old stove, particularly after I remove the burner grates to lift the stove top up to find the top pilot lights. The old empty apartment, abandoned, electricity turned off, the same footprint as mine, but reversed. I didn't know the person who lived here. There was a Crucifix on the wall one could see through the window when the blinds were up, and now looking at them, they are old blinds. I run a load of laundry through, to have underwear and socks. Wide awake, I take out the recycling, go for a walk out around the block by the woods, 6:30 AM, now, people arriving off the main road at the Nature Research Center facility, beyond the reservoir banks, mist rising from the river above the trees on the far side of the Potomac.
I call mom, eat some curried chicken salad from the deli, go to bed, scratching at the mild itch on bug bitten knuckles. The window unit AC is on low, so it comes in and out of cooling mode, and the nail gun thumps percussively somewhere outside the window nearby, and the little Bobcat, digging away, back and forth.
I find myself in the Safeway on Wisconsin Ave. after work.
When you get older, you'll find things, come across things. A parent is dying. I'm too far away to get there. I'm coming from a work meeting. Blinded, I go to the Safeway...
Saturday, Sunday, Monday in, and each one drawing me into the night sea. I don't know what to do but have some wine after a shower, do the dishes. 5 AM now, pushed further into the night, further into the solitary.
I might have the touch, the common touch, the goodness to great a thousand people easy, and to get to know individuals quick enough, well, that's because I know myself, I've seen my habits, yes I have... And it's always been, I've thought, a noble experiment in being a kind of person, a particular sort of people, who, either are from some ancient place, or maybe even from space, or hyper space, as far as I could gather... I mean, from people who know the soul...
I mean, to know the soul, your own soul, the hyper soul, however you might put it, I mean, these days, that would be odd enough... So distracted, we are by... by the vehicles of expression, this app, that app, the perceived need to respond to some bit of news, take up the offerings of entertainment... I mean, just to speak basically and in full presence...
Such a conversation, even in a barroom, will fall to the thousand different priorities of professional life.
And the week continues.
Tuesday night wine tasting, one of those Air Unhealthy days in DC, and I feel it, walking down to the Korean market for a sandwich before the bus. It's slow, it's quiet. Two moms with kids across the street playing soccer come in for half a glass of wine, so, of course, pour them a taste. They then order half glasses, but by the time I get over there to the table, they have to go, that's cool, no worries at all, come back some other time. I'm walking past them as they get up from the low table, now on their mission, and two glasses roll off the table, crash, breaking. "Oh, Jesus..." I mutter to myself softly... No, no worries, shit happens, we'll catch you next time, one mom tries to give me a ten, no, really, take it easy...
We're tasting a Bordeaux, a Cotes de Bourg, Chateau Bujan, 2015. I go around giving my little spiel about the wine.
And then, Khaos of the Double Ks arrive. I've gotten everyone else calmed down and dined and deserted, it's just not busy at all, some wine conversations at the bar between a Jamaican woman and an older gentleman, Southern, in a linen jacket, who's written a book about Napa, he inscribes it to her... The Khaos guys are already a little bit into it, having come from one bar eatery, and they get sentimental soon enough, but I am, I suppose, too much a gentleman to notice it, and just keeping on top of them, organized, ready with silverware when they want to eat, and then more people come, there's the panic of getting the orders in before the kitchen closes, early, the announcement coming up from downstairs via the trusty old busboy, M., 9, and then ordering blind, not for just the two Italian women who are coming, but for another, and then, yes, for the chef guy, and Khaos One tells me at 9:08 that they need a salmon tartar... and the kitchen is not pleased when I put the order in, no, even the busboy lecturing me. But I'm busy just trying to keep it all straight, and I wonder later, is it in their personalities to demand such attention that takes a large amount of stoic hospitality and the patience of a saint, a saint, who, naturally, likes people, and his friends from down all the years...
Later, after it all, the troubled cleaning up, I find "rare footage" of Kerouac on YouTube, but he is drunk and sweaty and in people's faces, no hero of mine here, and I feel ashamed. Jesus, maybe it is all blowhard crap, even when one appears to write that well as Kerouac did. What kind of a personality would claim such a talent, and now we would look upon such men, Ginsburg, also disheveled, Kerouac, a sweaty drunk in a striped short sleeved shirt, as bums indeed, and maybe I'm one too, for falling for it all. Where does much of narrative fiction come from but stimulants, caffeine, the hungover lifestyle... The work of the man child, the mama's boy, refusing to man up and act with action.
The skies open just as I get on the bus to work, roast beef sub, wrapped in paper, and lightning followed four seconds later by thunder. Drenching, but I keep under the trees and jump over little torrents in the sidewalks and driveways and across curbs, up to work, socks damp, shirt soaked through, knapsack wet inside.
I'm wearied out from the night before, but I know that I've left the bar in good shape. I was there until 1:30 in the morning putting it all back together, the clean up from the last round of conversations after the smoke, to do the math of the checkout report, and the chef guy forgot his wallet, yeah, so it goes. I put the bar together again, stocked, ready to go, cold stuff cold, silverware, mineral water, cutting lime wedges, cloth napkins ready, reservation list, a general order of neatness, a clean slate bar top...
