"You think a lot of things when you're tired," Gary Cooper's sheriff says to Lloyd Bridges' character who's encouraging him to hop on a horse and leave town just as the bad guys are coming, a movie written, by the way, with the Hollywood blacklisting of 'communists' as a real background.

Sunday was the end of a long busy hard week at the Bistrot Wine Bar. Bastille Day, then big parties over the weekend, a lot of going at full gas. I brought in two copies of the book for co-workers of mine, presenting them to my two friends downstairs after service had began. The waitress chuckled at the picture on the back, "Is this from the '80s?!" "Yup," I said, nodding. "No!" "I know, cheesy, but that's when it was written." When you work in a restaurant you're used to keeping a sense of humor at the ready, about your own foibles as much as anything.

At the end of the night I found our venerable waiter Robert (row-BEAR) reading it at table 14 there by the window, as I made my way to the kitchen to spare the busboy from having to run the last desserts of the night, a pear tart and a creme brulée. "Hey, I am reading your book. I am waiting for my wife. It is good." I wrote an inscription for him, honoring his taking good care of everyone. He knows the many talents and eccentricities of restaurant people. He is a veteran. He has waited on Salvador Dali, and Sophia Loren and Jackie.

I come back the other way to go back upstairs, after Blanca has gone out of her way, just having finished cleanup to make dessert. "Now you have written your first book," he says in accented English. "Hey, you know, it's hard to do," speaking quietly above the peace of a dining room silent and empty at the end of the busy weekend. "All you go through, working, taking care of everything... a little drinking... the people you wait on," he smiles, honoring the accomplishment of one's first, a foundation, perhaps, to build on.

It's a good feeling to be understood. That's restaurant people for you.



Promoting a book is near the last thing you want to do after writing it. People dear to you have begun to read it, again, in its newest and final form. You feel bad about what you people through, for dredging things up, for addressing intricate matters. You wish to reemphasize that it's a work of fiction, and that they tell you in every writing class you ever take that you need TENSION, and so you take raw material and perfectly happy childhoods and basically exaggerate.

The aim was to show humanity, to respect a complexity in life. Maybe you did so awkwardly, without much sophistication, maybe downright clumsily and annoyingly. (But this is where a mensch comes from.)

As they also say in writing classes, if life were all hunky-dory, 100% peachy keen, everything all fine, then people wouldn't read, or write, books. On top of that you try to write good sentences, one after the other, with maybe a melodious ring now and again, a reflection on life.

But it is a highly complex thing, writing your first book, and you go through a lot, yes. And maybe somedays, you want to bury it, so that it won't be found for years and years.

Maybe that sense of things helps you move on to the next thing.

You go through a lot, working in a restaurant. Mentally, emotionally, physically. The heart pounds with anxiety some times. You can't unwind 'til it starts to be light out again. And then you sleep. And you don't get up early enough to do much more than stretch, have some green tea, and get ready for work, waiting for a day off, and recovery. As if life and professions had found a symmetry to that other side which is the writer's work, 'self-appointed,' as Frost said. And just like being in the restaurant business as a way of making a living, you're never certain you're doing, in fact the right thing; you just keep on doing, having not many other choices.



Victor Erofeyev has a good piece back in the December 27, 1999 issue of the New Yorker, about his father, the diplomat, and how he came to be a writer.

I was drawn to restaurant work, and liked bartending, because I found it offered simple understandable relationships, in keeping with the O blood (the oldest type) that courses through limb, organ, sinew, bone, nerve and brain. It's the same reason a maintaining a journal of daily thoughts, upon which to feel secure, is healthy for me. The diary of the animal keeping in touch with his own nature as he deals with the complexities of modern society. One goes and does something, interacts, goes out, etc., and there is a reaction, a need for grounding, a way to combat nervousness and anxiety. The human creature, however gloriously adaptable and resourceful, intelligent beyond belief or any of nature's wildest hopes, is round and organic, an animal, ever being forced to degrees into the square, the cubical, the non-relativistic modern maintenance of time that lives not in the moment, thereby complex.

I'd be very glad to hear that most people don't have such problems, but in the meantime I'll continue attempting to sort out my confusion.

As I say, being a barman is a job I can relate to. Basically, a public house, a gathering place with tribal tones of belonging, as ever since chimps the creature recognizes immediately difference in faces and more than that. It's a job that fits with the organic understanding of time the human being within can keep up with. You've got a task to do. A tiring one. You go in and do it as much as you can in a week's course without messing yourself up too much.

Going out, though, I don't like so much. Too many pretenses, too many lies, too much complexity and hidden nuances, mysteries female, male posturing, aggressions, an uneasy peace. All I can do is slip into the kindest mode possible, if not retreating into a corner to passively observe and let the effects of this strange thing of alcohol by turns relax, energize, make sentimental and reflective, stimulate and deaden, making coping easier in ways, making the animal sorrowfully sluggish and eventually, off to bed, once having dragged myself home where I am happier and far more productive. If I could bring a notepad and sit in a corner, taken care of and undisturbed, observing, I'd be happy. Would that there would be more mellow sidewalk cafes where one could sit for hours, as I hear there are in Europe.



