"How's your book?"
"Uh.  I don't think Sergei liked it.  He didn't mention it last time he played here."
"No, your new book."
"Oh, yeah, huh.  I guess I haven't started it writing it.  I don't know what to write about.  We have too many hangups here in the U.S.  I'm stultified."
"Confessions of a Bartender."
"Well, that's a thought."

Confessions of a Bartender.  Actually, not a bad idea.  Bring forth all the strangeness of it, the life you lead.

I'm sitting in the chair at the dentist's, for my routine cleaning.  The nice young lady has scraped, and polished, and scraped some more, and then the dentist, a bright eyed fellow younger than me, comes in.  "How are things?  How's your guitar?  How's your writing?  I guess you didn't bike here today." (He is an accomplished musician and a cyclist, now a busy family man.)
"Well, I guess if Lance is confessing, I should, too.  So that's my next book.  'Confessions of a Bartender.'"  The three of us share a chuckle.
"That would be interesting."  (In contrast to my last effort.)
"Really, nothing happens.  I live the life of a monk," I say, shrugging, lifting my hands up.  It's true.  And anyway, religious orders have long been drinking wine, so that part fits too.

Relieved, my gag reflex having been carefully bypassed, I exit the dentist's office.  Later I end up taking a walk on the university campus not far away.  I walk across the main quadrangle of American University.  There's a hint of snow coming.  Young people, dressed as students, brightly walking back and forth between classes.  I pause before the Center for Spiritual Life, a round building at the far end of the quad, observing the light through stained glass windows in the inner darkness, a chapel.  A banner hanging on the outer door lists the congregations of different faiths present here.  But there is anyway something inherently spiritual to the life of a campus;  consciously or not, something spiritual is happening, though this is no longer regarded as the main reality, but swept off to the edges.

I walk on, downhill, away from the traffic circle, the new art center on the other side of the avenue, not far to the low brick campus of Wesley Theological Seminary.  Christ raises his left hand out in front.  I walk around, finding myself looking in through the big glass windows at the neat lit library at one end of a small square quadrangle.  I stand in front of a drained fountain and read the plaque at the base of the bell tower.

Later, as I walk back, heading home, past the Kay Spiritual Life Center, I am brave enough to enter for a peek inside.  I take a brochure "35 Years of Worship and Service," enter the chapel for a moment to breath its silence.  As I come out I find a small litter of tea light votive candles left on the steps, most with wax still in their little rings below the blackened wicks.  "The recent tragedy," one says to himself, the school shooting, a stain on modern life that can now never be wiped away, haunting each of us as we go about our days interacting, wondering if the person around the corner might be the nut.  Looking at the roof lines of a campus, I ponder the assassination of President Kennedy (my father's memory of the bell tower at UC Berkeley ringing comes in to the mind) in terms of Hindu Buddhist thought of there being an almost infinite number of other worlds comprising creation.  If you added all worlds, all the individuals, you might gather that though it's not a matter of such a thing as horrible of that ever happening again, the odds are that indeed such a thing would happen once in our world within its long history.  Is it Brahma observing to Vishnu, that the ants marching in ordered unison up the steps of a great palace were all themselves, each and everyone, once a powerful monarch building a great castle in honor of themselves?  It's all in the scale of things.

And so I imagine my own what-I've-done-with-my-life, as people do in dentist's offices, or on the eves of their birthdays, in some terms, ones that put me once in that great spiritual world of campus life, learning, dreaming, and then later outside of it.  Certainly I carry that life of learning within, but it feels quite evident that now as I walk across a campus I am no longer a part of that, and I am unhappy to see myself having fallen out of it.  My own sins, drinking too much, laziness, self-absorption, narcissism, bring a measure of shame, even if I was completely well-intentioned as an English major, actually trying to be very serious about it.  Being exiled from that spiritual world, not finding a way back, one easily gets lost, maybe very lost.  And so I am a bartender.  Lost in the wilds, able to remember the temple.

The spirituality of a campus--yes.  That's what it's all about.  And it makes you see, and makes you see the broader truth of it all.  Life is all about spirituality.  What else are we here for?  How else could we even exist?  We cannot acknowledge another person as being real and alive without acknowledging our spirituality.  But yet, what do we do with that spirituality?  We ourselves are not perfect.  Do we join a socially accepted congregation that holds on to its own seemingly distinct way of being?  Does or would that close us off, having so joined, from another perhaps broader spiritual practice or recognition?  If I spend my time amongst Methodists, do I not have less time to spend practicing Tantric Yoga?  Does one way look sort of foolish from the perspective of the other?