It's busy already, but one spot at the bar when Henri comes in, venerable waiter, close friend of Martin, the old maitre d' from Jockey Club, but it's a just a shade too hectic to have a sustained conversation with him, though I try, as coworker A. literally pokes me. Pigs feet, Veal Cheeks... I've come by to see you, but you're never here, Henri says as he gets ready to take his check. (His fellow French waiter down the street, who also worked with us, sometimes texts me on my work Saturday nights: "are you working tonight?" answer: "no." And sometime he slips in anyway, just as I'm getting rid of the last customers and there he is at the bar smiling at me, and for him, one is never enough, and so I have a right to duck him. I know how it's going to end, nice guy that he is.) There's a check presenter book next to him, the couple who has a story about a major soccer trophy visiting the town, and he mentions, having opened it that I gave him the wrong check, though meanwhile his check is right in front of him, which I advance. "I thought you looked confused," he says. "He's a man of leisure, eh..." ha ha. "That's a dangerous profession, young man," he tells me. Yes, my friend, I know. I told him I was working now an honest man's five shifts, and don't tell him about the rest, but... I can't really argue with him. He could manage to work catering to a law firm, breakfast and lunch, and then go do a restaurant night shift, avoiding the craziness. And it was better money back then, anyway.
And meanwhile, even in the slow doldrums of early August with Congress out of session, the bar is full, an older couple waiting for the two who are just having drinks to move along, and all the while the gypsy swing of the trio is ticking away.
And anyway my mind is recovering from the bleakness of spirit, the dissatisfaction that fell down upon me as the last of Khaos men were hanging around...
A favor to do, when I get back to the apartment. First, a nap, hitting the couch after taking my sneakers off. My friend who works for the real estate company who is my landlord, has sent an email, please light the pilot lights of the gas stove in vacant 201, and it's a greasy old stove, particularly after I remove the burner grates to lift the stove top up to find the top pilot lights. The old empty apartment, abandoned, electricity turned off, the same footprint as mine, but reversed. I didn't know the person who lived here. There was a Crucifix on the wall one could see through the window when the blinds were up, and now looking at them, they are old blinds. I run a load of laundry through, to have underwear and socks. Wide awake, I take out the recycling, go for a walk out around the block by the woods, 6:30 AM, now, people arriving off the main road at the Nature Research Center facility, beyond the reservoir banks, mist rising from the river above the trees on the far side of the Potomac.
I call mom, eat some curried chicken salad from the deli, go to bed, scratching at the mild itch on bug bitten knuckles. The window unit AC is on low, so it comes in and out of cooling mode, and the nail gun thumps percussively somewhere outside the window nearby, and the little Bobcat, digging away, back and forth.
Tuesday, August 6, 2019
Having laid out the cut slate flagstones, in squares and rectangles, one of the workmen took the cement mix in the wheelbarrow and troweled it up into a large pastry bag kind of a thing, squeezing out the mixture into the gaps, then smoothing, and below him the younger man, a slender kid, took a large sponge and wiped off the tops of the stones.
It's Friday afternoon. I go and do my yoga, mat angled to the western setting sun through the trees, and then it's good yoga under the pines, and I do my tree in front of a tree trunk and my lotus pose the same.
Later I get bored, taking a nap after eating half a deluxe cold cut sub stuffed with additional roast beef... and I'm not ready to get the bus in to go see Jeremy and A. and Jeremy's friends... I finally get to the 10:30 bus in, and when I get to The Gaul, everybody's gone and the busboy lets me in. I have a glass of wine at the bar, just sitting there by myself, what to do. Go buy laundry detergent at the Safeway, take the bus back home? I check the map application to see when the next bus back will be, but end up walking down past the Catholic church JFK attended near Georgetown University, sit down at the bar down in the Tombs, have a glass of pinot noir, order a burger, walk home finally.
It's Friday afternoon. I go and do my yoga, mat angled to the western setting sun through the trees, and then it's good yoga under the pines, and I do my tree in front of a tree trunk and my lotus pose the same.
Later I get bored, taking a nap after eating half a deluxe cold cut sub stuffed with additional roast beef... and I'm not ready to get the bus in to go see Jeremy and A. and Jeremy's friends... I finally get to the 10:30 bus in, and when I get to The Gaul, everybody's gone and the busboy lets me in. I have a glass of wine at the bar, just sitting there by myself, what to do. Go buy laundry detergent at the Safeway, take the bus back home? I check the map application to see when the next bus back will be, but end up walking down past the Catholic church JFK attended near Georgetown University, sit down at the bar down in the Tombs, have a glass of pinot noir, order a burger, walk home finally.
But how do you explain Buddha's enlightenment thoughts? How do you go about creating a group of like minded friends with something so tenuous, existing only in the imagination? How would you convince your own lonesome self about the karmic wheel...
... to send peaceful vibes out into the world?
