"People really like you, you're well respected and trusted by everybody.  Be positive.  Nature is not all directed to making you unhappy," my mom tells me.  Okay.

And this is as I'm trying to get my body through a very busy and difficult long weekend, for normal people, Columbus Day weekend, Saturday a stream of people honing in on the bar right when the door opens, walk-ins on top of reservations, and every other server downstairs leaving me to deal wth this most agonizing part of the night, which is my Monday morning anyway, then Sunday, hey, just me, left to deal with an 8 top, a 6 top, walk ins who are regulars and want to chit chat, catching up (the real purpose of a bar), other walk ins who aren't, who want a strange mix of things--downstairs, all they get is diners, appetizer, entree, desert, coffee, on top of cocktail and wine, but upstairs at the wine bar, you wear many hats, particularly as the barman.  Sunday night the two regulars at the bar see what I go through, catch my self-mutterings, Jesus Christ, perseverance the only way to get through a night, boom boom boom, one thing after another, not looking up so much, and just as I'm about to head back into the wine room to deliver drink round to nice fancy Georgetown lady who has famous Pre-Raphealite paintings hanging in her living room, another couple walks in and want a bite to eat and wine before going downstairs for dinner, while I'm juggling about five other tasks at the moment...

This is Sunday, and it's not always easy how the phone call goes with her, as she might wonder aloud where she is, thinking she's not at home, or that there are other people to feed there besides her, and sometimes very temperamental, but she must be taking her medicine as I hang on the phone wearily getting ready for work...

I go out and wait for the bus, but the bus doesn't come, and I know it's going to be a shit night, and finally when I get the pool Uber cab, in a beat up car, me in the front seat, he has to head into Georgetown, M Street, and that's just going to be a traffic nightmare, and there was the damn bus anyway...  passing by the line of people not knowing what to do with their time but wait in line outside cutesy Georgetown Cupcake to feel a sense of belonging, as I grumble to work in a state of anxiety through the crowded touristy streets of Georgetown and people walking across intersections without regard, and I wanted to get there early, at least on time, but the public bus, the D6, has betrayed me, too.


So I am exhausted as I try to get ready again, after another noontime of fitful rest, depression, anxiety, poverty dread, for work, for the actual Monday Federal Holiday, with no idea what I might be facing, except of the live music with Quiet Life Motel, my friends, great musical artists...  The little market is closed, and this time, screw the bus, I'll just walk, despite the lingering ragweed pollen in this Autumn of drought.  So many signs of something different with the climate...  The last few nights I'd taken to the depressing task of reading from On The Road.  How do you live like that, like Kerouac did, spending the last of his few dollars, the hitchhiking craziness, the sad characters of America, sad in that they all are poor and living on the edge...

Fortunately, the book has its shifts.  Reflections familiar to one who has read later Kerouac.  And there are lines to sift out and hold, like the early line when, if he has any advice to offer Dean Moriarty about writing, it's that you have to pursue it with the mad energy of a benny (benzedrine) addict.  Yes, don't kill yourself, Jack.  Take good care of Jack.  Take a look at all this writing business, and remember to give us the wisdom, the scholarly wisdom you've found, along with the beauty.

I make it to work.  Monday.  Set-up isn't too bad.  There are people at 5:30, but they are mellow, and all the mosquitos, we will have to deal.  The musicians, two of them, David and Tillery the horn player arrive early.  We can make it work, despite the fact that there are only three servers, meaning one downstairs, and one "floating" between the two floors, where I will end up holding the bag for the millionth time in this shit ass business.

And again, I am busy, as because of the different hats, serving to listen to bar people, to get the bossy little waitress what she wants, this and that, this and that, holding down whatever gaps in service I see in the dining room before me...  taking care of things, dodging the galoot busboy man as he gathers these insane piles of dirty plates we stack on milk crates, me on my knees often trying to stack them after scraping the remains into the garbage bin there to my right, stooping, it goes all night, no break for me, and by 8:30 there's a pit in my stomach and I'm starving about to bonk and fall to my feet, and thankfully there's a can of V8 stashed away and a bite from a chocolate bar to keep me going.  The young woman at the end of the bar (the bar was full earlier and she sat down at a little table to get an order in) has come in from Virginia, broke her arm in a bike accident, wearing a cast, shows me the X-ray with the metal plate and pins...  ouch.  My friend Drew comes in late. The hustle of the busboy man gathering the recycling and then the trash and then sweeping with the energy of a mad gorilla behind me, yes, there's no way to get through all of this--unless you could really just turn away from people and bother not even acknowledging them as familiar faces, which of course is impossible and would be offensive, to them--without a little promise of some wine to carry one through the last trenches.  Whether one wants to or not.

I'm heading to the bus stop to get back home to the apartment, but suddenly my guts are riled and I have to make a run for the bushes by the school, uh oh, too late,  no choice.  I manage to catch the bus, get in at last, and take a shower, rid of the holiday weekend which no holiday.

I'd not even had a chance, nor any inclination, to write for a while.  There was jury duty, early on a Monday morning, taking the bus across town...  reading the Wikipedia entry on the Lankavatara Sutra, a good thing to turn to when feeling overwhelmed and no longer in control and feeling poorly.  The judge let me out of it, somehow, when I told him I was a bartender, who works at night, but who in theory will dutifully set his alarm clock to listen to this exhausting civil case before the court, and finally I get sprung and miraculously catch the bus back to the little apartment, but then mom is on the phone wondering in dramatic fashion if she should just end it.  And then a nap for me to absorb all of this, before going to work.  Lankavatara.  It's all in your head, the whole thing.


What is there to eat today?  I've got mom calm with a phone call, and she's on her bed upstairs in front of the television reading Van Wyck Brooks, New England Indian Summer, and still taking her medicine and the cat's still alive.  Her new helper was able to find her stash of checkbooks.  There have been wars started, Kurdish allies abandoned, clearly dirty things going on with the man who took over as President, so much crap, so much bad stuff, incitements to violence and fascism...  I drink my green tea what my stomach can handle, and there are hotdogs to heat up in the toaster over, before I get ready to go to work, Tuesday night wine tasting.  I do the dishes in the sink, and take a breather.   Mom and all her lovely books, great books, books I have not read, having gone my own fool rebellion way, thinking that writing would be better than reading...  reading and then teaching.

In my own mind I will always be the idiot who messed up that scholarly life, to which I was given a grand head start opportunity to perform,

Energy takes a lot of writing, and writing takes a lot of energy.  An amateur, like me, will derive small amounts of satisfaction through the exercise, and maybe even verge on coming up with a few good kernels, but it's too much to come up with more than, say, one attempt at a book, and if that doesn't pay your way, and certainly it won't, you are left with such little steps as the one I write now.  There are other things to worry about anyway, the guts are still working it out, and now it's time to shower and go off to work, wine tasting night, the Haut Pila, a hearty red from the Roussillon.  There's baseball on tonight, plus a debate for the Democrat field.  And yet, slow nights can be as difficult as busy ones.

"Poetry helps us live intelligently in uncertainty," I hear on the radio, Harold Bloom died yesterday at 81.  Hear and Now, Robin Young.