Fittingly, it seems, it costs money to go back to school.  Debt.  Then again, it costs you not to go back to school, big time.

Years are frittered away thinking of these things.  You show up to work, do your job, go home at the end of the day, eat something.   All the years bar tending, it's not like I was totally practicing evil, but I am not proud of them.  And so I confess.  There were lots of sins around the edges, lots of not standing up for anything, but rather swept along by different personalities, when all the while, school is a far better influence.  You just hope, hold on to the hope, that there is at the bottom of it all something not unspiritual about it, as if performed with something in the mind along the lines of Christ's admonition to us to not seat ourselves by the head of the table, but at the lowest.

Picking up the brochure, I remember a familiar suspicion.  Is a university chaplain, a person of some denomination, inherently more spiritual, more spiritually informed, more qualified by spiritual acts than the rest of us?  Professional, of course, spent the time studying, practicing, has done the reading, and I am sure, quite helpful.  Yes, committed.  And yes, a lot of experience in dealing with certain issues.  Whereas I, the barman, whose shoulder has perhaps been subtly cried upon in silence often enough, am left standing outside, not sure what to believe in when it all is made particular, having not been raised as a church goer (but by no means ignorant of spiritual lesson.)  Can you be both Buddhist and Christian at the same time?  You could respect the Catholic faith but balk at becoming a priest for obvious reasons.

Being a writer can be spiritual, even finely so.  But it falls outside the usual organizations. Less foot traffic, less support, less organization, less respect.  You'll quite possibly end up bar tending.




I know:  I am in need of an editor.  I write too often without thinking.  I know it to be therapeutic.  It helps the thoughts.  The big banks have screwed us all, all who aren't part of their game of setting prices then making it look like the market arrived there through trading, the big banks who love huge government debts so as to make huge profits over tiny marginal changes.  They haven't left much for the rest of us, and we all know that big corporate oligarchy is so intent on fascist changes to our governing system as they and the big banks seem to enable each other into the same sort of power.  And the only way out against this trap of greed is a real hard long look at spiritual reality, and not only that but an acknowledgment of that which is spiritually good in life, spiritually good outside of all moralizing and entrenched belief systems.  We are good at this.  We can do this.  On the eve of Doctor King's Day, we can.  We can strive on for what he saw as a way forward, a moral way, quite apart from the world of corporate profit.  Spirituality.  The recognition of our 'brotherhood.'


When you are a barman, you go home.  You stay up too late.  You open a bottle of wine at 2 AM, and it relaxes you.  It lets you watch PBS specials about the lives of salmon with great appreciation, and you don't feel particularly lonely.  ("The unique smell of their birth place is imprinted in their brains," Jeremy Irons tells us.  That's pretty cool, after these fish have travelled thousands of miles.  The camera work by Bertrand Loyer--very cool.  "The Surprise Salmon" episode of Life on Fire.) Yes, you have your foibles, your puerile interest in Anthony Bourdain visiting Paris and Philadelphia, your love of Irish music on YouTube, Russian literature, some of it dirty, in order to relax the corpus after the blitzkriegs of the restaurant's dull week.  You like to play guitar at 5 AM.  You think of doing laundry, without doing it.

And it all leaves you with an ability to open a book at random, like a Dostoevsky, or The Gospel of Luke, and find a brilliant passage that suits the mind like a cross-pollenation.  From House of the Dead, an explanation of how the noblemen were treated in a Siberian labor prison.  Something that just fits into your head, because it's free.

You can't live in the past.  As my wise friend Ron, who works for an importer of wine we all rely on, told me just days ago, 'today is the first day of the rest of your life.'  Cheers, and thank you for the quite excellent Chamisal Vineyards Edna Vallen 2010 Pinot Noir, a Christmas gift my boss has suggested his company provide the salesman of the Frenchy Bistrot of Upper Georgetown.  (I've pushed my share of Kermit Lynch wines, curatively, on our customership.)  Ahh, Pinot Noir indeed is quite distinctive.  No one ever blends it.

As a parting word, Ron kids me about finding a kind older woman like the nice lady who is a good conversationalist.  That, or teach prep school.  (At a boys school, not a girls school--too vicious--in his opinion.)  I guess it's a running joke between us, what someone like me should now do with his life as a second act.  He knows my love of Shakespeare, as earlier I've tried to mumble a few lines, shyly, to this actor, who will always be an actor.  "No judgment," he says to me with his spot on smile.  And I say, yes, we don't judge here.  Rattled a bit, by several different things going on, I fail to deliver on my recent viewing of a film portraying Frost and Nixon.  "No, Ron," in Nixon gravelly sentimental basso profundo, "we don't judge here.  And we don't mention Watergate, either."