... to send peaceful vibes out into the world?
Sunday, August 4, 2019
I get mom on the phone, after my Saturday night shift...
We talk about a lot, end up with Emily Dickinson, and not the usual, "all but death can be adjusted."
The Past is such a curious creature,
to look her in the face
A transport may reward us
Or a disgrace.
Unarmed if any meet her,
I charge him, fly!
Her rusty ammunition
Might yet reply.
I gather that to me that main thing her is the image, of The Past being an actual creature, a physical presence, and, indeed, one that is curious, ever shifting, full of a strange strong personality, ever-shifting, not knowing where you might find it.
"You've got the touch," she says, helps as i face the day...
We talk about a lot, end up with Emily Dickinson, and not the usual, "all but death can be adjusted."
The Past is such a curious creature,
to look her in the face
A transport may reward us
Or a disgrace.
Unarmed if any meet her,
I charge him, fly!
Her rusty ammunition
Might yet reply.
I gather that to me that main thing her is the image, of The Past being an actual creature, a physical presence, and, indeed, one that is curious, ever shifting, full of a strange strong personality, ever-shifting, not knowing where you might find it.
"You've got the touch," she says, helps as i face the day...
Transcribed:
I was (um) actually a very good bartender. I would come in, before or on time, earlier, often, and set up. I would stock as well as I could. I think sometimes all the other guys would just shrug, doesn't need to be done. Showing up I'd be picky. I mean, I was sacrificing a lot for this, way too much. (Except I didn't know any other thing, any other way... That's pretty sad I guess, because when you're too late, you're too late. Well... You get defined, at least so it feels like somehow, and feeling a way is significant as far as you're going to keep feeling... You feel that way, old, life passing you by sort of stuff, not necessarily with any reality attached to it beyond wisdom, some kind of wisdom, at least....
And it's very hard to write now these days. I don't know... Fifty years ago Kerouac would just riff on, great stuff, and then before that you had Hemingway who was like a careful moccasin cobbler stylist. Both of them in a very real way, a very real way of writing, very true, very heartfelt, very much tied in with their own sense of how the "Genius/Creator/God Within," a way of presenting their experience, their reality, and of course they were very much exposed to art, and art which began more and more to offer up deeper pointed questions about personal depths, humanness...
I'd put Vonnegut with that bunch, I'd put Twain, I'd put Carver, and others too, I'm sure, Stephan Crane... Melville, certainly, Sherwood Anderson, Frost, Carl Sandburg, Whitman...
But it got harder to write when it should have become easier to write, like a political attitude, oh, yes, wait a minute, some sort of "woke" political correctness that was wrong enough to give a great backlash... One should have just been able to write, like I have,
and so now anyway, I'm telling you.
There was everything in what I did. There was theatrics, its sub components of physical comedy, voice, eye movement, eyebrow Groucho expression, sounding out in different voices.
Is it at all natural that a person would somehow chose a life that was a job of walking into strangers, and accepting them all the way, and all that. Yes, I think it is. Different flow, but always full of humans...
So I responded to it. Of course I did. Animal husbandry. And I feel that I've grown in stature, now that I'm middle age going on beyond at some point, that I've maintained my peak performance for a long time. I don't think anyone has actually ever given me credit for that. I mean, a job, a person, you take for granted. Right?
Bartenders can be in style or out of style, and many many play up the style, and I don't blame them, marketing themselves...
But those guys will come and go, I mean, even if they too stay put. I'd rather just be a plain enough guy, who's got every customer backed up with good stuff, many possibilities of a classic meal and wine to go with it...
I was (um) actually a very good bartender. I would come in, before or on time, earlier, often, and set up. I would stock as well as I could. I think sometimes all the other guys would just shrug, doesn't need to be done. Showing up I'd be picky. I mean, I was sacrificing a lot for this, way too much. (Except I didn't know any other thing, any other way... That's pretty sad I guess, because when you're too late, you're too late. Well... You get defined, at least so it feels like somehow, and feeling a way is significant as far as you're going to keep feeling... You feel that way, old, life passing you by sort of stuff, not necessarily with any reality attached to it beyond wisdom, some kind of wisdom, at least....
And it's very hard to write now these days. I don't know... Fifty years ago Kerouac would just riff on, great stuff, and then before that you had Hemingway who was like a careful moccasin cobbler stylist. Both of them in a very real way, a very real way of writing, very true, very heartfelt, very much tied in with their own sense of how the "Genius/Creator/God Within," a way of presenting their experience, their reality, and of course they were very much exposed to art, and art which began more and more to offer up deeper pointed questions about personal depths, humanness...
I'd put Vonnegut with that bunch, I'd put Twain, I'd put Carver, and others too, I'm sure, Stephan Crane... Melville, certainly, Sherwood Anderson, Frost, Carl Sandburg, Whitman...
But it got harder to write when it should have become easier to write, like a political attitude, oh, yes, wait a minute, some sort of "woke" political correctness that was wrong enough to give a great backlash... One should have just been able to write, like I have,
and so now anyway, I'm telling you.
