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...