Later on, I will convert this all into iambic pentameter in my head.  That helps you control the language, find the right word, the right sound.  I wouldn't mind it if all the people on CNN delivering opinions about Lance Armstrong would stop, take a moment, and put it into iambic pentameter before the words gushed out of their breathless intent mouths.  Some people are able to use words, words with thought.  And actually, I have the distinct impression that Lance Armstrong is one of them.  To me, he came across as a thinking person, intelligent, and that's not nothing.

All stories are ones of becoming.  This is the intersection of news and art.  One struggles to become something, endeavors to work out the ideal in the forms one can do out of the deeper ideals of the mind.

And so it is satisfying to find a piece wherein one becomes.  Something fresh.  Maybe a short story.  Enough different to be new.  And to be new, that short story, definitely, had to show something about its creator.  It reveals the deeper personality of its creator.

It's as if the whole exercise were a revelation of the deepest kind of personality there is, while still remaining individual personality (at which point it becomes debatable, as to self and non self, soul, higher beings from inner or outer space, etc.)  Go on YouTube and find "Jimi Hendrix, the Uncut Story," and, you know, I would bet part of you will leave satisfied (and if not satisfied, irritated with yourself for your own egotistical reasons, maybe a mix of both.)

And we know, from history, from our educations, that 'people happen,' that 'art happens,' that things are created and are taken as they are, fresh and new, an addition, a contribution.
To us as we study them, they are acts, mysterious, fait accompli.  To listen to Jimi Hendrix' first album, Are You Experienced, is to listen to something complete, full, showing mastery;  it stands as a monument.  We view it from outside, and it is satisfying to know, for example, that "Purple Haze" emerged out of a very long text of deep Hendrix thought, that "The Wind Cries Mary" broom involves a real broom picking up after a particular domestic incident involving a girlfriend, taking place in London.  It's left Hendrix himself to feel the incompleteness of it as far as serving everything he wanted to say at the time.  And in a certain sense, the songs of this, his first album came from the days of his musical touring, his earlier career on the road.

The thing is, something fresh comes out, arises.  It overlaps with the old, it takes part in tradition, but, like each of us, there is individual freshness, uniqueness, that stamp of individuality, the finding of something, in addition to all that, perhaps suddenly limitless, boundless, encompassing.  (And from thence forth there will always be a fresh audience for it, as there are new people born into this world.)  The nature of genius, then, is to reveal how people think.  (This could even be of fairly common material.)




And so we struggle to observe this transformations, ones that happen from long nights, rumination, steady effort, years, honed with skill (perhaps the most envious part.)  Hendrix, or Ella Fitzgerald:  one willing to be poor, almost destitute, in order to follow what it is one must do.

We all know the difficulty of life, of work.  Just like you, I would say, myself, the job I do, is a hard one, much harder than it looks, demanding things a job should almost not demand, weird hours, diminishment of life's hopes, habits diametrically opposed to normal anthro-existence.

I am feeling that difficulty.  And I do not know where what I do leads, but that it is somewhere, I just don't know where.  Have we come to a point where to be in a community--imagine--with other people is itself an art form?  Is it possible to see the person who serves you, who engages with you, as much of an artist as a Jimi?  No, probably not.  There can be art to that, sure, an art to it, a continual reference to art, but that will never be art.

We know our minds lead us somewhere, it's just a question of where, and then, yes, practically, what will happen to us then.



Tending bar was always a much harder job than what it might have seemed it should have been.  For one, it involves hours of absorption, hours of chewing on it all and simply coming down from the rush. And despite all its 'storied-ness' somehow I am left without any real stories, but those that I have listened to, people talking about their very real lives, where I go on, having no real life.

There was a piece not long ago about food allergies in the context of bullying.  Said article was a bit vague on the actual cause of the bullying.  One imagines it happens as the main population of kids observes the does and don'ts of the allergic kid.  "What, no glutens?  What are you, a freak?  Don't want cheese, can't eat pizza, what's up with that?"

But we are not all cut from the same cookie cutter.  We are complex and different.  And certain people can eat certain things, and other people just shouldn't.  Take wheat, for example.  I fall in with the belief that blood type is, at least, a factor.  A type O cannot be the omnivore able to handle domesticated grains that a type B is.

And one wonders, do let's say blood types give us what might be construed as a particular kind of general attitude, a way of filtering (eating) reality?  Observations emerge.  Maybe kids, people in general, note the distinction of behavior between the food allergy group and the main which goes beyond eating habit.