There was everything in what I did. There was theatrics, its sub components of physical comedy, voice, eye movement, eyebrow Groucho expression, sounding out in different voices.
Is it at all natural that a person would somehow chose a life that was a job of walking into strangers, and accepting them all the way, and all that. Yes, I think it is. Different flow, but always full of humans...
So I responded to it. Of course I did. Animal husbandry. And I feel that I've grown in stature, now that I'm middle age going on beyond at some point, that I've maintained my peak performance for a long time. I don't think anyone has actually ever given me credit for that. I mean, a job, a person, you take for granted. Right?
Bartenders can be in style or out of style, and many many play up the style, and I don't blame them, marketing themselves...
But those guys will come and go, I mean, even if they too stay put. I'd rather just be a plain enough guy, who's got every customer backed up with good stuff, many possibilities of a classic meal and wine to go with it...
Shush, quiet...
I just wanted to thank you for the nice note. It's taken me a long time to get back to. At the time I seriously appreciated your professional courtesy and your kind suggestion, after my causing trouble playing music and signing at 6 in the morning. If I play, and I still do, I go far away from buildings as I can, and out here this is a great great space for it. I am so pleased with the location out here on George Patton Boulevard. I love being out in the nature, at all times of day. Your very good idea to invest in some good bug repellent has provided me a chuckle for a long time now. In fact, bug repellent is a boon for outdoor activity, and now, I've changed my ways, and quietly practice yoga out among some tall pine trees somewhat near the house, near the little building for the Urban Ecology National Parks..., doing five minute headstands, and fairly intense Lotus... which they say is one of the real reasons for gearing up with the yoga exercise, to sit and meditate. (I have yet to meet one of the local gals, in an intimate way as a healthy young couple might please themselves with, by which to further my practice of yoga, and that of the little man who also has seven chakras. I would imagine her, ideally, wearing some kind of naturally derived outfit, and a gentle wild manner, happy and unrestrained, but yet natural enough to appreciate the great silences of man that let us enjoy nature...)
Anyway, I wanted to thank you again for the great infrastructure out at 4762, and for having me. It's been good for me, and I hope to be here awhile and unpack.
Best,
Ted's sketch of letter
I just wanted to thank you for the nice note. It's taken me a long time to get back to. At the time I seriously appreciated your professional courtesy and your kind suggestion, after my causing trouble playing music and signing at 6 in the morning. If I play, and I still do, I go far away from buildings as I can, and out here this is a great great space for it. I am so pleased with the location out here on George Patton Boulevard. I love being out in the nature, at all times of day. Your very good idea to invest in some good bug repellent has provided me a chuckle for a long time now. In fact, bug repellent is a boon for outdoor activity, and now, I've changed my ways, and quietly practice yoga out among some tall pine trees somewhat near the house, near the little building for the Urban Ecology National Parks..., doing five minute headstands, and fairly intense Lotus... which they say is one of the real reasons for gearing up with the yoga exercise, to sit and meditate. (I have yet to meet one of the local gals, in an intimate way as a healthy young couple might please themselves with, by which to further my practice of yoga, and that of the little man who also has seven chakras. I would imagine her, ideally, wearing some kind of naturally derived outfit, and a gentle wild manner, happy and unrestrained, but yet natural enough to appreciate the great silences of man that let us enjoy nature...)
Anyway, I wanted to thank you again for the great infrastructure out at 4762, and for having me. It's been good for me, and I hope to be here awhile and unpack.
Best,
Ted's sketch of letter
Thursday, August 1, 2019
The workweek draws to an end with a party in back ordering cocktails as the trio playing Brazilian genre jazz, with the singer making her efforts at pitch and Portuguese, at a volume level that throws off my concentration, big time, and the server is ordering drinks complicated to begin with but I can barely hear her. The boss's family is sitting at one of the low tables, and I've been at it since five thirty and don't have much smile left. It all started soon after the door opened, engaging with the two older men who are a couple, particular shapes to their heads, who used to come often but have just driven down from their new home in Ontario, Canada, who both want a nice glass of gin, one with tonic, one with water, no fruit, after their 500 miles of road. Early on, and while my coworker has disappeared somewhere, Marie Reine comes up with a party to sit in the back, and they want cocktails immediately. Okay, so I go back there, still smiling. Yes... She wants gin and tonic with lots of lime, okay, fine, and he wants a gin martini with olives, okay, and then after two young people join them the older guy is up at the bar with such a manner that I must acknowledge him in a minute, yes, I know, they too need cocktails, like, yesterday... Alina, could you please go and get their order, which turns out to be one flute maison and a Manhattan on the rocks, and already I have to concentrate, but that's how the night is going to be on this final day of Mercury Retrograde, communication breakdown, blips and burps, and teamwork difficult.
