It's Sunday. The sun is out. It's reasonably warm. The author is getting ready for work, folding a non iron shirt into a legal pad notebook, putting something of a sandwich together for later, filling the water bottle for the bicycle. I'll ride up the big avenue, then cut into the woods, into the park and wind my way down then up by Dumbarton Oaks. It's Oscar night, and I wouldn't mind watching, to see how storytellers are plying their trade these days.

My mom has mailed me a copy of Synge's The Aran Islands, and I find something very real about it, the tales of the locals, the recording of their folk tales. I'll take those scenes of the islands with me as I work in the upstairs room, the wine bar, not getting any richer, but showing up. Good story telling, always a comfort to the living of life and all its cares and concerns.

Clever magazine article titles that play on words and phrases. A sign at the museum at Dumbarton Oaks, "Cross References," above a Christian cross. (Jesus, is anything sacred, immune to such picnic treatment?) Something that involves taking a phrase we all seem to know, like 'happy days,' and making it 'happy daze,' that sort of thing, a pun. And, not always in good taste. I guess it exercises the brain like a cross word puzzle, and so, dumbed down as we are, we click on it. 'Rapper' could show up as 'Wrapper,' nights as knights, but anything, any phrase, 'ham and eggs,' let's say, is fair game. Hot dogs. Tits and ass, that could show up as anything that rhymes with it, say, brits and brass, fits and class... it's all so subliminal, sort of, not really, that we enjoy the brain connection. And if someone should come up with something a bit original, oh, it will be copied in this cheesy way. I don't want to think that a good song Rainy Night in Soho will ever be popular enough to suffer receiving the treatment. And sometimes one wishes that more pithy statements, like Emily Dickinson's 'an admiring bog,' got a little more play, because within the words, a lesson, a point that gets across.

What does this show us? Where does this lead our minds? Sometimes well, but not always.

I think it's a bit of a selfish attitude. The appropriation of one thing, letting that show up as shorthand. We never have to read anything. We just make references to it, to show we're smart. "islands in the stream.' never mind hemingway, and all the work he put into a late novel.

And what does it amount to? Basically, I think, a disbelief, a disavowal, a repudiation, really, of... genius. Yes, this is one big way we put down genius. One more way to say, 'oh, god, he's singing in that voice again.' One more way to say Mozart is this, Beethoven is that, MacGowan is this, Kerouac is that. Dante, Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Jefferson...who knows. Masked behind our appropriations of words and phrases, a dismissal. Behind the neat header, a misuse, a smirk at something once said cleanly and purely.

So who do we take to be 'genius' these days? Steve Jobs. I'm sorry, I know we want to think of people as geniuses, that it might help our own business projects, but, really? Yes, he built a better phone, as one builds a better toaster. He, and Bill Gates, and many others, changed the economy, and streamlined, but, the word genius is better preserved, I think, for other folks. Mozart. Maybe Lincoln. Beethoven. Modern culture has gotten quite a bit off as far as recognizing real genius, as much as it would insist that it is vigilant.

The restaurant business, being tough, is, I think, one clear example of what genius must go through. That is my opinion. To be a genius is very demanding. It has odd hours, completely different viewpoints. It is a completely odd life.

And us, now, none of us are all that kind to the geniuses in our ranks and in ourselves. Act a little different, a little funny? March to your own drummer? Guess what kids, you're bound for rejection.

You go through a lot at work. You go through a lot emotionally. And it's true of bartending. You go through a lot, many emotions, and if you don't manage to stay reasonably calm, it spills over onto the rest of your night and the day after. Shaken up so, by the ups and downs, you can feel a little disturbed when an incoming email pings at you. And if you go out, you can get carried away by the opportunity of relaxing, of letting it all go.

Well, you have to do yoga. It clears the mind, and sets you back right.

Do you accept Shane MacGowan as your personal savior?

Well, yes. Here's an example of the artistic spirit that can be fostered as people do what they will do. One can enjoy some wine, hang out at a pub, and be not an aggressive bullying prick but a musician forwarding a venerable traditional culture.

I finally went out and did it. I bought a decent amp for my acoustic. I got a microphone, one of those internet deals, a very decent Shure SM58 complete with cord and microphone stand for a hundred bucks. And now, no longer testing out the confines of the backyard in the middle of the night, my attempts at music reverberating off of brick walls, hoping not to be called out by an angry sleepy neighbor (which has happened), trying to hear how I sound, now I have a way to hear myself, which is enormously beneficial as far as staying in pitch when you sing.