Are Os built better for long sustained efforts like hunting, generally agreeable, non judgmental to cooperation?  Are Bs (blood type of Mongol hordes) shrewder, better at market interactions than their more gullible and accepting brethren, built better for the speed and constant doings of a modern world full of decisions over tiny matters?

Philip Roth's The Human Stain, with Anthony Hopkins, brought to you by... dishwashing detergent.  (A great look at college politics, and, so far a very good movie.)  Cool.  After watching Frost Nixon.  A weirdly good late night on TV.  Have other networks come to support a bleeding PBS?

Well, at my age, living alone, I could eat my home made delicious Bolognese Ragu with rice penne straight out of the pan, a beautiful sensitive sauce, and who's to care?  Back, as close as one can get to the early human eating habit, meat, sauce, a little wild grain unaltered by domestication and agriculture.  Only thing is, I'm running out of Lascaux, a beautiful red from the Languedoc imported by Kermit Lynch, down to the last glass and a half--uh oh.  I end up eating out of an earthenware bowl, which anyway makes sense--pan too hot.




I get the feeling sometimes
that I, or my soul,
is a tiny half step behind me, just following,
as if to watch a child,
'what's he going to do?'
We both know what I have to go and do.
I go and deal with it.
And the part of myself, the higher part,
which could have done so many things,
being perfect, as all souls,
good, generous, sensitive and logical, even,
has to go and follow me, with what I've done,
with this life.  The stuff you got to do,
in this case, tending bar, whatever that is.
Not quite perfect, if that's what the self
that was led by the soul
ended up doing in this, the real world.
(It's actually fun, if you let yourself do it.
People come to you for suggestions
about wine.  That can't be
all bad.)
But that self that follows,
so closely, all the time,
telling you things about yourself,
quite aside from your own getting
accustomed to things,
asks.  Do you...
are you happy?
Why not play music of your own
more often?  Why not teach?  You could do that.
Except,  I know,
a pain in the ass.
And Shakespeare's language
goes farther away from us, each day,
as we go about our business.

I'm led to think sometimes,
there is repetition, duplication,
as far as great thought and impulses go.
There's a little bit of the great
in each of us, a shadow, a reverb echo
sort of thing.
And we are wonderful about repeating,
about bringing to life
that original thing we might have read about.
And that is the main thing.

Okay.  "Spiritual being."  That's what an intimate might say about someone like Jimi Hendrix, perhaps, in a documentary that covers his death (in mysterious circumstances.)  It refers to people who have a broader imagination or some sort of calling.  It doesn't have to be artistic.  Lincoln could well be such, but he was quite grounded in the legalities of getting things done in a very real and practical realm.

Leave it to the individual to choose whether or not to attempt such a thing, be a Keats, whatever.  But what you may quickly run into is the growing status that you are a creep.   Yes, that is the payment for doing a good deed, the punishment.  You are a creep.  In an isolated spot.  People don't get what you are really up to.  The economy doesn't get what you are really up to, maybe because you don't have much to do with it, converting your spiritual values and insights into economic units sold on a trading floor.  You might be lucky to end up like Platonov, as a janitor.  And perhaps it doesn't help if you are a weak person, susceptible to enjoying too much wine while you go about the business of maintaining things, dishes, cooking, laundry and the like, at the odd hours when restaurant people do such things, like that Big Friday Night grocery shopping.  Yeah, take that weirdness to figure out how to approach Match.Com.   Uhmm...   Errr....  I...  Oh, forget it.

Service industry.  Could be a lot worse.  That's probably what spirituality is anyway--service industry.  Do it in hospitals.  Share your observations at the end of the day with a friend.

But yes, back to being a creep.  Maybe you start believing it yourself.  But probably around the same time that you also stop giving a crap what people think in general, not that that would be a particularly dramatic or noteworthy thing.  Well, you never really stop caring.  Whatever you observe goes in to your deeper understanding of the human ego, part of your own caring about people.  Which is probably creepy, and to be kept to one's self, thank you very much.

A lot of people pack up what they do, it seems, and make it sellable, like being a style consultant, a PR agent.  Or they pick up a duty known to the world, like 4th grade teacher, or train conductor.  Things have to be taken from whatever nature they crop up from and sold as units.  Pop music, for example.  Knowing what sells, well, yes, an excellent sensitivity to have.

But is that the way the gifted, the way the genius, the way the one who is comfortable doing whatever it is that they do, goes about it?   As MacGowan says, music is just music, it's everywhere... people just put it in boxes...  To the great hearer, to the open eye, yes, indeed, 'music' is everywhere, evident in its strains.   And if you are 'a writer,' well, maybe it just seems silly to take that which is everywhere and all around us and flowing through us, and write it all down as a particular thing with a particular plot or like a television show.  That's just how you would look at it.  Each day is worth writing about.  Each thought is worth writing down.  Like Joyce.  Or Hamlet.  Tell one of them to sit down and write about a particular topic or a story with a direct plot-line.