The day started with mom's helper calling, to tell me mom is "drunk," and she puts her on the phone, around 12:30 just as I'm getting up to figure out the first tele-session with my therapist who's moved away to New York State. After the session I take a nap--mom is sleeping now anyway--shower, have some green mint tea, get to the little Korean deli across the street before the bus comes for a roast beef on rye, and when I get off the bus at the stop closest to work, by the playing fields for the Catholic girl's school near Georgetown University, I realize I've forgotten my new Nalgene water bottle with my homemade electrolyte water, probably on the bus, distracted, I pulled the yellow chord but the little usual bell did not sound nor did the Stop Requested sign light up, wondering if the driver was going to stop, and generally tired from the week and not feeling too happy.
At the end of the night, around 1 AM, too beat to hit the Safeway for groceries and ground hamburger, slipping the rent check through the door just a few doors down, I get my Uber driver, and he drops me off, and sadly I walk back down to the bus stop to see if there's any chance I left my new Nalgene blue water bottle there, but nope. I pour myself a glass of wine, have a piece of feta left over from the Gyro the other night, Saturday night, find some Irish whisky, and go for a walk around the block, to stand for a moment under the trees. It's slow, I open my shirt up, just shaking it all off. When I get back there's something on Facebook, a link to rare photos from the Vietnam War Era, and along with Ann Margaret entertaining, there's a GI with an open Playboy with the caption, away from home, soldiers needed to keep their sanity however they could. Yup, I get it. A bit of self-pleasure to soothe the end of a day in the trenches.
My first day off, I sleep. I get up, call mom, around one, she's fine, go back to bed and sleep a deep muscle-bound afternoon sleep from which I cannot move, above the noises of the construction below, the workmen banging away on the wooden frame on top of the poured concrete foundation, the sound of the nail gun's bullets. "Bah, this job," I say to myself in thoughts, that's what I get for being an idiot, being around booze and wine, for not making choices resembling any sort of plan... " But, at least, I am off today. The cupboard is bare, and I'm needing hydration, and it's hot out, as it has been for many days in a row. "Drinking wine is hiding away in your own little world, and all the while a waste of intellectual and other talents," my mind tells me, echoing the words of my therapist about my tendencies to live in my own little non-reality world. And other such bitter thoughts, but at least my head doesn't headache and I feel rested enough that the mind seems to be working again after the five night shifts.
I hope to get to yoga soon enough, I remind myself, so I brew up hot water, in a cup with lemon, ground ginger and turmeric, a crack of pepper and a light dash of salt. Then a fresh pot of Moroccan Mint, steeped three minutes, as I look at the Hispanic workmen laying fresh flagstone with a string to guide them, mixing a cement mixture by hand, one man on his knees pounding down on the laid slate stones with a rubber mallet.
There's a glitch on my laptop, as far as the tele-session with Dr. Heather goes. It worked in practice, but now the little camera will not respond to my turning it on, and it begins to heat up anyway soon. The important thing is for her to see me, and she tells me I must be tired, having to cope with aging mother stuff from afar. And there seems to be no real answer to it, for her stuff and my stuff and I just went through one move, and that's enough to turn you into a Zen Buddhist with his Lotus pose. I describe my yoga practice, and it's a good one.
In the office, as I change into my work clothes, I reach mom, and actually she is fine, quite fine, and says the whole thing was exaggerated, to make her look bad, tongues wagging as they do. Okay, fair enough, and I am relieved indeed, and no sense going into it any deeper.
On another front I tell my therapist that my old girlfriend, from many years ago here in DC, how she came by the bar, and how I was actually quite relieved to find that she's found a professor boyfriend somewhere, and that she herself has gone back to therapy to get through the childhood issue of her father leaving mom and her sister... "Are you relieved," as in "are you sure about that," Dr. Heather asks, yes I am. And then I mumble about the young woman I know through old Nate, who does yoga, she's cool, in great shape, maybe I'll have the energy to go to Karaoke in Arlington with her one of these Thursdays... Ah, but the whole mom thing doesn't put me much in the mood, nor does five shifts keeping up to make ends meet here at the new apartment after all those years with good old George, a mensch. And this is the first year I haven't watched the Tour de France on television for a long time. The years I spent out in Rock Creek Park on a road bike, going out past the Mormons, out past Grosvenor, out to Garrett Park and turning back around, Beech Drive the whole way, and sometimes out into Potomac via Falls Road, a taste of country side I surely enjoyed, away from the strip malls and the city's avenues full of traffic and other hassles.
And then a breeze comes in through the open window above the three workmen speaking familiar sounding Central American Spanish as they trowel and scrape and cut rock with a little hand-held spinning blade, to fit and pound with the mallet, overseen by the third, sitting down on an unfurled roll of sod, then tossing bits of broken concrete over where there needs to be some fill, "cabron," and light laugher, and more talking as a plane whooshes over head, and I have to think about what I need to get to eat this evening. And somewhere in the city the young and good looking and the gregarious are sitting down for happy hour, striving successfully, staying within the narrow lines of the contemporary tech urban economy, and not necessarily thinking too deeply about it all, but not me. I'm not on their schedule.
I need some exercise anyway.