A journal is a chance to seize the day. One wakes up with a theme from past experiences fresh and not so fresh, an idea to develop and let play out. To me it's largely a dialog between nature and modernity and all its products and habits. For an O, at least for me, dealing with the television and the newspaper is a constant trick, a battle requiring the resourcefulness of the hunter-gatherer to put such flickerings and shouts into perspective, to tone down in importance and come back to life directly and its textures and basic needs. How to meet the immediate need for protein.

Would that the historian would account for a subject's blood-type. Why did Darwin suffer such gas, and come up with such a broadly applicable theory? Napoleon? What was Jack's, what was Bobby's? What was Lincoln's? What was Hemingway's?

("Figure it out," my brother, a Type B, said to me once with regards to my writing, referring to the successes of Dan Brown, perhaps hinting that my problems were psychological, ones of laziness maybe. Of course, he was expressing greater concerns of love and things of far greater depth to go into here. I have seen other's reactions to my dumbness, as if to say to me, 'you just don't get it, do you,' and truly, I'm sorry, I don't. All I can do is try to behave according to that person's individual rulebook toward me, even as the creature within might buck and squirm. Even I, though, take pleasure in belonging to the social contract and the world beyond that extends all the way to workers in China and what-have-you. Maybe there's a related dumbness in someone like a Gaudi, who goes on building his wild crazy cathedral no matter what {until hit by a street car.})

So, it is a thing of blood type, I think anyway, why one writes, why one shares. Other people might find such a thing grossly inappropriate.

However, teaching and learning must continue beyond the classroom. Schools, after all, must reflect organic and natural human society and endeavors.

And even in a barroom, there are teachers and students, people who want to learn and partake of wisdom, reaching out hopefully for a greater good and a just and lasting peace.



The Tour de France, it makes this anxious creature happy, as I watch the climb to Station des Rousses. There's something comprehensible about it. I don't need to ask many questions about its basic whys and wherefores. I look at my bike, parked in its trainer stand, and the creature somewhere goes, "ugh," with some satisfaction, as if bone in one hand, wiping meat juice off the side of my mouth with the back of the other. But before a ride, I must go grocery shopping, a complexity I fear, but I have my list, and anticipation is rising in my gorge already. Don't forget figs.

It is again the days of the Tour de France. France opens up and allows herself to be seen intimately, on roads past farm house and town, past Chateau and Cathedral, forest, rivers, and for a wonderful suspended time being, we take a break from the world of professions imposed upon us and we are all living idyllically again, along with farmers rolling their hay and the grace of fine old houses in fine old towns. Yes, a break from the impositions of big egos.

A writer finally offers his book, a novel, to 'the world' through Amazon. Awkward at first, feeling rather shy about it, a little paperback proof copy of it arrives. And yes, it is a book, in fact a decent one, living by its own rules and architecture just as the human creature grasps towards the form and its arch, the golden rectangle in which to fit many many random thoughts and events and give to them shape, coherence and beauty. A novel is not a profession, but yet it is something people must do, instinctively with the essential current and flow of consciousness and mental life.

No, there was another profession that sustained the person who writes, along with a lot of true generosity and support and love and kindness from those who matter to him. There was the great obstacle of work and attending to adult matters of responsibility, such as it is, and, you know, one tries, whether or not he does a perfect job at everything, for at least, he hangs in there. There is work, and work involves recovery. Bob Roll observes that a Tour rider goes through so much in a stage, physically, mentally, emotionally, adrenaline pumping, that it's hard to wind down and get a good night's sleep. One strength of Armstrong, Roll points out, is that 'you're not going to solve anything at 3 AM, and might as well just go to bed,' which is a gift of being able to shut off all the worries and relax, an interesting insight into the Armstrong character, a certain devil may care attitude essential to his sangfroid and exploits in a scary line of work.

Chekhov was smart to line up a professional life as a doctor as he built his writing career, early on even paying for his schooling with little pieces here and there.

Come to find out, a writer feels much more like a writer when he has something to show for it, a manuscript in a form that other people can actually find their own copy of and peruse, at least to keep on the shelf. It's a huge boost of confidence, a great support to the thousand observations, insights and judgments and event the personal wishes that behoove a writer. (No, I don't want to go out tonight.)

It feels right to watch the Tour de France, even with the volume on. I suddenly feel like all that verbal stuff doesn't throw the subconscious sources of thoughts off as a writer does while in a slump, thinking the slightest tire commercial will ruin a day's effort at the notepad.

It is, as Bob Roll points out, here as a comment on Mark Cavendish, initially dry in his efforts to win the sprint stage, a sign of character when a rider can put together a win from a losing streak, when things don't seem to be going right, grasping for what's wrong, living through it, keeping at it until making it work again. "I love the sport," Cavendish tells us. "I want to win."