You bloody tame all of nature with a few good lines, and some snotty critic comes along and says you let it all fall into a mire of plotless repetition and needless characters and cliché.  And then because you've been 'defined' by another mind outside of your own, you start to feel like a creep again.

Eh.  That's just how it goes.  Loneliness won't change you too much as a person, and might even make you just a bit kinder.






Perhaps you go through the turmoil of making art, which entails surprising yourself occasionally, as a way of finding out about ego.  You find that the ego is an entity separate and distinct from your own essential being, and that it even need not be taken seriously.  Something may have seemed important at a certain time, thus a basic plot line of trying to achieve where that something may lead, but ultimately that seemingly important thing is washed away, a grain of sand.  To make art helped you realize that, and maybe you knew something of it all along, art reflecting the fact that ego takes form.  So the greatest art has, at times, a detachment.

Eventually, you learn, I suppose, to not hurt yourself with going through the twitches of egotism that art entails, making somethings more important than they need to be, but rather, standing back.

He was probably a sensitive enough chap to feel that he had made a mess of his life, in certain moods and certain times.  His most famous ghost mutters this great line, to set up the drama of one of his crucial plays.   "I could a tale unfold.."

It's literature, art, a line, and it can be read in many ways, open to interpretation, and so it depends on the reader and what the reader may be feeling or going through, the kind of response to such a line.  Maybe certain interpretations are more fitting than others.

Would Shakespeare have been perfectly happy with his accomplishments, not without self-questions?  Perhaps.  Perhaps not.  Is he here exercising, or exorcising, an item, an element of his own psychology?  I can tell a story, this story, because I feel something related to that feeling this ghost is now possessing and inhabiting, the angst below the surface and its niceties, an angst that possesses the sense of being wronged (or in this case poisoned) that follows, as well as one's own original mistakes in life.

So many great phrases emerge from the passage, 'burnt and urged away,' one of them.  The sense emerges of private pain and endurance.

And perhaps here too is the element of personally finding no point in putting all those crimes and errors into words.  One's own mistakes are too huge, too many, too mythical, too entrenched, that no one else could even begin to lift their burden.  They might require 'an external blazon' rightfully, but such a bellowing out would not be appropriate somehow, perhaps by social norm, perhaps as 'ears of flesh and blood' just aren't spiritually minded enough to really grasp the underlying human reality, as human reality is misperceived when the spiritual element of life is excluded (or maybe not), shout as you might, unable to bring a deep lasting forgiveness.

And here is Shakespeare, just at that moment when he is about to say, 'oh, but enough of that;  let's get on to the story here of the uncle killing his brother the king;  forget about all that in the meantime, the show must go on.'  Luckily, though, he had created the marvelous instrument of Hamlet, the son, the perfect vehicle of a person really being open, really able to tell you just how he feels and why.  Not be coincidence is this a prelude to that character so open and forthright about his feelings, replete with the knowledge of messing things up even as he is doing so.

One can hope that the audience of the day found it cathartic as found it worthy of holding the undivided attention.  They might have left into the night air with some sense of having opened up all that is kept closed and back in the various Stratfords of life and haunting us presently.



"I am thy father's spirit;
Doomed for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confined to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purged away. But that I am forbid
To tell the secrets of my prison-house,
I could a tale unfold, whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part
And each particular hair to stand an end,
Like quills upon the fretful porpentine:
But this eternal blazon must not be
To ears of flesh and blood. - List, list, O, list!"
- William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1.5




And then this part:  "The play's the thing/  Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."  We must now look upon any executive impulse of empire, such as torture, as is now a popular issue once again on Charlie Rose and current film and current issue, as being something alien, something outside the normal bounds of behavior.  Basically, we can attribute to people the basic impulse to be moral.  Sometimes they don't always act so.  The great counter-reaction to one action is to broadly assume the inability of the rest to act more or less normally.  A work of art asserts the moral normalcy of humanity, the golden rule, that rule descending to eye for an eye if respect gets lost somewhere along the way.  This too is a revolutionary thing that Hamlet is saying.

One of the last living examples of a form of art untouched by years and fashion, real, true.

The Pogues, live at the Olympia, celebrating 30 years.

Lullaby of London,  Rainy Night in Soho, Streams of Whiskey, Dirty Old Town, Greenland Whale Fisheries...

Beautiful, and true, even done by sort of old men, kings on top of their game.