I remember telling my therapist in our little video chat over my iPhone how I can only take so much of reading all the Buddhist stuff, and all the yoga, good to do, but you get enough of it, it seems sometimes, but it's also self-protective. As if leaving a bit of yourself safe, even when you are feeling isolated, feeling the need to be out amongst company in the city's life.
I put some pants on and cross the avenue to the Korean market for sandwiches, a hero, a roast beef with horseradish, a small container of curry chicken salad, some sliced roast beef for extra, though I try my best to avoid bread, I need my energy anyway. I talk to the two women by the counter, one who makes the sandwiches, and one at the register, with whom I've become friendly with. "Your husband (an older fellow with thick glasses, and more halting English skills) taught me how to say thank you (in Korean) but I've forgotten." I take a little piece of DC Lottery paper to write it down. Kum Sa Ham Ni Da, I spell out as she looks over, and it translates as thanks to god, she tells me, and bows, and I bow too, and back across the street with my bottle of wine and supplies. I feel shy, vaguely ashamed of myself, somehow, is one feeling, on the first day off. I'll go do some yoga, I decide, while it's still light out, under my California Pine friends over by the path above the canal. I need to conquer some of the unhappy thoughts and the sense of isolation and the sense that my life is going nowhere...
How to rejoin the stream of human beings... How to join in with the people who can sit and have their earned conversations with their peers, as I wait on them... Currently impossible, given my job and its schedule...
After the market, sandwiches put safely away in the refrigerator I put my yoga shorts back on, a tee shirt, the remaining Nalgene water bottle, insect repellent, yoga mat, down the place where the ground is level and soft underneath the high pine trees, getting near dusk now, planes with their landing gear down coming in overheard, some coming very fast, and I get my mom on the phone after a couple rounds of messaging with an old girlfriend living in California's Redwood forests, a re-kindled artistic friendship wherever it might go, and now under the trees going through my yoga poses, and getting to a meditative enough place in my mind where some negative thoughts harbor, I begin to feel normal again, almost.
And it dawns on me. Ents. Tolkien had been to the Great War, seen the trenches, brutalities unspeakable. (He wasn't the only writer, either, who came out of the experience, who would later pay homage to nature, one way or another.) And what he eventually brought forth from such dark troubled times is the ecological imagination found in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. A reimagining of human consciousness and the interaction with nature, a reimagining of the human persona. Yes, perhaps it seems a little bit fanciful, tree-like beings with human attributes and mobility, things like that, but what if you could construe the human being as an unselfish character, not out for gain, standing something like a tree in his occupations, asking for not much more than the basics in return, instead of playing the whole ecological disaster game of "me first," but rather, standing as the tree stands, at peace, with harmony with the ground below, the sky above, the creatures of the air, its neighboring fellow trees, its roots solid down below.
There must be something to it, so deep and intuitive, that we can barely grasp, our lives connected to the lives of trees...
I do my yoga, sun salutation, warrior, plough, attempting lotus pose, but then remembering pigeon, after my five minute head stand, and lotus goes much better, and the trees are above me and the sky turns pink glowing out in the west as the planes come in from far away with their lights on. The trees render forth their benefits upon me and I meditate.
And like a tree, I too stand over conversations, occasionally participate in a fortuitous kindly one, but generally just stand and listen with basic response as necessary. I don't get paid much to do it, nor do the trees.
Going through the condensed form of ecological disaster that war is, guns, bombs, shells, the modern way, perhaps the experience allowed the human being to think back, to consider a more ecological way of living. It might seem fanciful, overly imaginative, a waste of time, at first, looked at coldly, this business of talking to and with trees, but hey, what's so wrong about it. Malory took to the mountains, Tolkien took to the imagination of literary possibilities, rife with imagery and symbolism, good versus evil. And in literature, such an awakening, such a breaking free of the industrial age rut, at least in the private imagination, was possible. and right could be distinguished from wrong, as far as how to treat the elephant or the wild land and the oceans themselves.
Buddhism is not the easiest thing to grasp. Large portions of it can seem quite counter-intuitive, or counter to the logic of economic progress. Buddhism I find personally to be quite a pain in the ass, and in some ways I wish I'd never heard about it, never had been bitten by its curiosities. You're born into this world, into a family, and for their sake and your own, deal with it; enter into the battle, fight, drive 80 miles an hour in traffic to get to an economic destination, everyone else is doing it, you don't want to be left behind, because that is no good, my friend. Or, a compromise, perhaps, if such a thing is possible, between Buddhist thought and the world of consumer consumption. You gotta eat something. You gotta live somewhere, somewhere to put your stuff... Best you can do, a separate peace, on your day off, but that gets lonesome quick, unless you are in control of the mind, which, yes, happens to be another thing the Buddhist tends to preach, meditation, in other words...
Buddhism is torture. What's its payoff? Hopefully some form of Tantric enlightenment, for all your troubles and the pains of sitting cross-legged in Lotus pose.
And yoga? It seems to help control the appetites one gets, the cravings.
