I don't even want to write today, wasted the morning, the phone call to mom, checking in, across the street to the Korean deli...

How many bad decisions, growing and growing, in their effects upon my life.... I go and run errands.


Saturday night, not long after the door opens, a trio of Russians, familiar, come in from their walk in the woods behind Dumbarton Oaks down in the dell where trees are fallen, and the ladies have been bitten by mosquitos, Alla, an instructor in classical piano, Mikael, her husband, and Natalia, the widow of a diplomat... seventy or so, noticed by the male of the species.

Soon after their order, getting them first with the wine they might like, escargot, foie gras mousse, another order of escargot, the busboy is bringing up the sturdy booster seat for kids...  I get that table sat, get them kir royal to start with, Badoit for the table and the kids, she used to come here back when she was in law school at American, back in '98, live in New York now...

And then, oh, I see, from the reservation tab, the two low tables by the front window, the boss, wife, son, son's friend, will be dining with me tonight.  Great.  Deal with it.  Two bottles of mineral water, one still, one sparkling, out on the table, son and friend come in, no, they'll wait, no wine now, nice haircut, thanks, okay, and now the elderly foursome are sat at the quiet table way in the back.  It's a room narrow enough I have to aim myself into, careful with what I'm carrying, water, menus, to not bump into the chairs on one side, opposite the banquet, and the wine cellar presentation of the Bordeaux.

The boss has the good presence to take the order for his family with the little wireless tablet, no salad dressing for the wife, salmon not the normal menu way, but grilled medium rare... All I had to do was open the Minervois in the Bordeaux wine glasses brought to the table, and one rosé.  But it's still ground to cover, the child up front is sweet, a little girl, but making a mess, and one wants to get all their orders right down to the desert course, a scotch for the man, and then all the way past the bar back to the room with the elderly intellectuals having a light meal of onion tart and seared foie gras--one of them mentions a list of books to bring people up to date, one being Portnoy's Complaint, and a book with a word in the title like brave, as good if not a better book on the Holocaust than Anne Frank, one bottle of Cotes Du Rhone for the table, and then scurrying for the Pinot Noir from Auxerre for the table of two couples, both women expecting, I gather.

And then a few more people at the bar now that I'm trying to put a wrap on things in the dining room, eyeing the clock for potential kitchen closing early time, and you know, it's friends who show up now, and one just wants to talk, and one wants to eat, and again I check my watch as it nears 9:30.



Can't get out of there without a late night.  A need to take the edge of.  To have a chat with the neighborhood, who ever has come for a late meal or whatever...

I've always been susceptible to going off track with things, with bullies, with interesting people, and it becomes necessary, so it seems, for me to join in, and it starts easily enough, a little splash while the last dessert order is placed, it's ten at night anyway, and my fellow servers who worked the main dining room downstairs have since wrapped up.  But that's how I've always been, always dilly dallying at the temples of friendship and evil companions with whom one, in the expression of my grandmother, falls in with and has a good time...  but also leaving oneself open to valid criticism and also guilt, for making a parent wait for your silliness, or your teenage desire to smoke a bit of pot with the last fun people.


My friend, D., has come by both for a good dinner, after working all day as a builder contractor, and to check on me, as we ran into each other up the street from work the night before, I having made the mistake of dropping by quickly when my friend tending bar told me some old friends from Austin Grill days were asking about me, "cool," as he described.   I'd had a glass of wine, one, at Breadsoda, and saw him through the window at Wingos, as I was on my way to find something to eat, ending up at Z Burger, getting two doubles on my home.

I'd been tired all day, and had to drag myself up out of bed at 2:45 in the afternoon to get ready for Saturday Night Labor Day Weekend, the start of my work week.

I'm trying to do the paperwork, and in the dim light it takes serious effort, suddenly feeling very tired, almost needing to sit down.

"You want to go out for a burger, man?" my friend asks me after we've sat around talking to the neighbor Cathy, and I finally manage to pull it together, having a small bite of mushroom risotto.  "But you just ate."  "Yeah, desert."  D. and Cathy share stories from church, from the arch conservative Arlington diacese, to Cathy bringing "homeless people" to dinner at The Tombs on Sunday for prime rib dinner.


It takes me a long time to get everything cleaned and put away.  Organizational skills have gone out the window, and I'm feeling faint almost all of a sudden.  At this point in the evening, shaken by the long run of one shift, keeping the conversations going, also appropriate to service--it's all an art form, really--you don't know quite what to do with yourself, go home and hole up and find something as far as a TV series on your laptop, or to just walk up the street with your buddy in the fresh night air with no particular object more than a burger, maybe a beer.  I'm feeling paranoid now about ends of nights like this in such a moment.  We lost an excellent chap a year ago, and the Sunday night for dinner of Labor Day Weekend was the last I ever saw of him.

We have a beer at Breadsoda after wolfing down our burgers at the counter of the burger joint, the music is good, and the pretty girl next to us is vaping.


In the back of your mind, as you get your cab home, wondering if you've got everything, your mind tells you about all the things you should have done, all the things you failed to make happen, given all the opportunity and the way your family set you up to succeed and be a good person in this world now.  Surely you should have been an academic, a teacher...  not falling for the bullying, the have a drink you'll feel better...  followed by all the angst the next day...  the wish to clean your self, your system, your whole entire life out...

Yeah, actually not too bad today, as far as an energy level, and maybe I'll even have a little bit of time for yoga before work, but still, the long low level of chagrin one must feel, and the only immediate good thing, as far as being able to be a good boy today, is that it is Sunday, the day of the Lord, as it has come to be, out of the Sabbath keeping tradition.  I take my shower.


Poor Kerouac, he would have that sense of being led down a path, falling in with certain kinds, out of boredom, out of not being able to easily fit in anywhere else, anywhere normal, since his early days visiting the city and meeting Ginsburg and the crowd.  Mailer observes how Gore Vidal, creepy aristocrat rich man, ruined poor Kerouac, seducing, out of his grand well-bred Harvard egotism, the shy Catholic searcher, plying him with who knows what to get to his dead of despoiling, leaving Kerouac, one might gather, with some long standing creepy doubt bad memory uncertainty taking the simplicity from his man life.

Hard enough to go on the road, to suffer such as traveling with Neal Cassady, in the name of literature and letters, the life of the mind, hard unto a sensitive soul who probably just wanted to go to church on Sunday and be normal, normal enough so that all the great guilt he would have felt... ("They had Ph.D.s in guilt," Carolyn Cassady observed, of the two.)

Light some incense, Frankincense and Myrrh, maybe a little yoga and meditation before work...

And even managing a few poses, before getting ready for work.

Arm yourself, again, my friend, to go face that which is hard to face...