And, come to find out, going through my Pogues song list, I don't sound half bad, which amazes me, as I had the opinion that I couldn't really sing all that well. Of course, it's a matter of finding the range your comfortable with, and pleasantly, for me anyway, my range isn't that far off from Mr. MacGowan's. And maybe it has something to do with the nature of the music played by The Pogues, which is basically traditional Irish. It's a music of the people, a folk music. It's not meant to be fancy or overproduced. You grab an instrument and you play, and probably pretty much anyone with half a mind for it can come up with something.

We don't, I think, get to pick out our talents and what we're exactly good at. But a love of something, a form of art, a way of making it, can lead us to try it ourselves. We might find out we're not Chekhov when we sit down and try to write our own story, but then again, the main thing could well be just letting it happen, if it is something you're given to do.

And so for years and years, I loved that music. Timidly, I started to play it. "Well," I thought, "I'm not harming anyone. It's within my rights to try and practice..." Okay, the cat doesn't like it, and runs from her sleepy chair to a hiding spot in the bedroom. Okay, maybe not at 4 AM in full volume, the lawyer, every bit a lawyer, comes out on his deck, 'stop.' Okay.

Give yourself a shot at it. Try it out. Have a little fun, and you may end up surprising yourself at the level of quality.

And so, a guy who has a beer, as one does in college, gets a little creative. Tries writing, tries poetry, and somewhere deep inside, the gut instinct, the desire to play music, Irish music fused with rock n roll.

But.. "Are you mad? Look at MacGowan, and what's he's done to himself. It wasn't just wine and beer and pot. It was acid. It was, quite regrettably, heroin too. Okay, that is true. He wears the years of abuse of a musician on the road.

On the other hand, you might say he has been prescient about the crisis young people in Europe, in London, in Spain, in Greece, in Italy, are facing, having not been left with much and not much in the way of opportunity. It's a situation that brings to mind a number of Pogues songs. "So thanks for sweet f*** all..." Indeed, his music offers a refuge from shallow consumerist materialism in favor of embracing solid and grounded human emotion.

People will be people. They will drink wine and dance and make love and find pastimes to relax themselves. As with everything, it's the attitude they bring to it, good or bad.

lacrosse

An aspect of high school/college lacrosse of late has come out in the UVA murder trial. A thuggish culture I've heard of directly from parents effected by its bottle-throwing bullying, kids from privileged schools, aggressive, destructive, an eagerness to humiliate any and all in a team's way. The events resulting in the murder trial of a young man who found his lacrosse player girlfriend was dating a player of a rival team reveal, perhaps, a cultural milieu. Where lacrosse teams have acted with arrogant impunity, with parents supportive and powerful enough to enable the worst behavior, now, perhaps, some light will be shed on the violence and aggression that is part of this 'sports culture.' One can hope more accounts of such will surface.

Now of course this is not true of all of high school and college lacrosse. But...

As a necessary afterthought, to say this is of course a complete and gross overstatement.  It should not be applied as a blanketing statement.  Sports are beautiful and good for people, and it is through them that we learn sportsmanship.  At issue is the sense of self-entitlement that certain attitudes might engender.  Lacrosse is not the issue, and events that happen are most likely unrelated.

President's Day Weekend, the Sunday night shift... The couple that won't leave; the French chef in for dinner, Pepe Le Pew, a colleague calls him, whose refrain, "I like food, I like wine, I like to talk about food, I like to talk about wine," the couple seated next to him, planning a trip to France, is getting a lot of; the woman who's had too much Sancerre (or without any dinner) who asks me what my deal is. The waitress goes, I send the busboy home, the downstairs waiter comes up to watch the show... Chef Pepe has moved on to tipsy woman. "Are you in control of the music? Put on The Clash," she says. It ain't pretty. I turn the lights up, eat my salmon tartar over in the corner, ignoring the "come, sit next to us." I am left in a peculiar kind of purgatory as the fruits of my labor bring me toward wrapping things up. I just want to go home. Le Pew leaves, with a jolly "thank you, my friend, good luck," and one last shot at getting her to leave with him. "I like women," added to the list. She will stay and continue her inquisition a little while longer, the likable person she was now feeling spurned. I turn the music off, and finally, the last leftover first date couple makes toward the stairs. Finally, after making sure she has everything, I walk her down the steps and hail a cab. Thank god for cab drivers.