The day started with mom's helper calling, to tell me mom is "drunk," and she puts her on the phone, around 12:30 just as I'm getting up to figure out the first tele-session with my therapist who's moved away to New York State. After the session I take a nap--mom is sleeping now anyway--shower, have some green mint tea, get to the little Korean deli across the street before the bus comes for a roast beef on rye, and when I get off the bus at the stop closest to work, by the playing fields for the Catholic girl's school near Georgetown University, I realize I've forgotten my new Nalgene water bottle with my homemade electrolyte water, probably on the bus, distracted, I pulled the yellow chord but the little usual bell did not sound nor did the Stop Requested sign light up, wondering if the driver was going to stop, and generally tired from the week and not feeling too happy.
At the end of the night, around 1 AM, too beat to hit the Safeway for groceries and ground hamburger, slipping the rent check through the door just a few doors down, I get my Uber driver, and he drops me off, and sadly I walk back down to the bus stop to see if there's any chance I left my new Nalgene blue water bottle there, but nope. I pour myself a glass of wine, have a piece of feta left over from the Gyro the other night, Saturday night, find some Irish whisky, and go for a walk around the block, to stand for a moment under the trees. It's slow, I open my shirt up, just shaking it all off. When I get back there's something on Facebook, a link to rare photos from the Vietnam War Era, and along with Ann Margaret entertaining, there's a GI with an open Playboy with the caption, away from home, soldiers needed to keep their sanity however they could. Yup, I get it. A bit of self-pleasure to soothe the end of a day in the trenches.
My first day off, I sleep. I get up, call mom, around one, she's fine, go back to bed and sleep a deep muscle-bound afternoon sleep from which I cannot move, above the noises of the construction below, the workmen banging away on the wooden frame on top of the poured concrete foundation, the sound of the nail gun's bullets. "Bah, this job," I say to myself in thoughts, that's what I get for being an idiot, being around booze and wine, for not making choices resembling any sort of plan... " But, at least, I am off today. The cupboard is bare, and I'm needing hydration, and it's hot out, as it has been for many days in a row. "Drinking wine is hiding away in your own little world, and all the while a waste of intellectual and other talents," my mind tells me, echoing the words of my therapist about my tendencies to live in my own little non-reality world. And other such bitter thoughts, but at least my head doesn't headache and I feel rested enough that the mind seems to be working again after the five night shifts.
I hope to get to yoga soon enough, I remind myself, so I brew up hot water, in a cup with lemon, ground ginger and turmeric, a crack of pepper and a light dash of salt. Then a fresh pot of Moroccan Mint, steeped three minutes, as I look at the Hispanic workmen laying fresh flagstone with a string to guide them, mixing a cement mixture by hand, one man on his knees pounding down on the laid slate stones with a rubber mallet.
There's a glitch on my laptop, as far as the tele-session with Dr. Heather goes. It worked in practice, but now the little camera will not respond to my turning it on, and it begins to heat up anyway soon. The important thing is for her to see me, and she tells me I must be tired, having to cope with aging mother stuff from afar. And there seems to be no real answer to it, for her stuff and my stuff and I just went through one move, and that's enough to turn you into a Zen Buddhist with his Lotus pose. I describe my yoga practice, and it's a good one.
In the office, as I change into my work clothes, I reach mom, and actually she is fine, quite fine, and says the whole thing was exaggerated, to make her look bad, tongues wagging as they do. Okay, fair enough, and I am relieved indeed, and no sense going into it any deeper.
On another front I tell my therapist that my old girlfriend, from many years ago here in DC, how she came by the bar, and how I was actually quite relieved to find that she's found a professor boyfriend somewhere, and that she herself has gone back to therapy to get through the childhood issue of her father leaving mom and her sister... "Are you relieved," as in "are you sure about that," Dr. Heather asks, yes I am. And then I mumble about the young woman I know through old Nate, who does yoga, she's cool, in great shape, maybe I'll have the energy to go to Karaoke in Arlington with her one of these Thursdays... Ah, but the whole mom thing doesn't put me much in the mood, nor does five shifts keeping up to make ends meet here at the new apartment after all those years with good old George, a mensch. And this is the first year I haven't watched the Tour de France on television for a long time. The years I spent out in Rock Creek Park on a road bike, going out past the Mormons, out past Grosvenor, out to Garrett Park and turning back around, Beech Drive the whole way, and sometimes out into Potomac via Falls Road, a taste of country side I surely enjoyed, away from the strip malls and the city's avenues full of traffic and other hassles.
And then a breeze comes in through the open window above the three workmen speaking familiar sounding Central American Spanish as they trowel and scrape and cut rock with a little hand-held spinning blade, to fit and pound with the mallet, overseen by the third, sitting down on an unfurled roll of sod, then tossing bits of broken concrete over where there needs to be some fill, "cabron," and light laugher, and more talking as a plane whooshes over head, and I have to think about what I need to get to eat this evening. And somewhere in the city the young and good looking and the gregarious are sitting down for happy hour, striving successfully, staying within the narrow lines of the contemporary tech urban economy, and not necessarily thinking too deeply about it all, but not me. I'm not on their schedule.
