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...