It all strikes one as a bit disturbing, this serving of wine to people. Why did I get into it? How to get out of it? Yoga, do some yoga, then meditate... that helps. The unsettling feeling stays with me as I ride home on my bicycle, as I sprawl on the couch watching a PBS show about Lincoln's years as a lawyer, as I wake up the next day, as I go to work the next day, as if my life were held hostage by that element of society which sneaks out at night and bares itself after the politeness is over, the selfishness coming out.

But, as a friend puts it, do I continually create my own hell just by going in there? Wow. I would hope it's just a job, and it does pay the bills; I can see what she means. Nerves jangled, I'm more prone than I would be to need three glasses wine in succession, more prone to bad decisions of the same sort I've whiffed all evening, of drunkenness leading to blind sensual fixations, a person carried away with slaking various thirsts. This doesn't happen when I am home reading and figuring out what to do about dinner and other chores. And writing.... is all this 'material,' as in material for the next prose attempt? Do I really care that much about the ins and outs of wines to feel dedicated to all the details of the world of wine? Maybe some people can handle wine, in that they enjoy it as an element of dinner. But I'm not sure I can, and you know, you get tired of waking up feeling green around the gills, and maybe on top of that, a bit ashamed of yourself for the pleasure-seeking that went with a bit too much wine.

This is, I guess, why I do it four nights a week, no more. That's enough.

Last night, working alone, I was getting off easy. Until two conducting an affair come in (one is a psychologist), just as I'm getting rid of the last diners. C'est la vie. I end up eating my roast beef sandwich at the same corner of the bar I took refuge in the night before. They let me off the hook, now that I have nothing left to do but stare at my iPhone propped up against a wine decanter and finish my dinner, as I make note to myself that I must go and get canned cat food at the Safeway, and some baby food too, as the cat is constipated.

Ahh, I get home again, wiped out. Amadeus is on the old telly, and so the night sinks in as I ponder my own childishness, until I've had enough of the tension of Mozart's destruction, and head off to bed.

At the end of the week I have a chance to read, to climb back toward the liberal intellectual world, a book my father nudged me toward for offering a clean fresh look on how the Gospels might be interpreted. In King Jesus, Robert Graves, informed by extensive scholarship, proposes a version of the original story, along with popular misinterpretations and mistakes in the narrative as passed down in Christian tradition.

This exercise of the mind brings back to me the riches of my father's thoughtful mind and gentle spirit. He attained much in his lifetime, and he was your basic kind and broadly intellectual college professor, who would touch on Yeats in the course of his botany lectures, who had a great grasp on the life of the mind. And compared to his achievements, his good works daily as an educator, a son can sometimes wonder how well he has honored such a tradition. And I know I have had my issues, discovering how to be in academic trouble, for whatever reason, in a time when it's better not to be. And of course the usual issues often come up, concerning what one is doing with his path in life and all that sort of thing.

The best thing one can do, actually can do, is realize in some way that he is 'sick,' in some way, or to put it better, and aligned with a helpful tradition (to say the least), in need of a physician. So one turns to a book, and this one about, well, wise people, from Hillel on through to a Jesus struggling with how to bring the Law of Moses along in a living world. Graves description of Hillel, through the eyes of Jesus, gives us a poor man who studied the Torah, stayed humble, kept a fine sensibility about all things meaningful, all the while maintaining his connections to the trade of carpentry, that is to say, an unpretentious fellow.

It is easy, I would gather, to be down on yourself for the life of trade that you've fallen into. But it is good medicine to look at it another way and see that maybe just so you have in fact accomplished some good in the world, some extension of kindness toward your fellow human being and neighbor in the course of your work. Maybe you don't specifically, in particularly authoritatively tangible ways, help people. But I know, in my gut, and from my own experience, that one's conscience can make you feel sick about yourself, and that what one really needs then is some form of acceptance, a permission to be good and kind, even as that might strain upon one's worldly logic.

And in a public house, I think the offer is primarily of kind acceptance, so that people can be themselves, let the demons of their guard down, and relax in some way, which then in turn gives them permission to not just sit around feeling guilty about all their lusty thoughts and of what they've done, but to have a sense of themselves as good and soulful people, a regaining, if you will, of humanity.