I need some exercise anyway.
I remember telling my therapist in our little video chat over my iPhone how I can only take so much of reading all the Buddhist stuff, and all the yoga, good to do, but you get enough of it, it seems sometimes, but it's also self-protective. As if leaving a bit of yourself safe, even when you are feeling isolated, feeling the need to be out amongst company in the city's life.
I put some pants on and cross the avenue to the Korean market for sandwiches, a hero, a roast beef with horseradish, a small container of curry chicken salad, some sliced roast beef for extra, though I try my best to avoid bread, I need my energy anyway. I talk to the two women by the counter, one who makes the sandwiches, and one at the register, with whom I've become friendly with. "Your husband (an older fellow with thick glasses, and more halting English skills) taught me how to say thank you (in Korean) but I've forgotten." I take a little piece of DC Lottery paper to write it down. Kum Sa Ham Ni Da, I spell out as she looks over, and it translates as thanks to god, she tells me, and bows, and I bow too, and back across the street with my bottle of wine and supplies. I feel shy, vaguely ashamed of myself, somehow, is one feeling, on the first day off. I'll go do some yoga, I decide, while it's still light out, under my California Pine friends over by the path above the canal. I need to conquer some of the unhappy thoughts and the sense of isolation and the sense that my life is going nowhere...
How to rejoin the stream of human beings... How to join in with the people who can sit and have their earned conversations with their peers, as I wait on them... Currently impossible, given my job and its schedule...
After the market, sandwiches put safely away in the refrigerator I put my yoga shorts back on, a tee shirt, the remaining Nalgene water bottle, insect repellent, yoga mat, down the place where the ground is level and soft underneath the high pine trees, getting near dusk now, planes with their landing gear down coming in overheard, some coming very fast, and I get my mom on the phone after a couple rounds of messaging with an old girlfriend living in California's Redwood forests, a re-kindled artistic friendship wherever it might go, and now under the trees going through my yoga poses, and getting to a meditative enough place in my mind where some negative thoughts harbor, I begin to feel normal again, almost.
And it dawns on me. Ents. Tolkien had been to the Great War, seen the trenches, brutalities unspeakable. (He wasn't the only writer, either, who came out of the experience, who would later pay homage to nature, one way or another.) And what he eventually brought forth from such dark troubled times is the ecological imagination found in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. A reimagining of human consciousness and the interaction with nature, a reimagining of the human persona. Yes, perhaps it seems a little bit fanciful, tree-like beings with human attributes and mobility, things like that, but what if you could construe the human being as an unselfish character, not out for gain, standing something like a tree in his occupations, asking for not much more than the basics in return, instead of playing the whole ecological disaster game of "me first," but rather, standing as the tree stands, at peace, with harmony with the ground below, the sky above, the creatures of the air, its neighboring fellow trees, its roots solid down below.
There must be something to it, so deep and intuitive, that we can barely grasp, our lives connected to the lives of trees...
I do my yoga, sun salutation, warrior, plough, attempting lotus pose, but then remembering pigeon, after my five minute head stand, and lotus goes much better, and the trees are above me and the sky turns pink glowing out in the west as the planes come in from far away with their lights on. The trees render forth their benefits upon me and I meditate.
And like a tree, I too stand over conversations, occasionally participate in a fortuitous kindly one, but generally just stand and listen with basic response as necessary. I don't get paid much to do it, nor do the trees.
Going through the condensed form of ecological disaster that war is, guns, bombs, shells, the modern way, perhaps the experience allowed the human being to think back, to consider a more ecological way of living. It might seem fanciful, overly imaginative, a waste of time, at first, looked at coldly, this business of talking to and with trees, but hey, what's so wrong about it. Malory took to the mountains, Tolkien took to the imagination of literary possibilities, rife with imagery and symbolism, good versus evil. And in literature, such an awakening, such a breaking free of the industrial age rut, at least in the private imagination, was possible. and right could be distinguished from wrong, as far as how to treat the elephant or the wild land and the oceans themselves.
Buddhism is not the easiest thing to grasp. Large portions of it can seem quite counter-intuitive, or counter to the logic of economic progress. Buddhism I find personally to be quite a pain in the ass, and in some ways I wish I'd never heard about it, never had been bitten by its curiosities. You're born into this world, into a family, and for their sake and your own, deal with it; enter into the battle, fight, drive 80 miles an hour in traffic to get to an economic destination, everyone else is doing it, you don't want to be left behind, because that is no good, my friend. Or, a compromise, perhaps, if such a thing is possible, between Buddhist thought and the world of consumer consumption. You gotta eat something. You gotta live somewhere, somewhere to put your stuff... Best you can do, a separate peace, on your day off, but that gets lonesome quick, unless you are in control of the mind, which, yes, happens to be another thing the Buddhist tends to preach, meditation, in other words...
Buddhism is torture. What's its payoff? Hopefully some form of Tantric enlightenment, for all your troubles and the pains of sitting cross-legged in Lotus pose.
And yoga? It seems to help control the appetites one gets, the cravings.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