A good wine list stands in contrast to all the crazy tangents of human nature. A good wine list is beautiful and simple. The wines offered each have their own virtues of balance, finish, concentration of fruit, mineral notes and inherent qualities that make them accompany food so amazingly. Often, in ordering wine from a steward, the personality of a client comes through. "I want a big California red." Hmm, why does that not surprise me, that you would like a big fatuous foul bomb of ill-craftedness to match your ego. Rather, go with the flow. Enjoy the terrior wines of venerable tradition and local know-how.

It's like someone you have given the benefit of the doubt to for a long time. Of course, no one is completely blameless within the context of human contact and relationships big and small and passing, if only because the other individual will always be interpreting your own actions, or misinterpreting, just as you may be doing. But it's a big relief to say to yourself, you know, that which one is supposed to like really turns out to be a rather undesirable.

People will order, and taste, wines with their egos, and miss the individual grace and beauty of a wine.

"Jesus eats and drinks with whores and highwaymen, turns water into wine, and finally, in one way or another, establishes a mystical union at a feast through its humble instruments of bread and wine." Adam Gopnik, from "What Did Jesus Do?," The New Yorker, May 24, 2010, page 74.

Jesus shared wine with publicans and sinners as a way of awakening them to that fact that these identities so clung to by habit were not, in fact, all they were, not even mainly, that secretly, or not, they were something entirely, or at least largely, different. It is the same message as the Buddha's, brought to a young West, that the notion of Self is an illusion. To all seemingly concrete conclusions about a identity, Jesus brings questioning and contradiction, revealing the riddle to any claim of Self. The wealthy are too cooked by all their assumptions of self-preservation and what-not, and will have a very hard time giving up who they see themselves to be. They'll never get to the humble Four Noble Truths and the Eight-fold Path. The poor, the sad, the mournful, are closer to the understandings which will release them, though they still have a ways to go. Caesar, well, his things are based on illusions, and if you really want to subscribe to all that, you're welcome to, but will remain mistaken. Oh, you think the harlot is solidly guilty and that you are solidly righteous enough to judge her, well, let's see if you are truly free of sin...

It's a voice that questions a lot of what a society places upon people to give them recognizable identities, radical indeed. It's reasonable to gather that an establishment might not be completely content with that.

Now what if you start asking yourself the Buddhist's questions? Hmm. Well, you have to start somewhere, and at first you may well not like some, maybe many, of your own habits. You might begin to see through things. You might begin to see yourself as something akin to a Prodigal Son, a faulted sorry self. There may come some troubling questions about your professional life, your personal life.

It could be that it isn't entirely your fault. In certain ways we live in a society that enables the tempting devils of Maya. And Buddha wouldn't be Buddha--and Jesus wouldn't be Jesus--if there weren't a susceptibility on the part of the human creature to, as lower animals, respond to stimuli, even stimuli made up in one's own head of a tempting sort. The two are monumental thinkers for good reason; their insights are brilliant, maybe even testable, of a high sort, with great powers known and unknown, a whole new way of looking at things, in deep agreement with the nature of reality. And maybe they provide stuff we, in our busy lives, don't get to sort out so forcefully.

Jesus' confrontation with the ego's fascination with wiles is rendered as a personal encounter with a personified Satan he will say no to. The Judeo-Christian tradition is full of 'personal encounters,' voices, clear signs from the God of Abraham. (Later on, we'll get the Mormons' personal messages from archangels.) Buddha, in some contrast, is more about drawing such epiphanies out through careful thought, logic, meditation, stuff one does on his own, free to all for the taking.

You might find yourself feeling a bit naked, like you're nothing but a sad person after a life of asking yourself questions, but a life of falling into the same old habits, if still having been capable of treating other folks with friendliness, kindness, hopefully some decency. And you are at least free now from being little more than just entirely a publican, a sinner, a lowly fisherman living humbly at the edge of a great busy empire.

It comes as a sense of footing, the right kind, to allude to a parable of Jesus, at times an uneasy place for the worldly to inhabit, maybe a rather lonely one, but a healthy, psychologically sound and independent one. For what it's worth, essential now as then for negotiating life.

There seems to be a sense of entitlement to some people that matches the importance they attribute to their role in society. Which came first? Good for them. They perform important roles in society. I simply make an observation on behavior based on serving people dinner, wine and drinks. I might guess that one could have observed such an attitude from very early on. Where does it come from? Is it genetic? Is it an attitude picked up on as a babe? Is it some form of actions of past lives causing an effect according to karmic law?

There are also those who don't mind serving people, who enjoy it. And I have great respect for such people. They strike me as being on a run of good karma. Some serve humanity in grand and important ways, and for some it's just simpler, more direct.

It is the right of all sentient beings to grasp and to understand and to share as a lesson to others the sense of karma. This is the compassion, to share the understanding of how past deeds shape a person's life.

Amazon and CreateSpace have answered a call. Now those books which people write out of compassion, with no wish for gain, are finally easily and broadly available. Where I once had vague thoughts that some democratic institution should arise to serve better the plain truths of sentient beings, the marketplace has developed such a vehicle. Bravo to all who make it work, including those who write the many things they do out of excellent intentions.