I was not a fighter, not a scrappy guy, like JFK was.  I was too much a passive type, as if there really was a thing called God's will looking down upon us.  My father was a Theosophist, like a Buddhist who believed in Christian love's power.  My attempts at dignity above the fray ring to me like a hick country boy knowing nothing of hustling and pitching and aggressive New Yorkers.  To my embarrassment, James Dean was something of a model, and that was when I got sort of lazy as a student, even as I read Sorenson's Kennedy when looking for a way in life after college.

We do pay for our choices.  We get stuck in ruts.  And I did not do for the country but lay in shame somewhat, and my Irish wit, childless, I employ while tending bar, perhaps much as Kennedy's own grandfather had.

My friend Andrei, from the State Department, conversant in many languages, an aficionado of Bossa Nova and local musicians tells me a saying:  "If you want a friend in Washington, DC, get a dog."  And in a way, I suppose, in my duties, I'm somewhat like that dog.  The professionals come, and I make my rounds, and when I don't get to a table--maybe they looked busy--they'll mention it, why no visit, why no tasting, why no personal friendly love.  On one level, perhaps it is like Shakespeare, reserving for the mightiest, Lear, the company, when all's has fallen, of the lowly fool out on the howling heath.

Sleeps cleans the brain of toxins, the BBC reports, from a study by a team of neuroscientists at the University of Rochester published in Science.

So that's why I feel so lousy and end up napping away my first day off.  I've not been sleeping so well, four long night shifts, fighting daylight creeping in, a bit too much red wine, probably eating too heavy, too late.  No wonder the mood feels like a poisoned one, hard to be optimistic.

And it feels like it is all the thoughts that didn't get written down that cause an ache this first day off and leave me unable to write a thing.

I write in order to remember the mind's usefulness and good health.  My big fear is of not being able to exercise the need, the inherent right, the duty, having the sense of writing being the main work I must do.   Perhaps the same fear drove Shakespeare, the fear of bad brain health, a lingering sadness of how much one may have missed in foolish duties, idleness, laziness of expression, distractions.

Some of us write principally out of health, brain health, moral health, as a way of combatting the stresses jobs bring you and cost you, the night shifts, the poor sleep, the lack of energies on days off.

Writers are shy, often enough, in person.  There are things to say, and time gets rushed in the pace of life and people coming and going.   There are healthy things to say, to write, and one doesn't always have time, or to another, more used to the mainstream habits of speed would take their slowness as strange.

I enjoy close textual reading of literature of the kind we did at college in English 11, intro to studies.  An interpretation might hang on a particular word or a phrase.  Here, for example, the 'threatening verticality' of a young woman's apartment to the married man means something in particular crucial to understanding an Updike short story, as we learned studying with Professor DeMott.

But I have to wonder.  Considering the creation of a literary piece, and probably even the reason why the species writes, I see writing as coming out of a place that sees its own meanings, deeper, subconscious, secretive promptings that are discovered through writing them out.  We grasp and wrestle, we try to find an appropriate form, maybe a poem, or maybe trying a Hollywood story line even, who knows, maybe a longer work.  With each attempt we come up with something speaking of a here, a there, a moment, a mood, and in that success, we will feel that we made a good attempt, but that to a large extent all we can do with conscious words and statements is to circle in on something, come close, closer than if we didn't try to say something about it.

And maybe that which is deeper, which we must always try to find, pinpoint to a satisfaction, can never really be said, at least in a logically convincing away.  There's always something like that vague sense of a morality, like the morality of the current Pope, or of Franciscan humility, that strange love for humble things, animals, plain miserable people without good position, a love of deeper reality.  Our words might be clever, but must mutely address our dreams, so combatting native cynicism.

Here we are left on the same playing field as the cat, the dog, the bird, the elephant, the whale, or any other animal or beast, even those who might only gesture at best.  Words go far, but not far enough.  Words are a way to get to that big blank high thing we all have in us, call it love, or understanding, or other things we might be embarrassed to admit, sitting close to the living fire within that leads us on.

So is there the stuff that lies under all of mature Chekhov, and probably immature Chekhov as well, the deeper empathy, compassion, spiritual sentiment, love, that lies under the religious system.  Yes, the barroom is full of conflated wine-tweeked moments where egos come out, but...  That literary curiosity would even go there to such a story-lineless idle place...

An act of understanding, literary and worded, must invoke the inner world of the soul equally, go beyond the specifics and the explicit.

"Nature abhors a garden," my father would say.  Weeds.  Encroaching vines, errant invasive species...  Humbly I think of Chekhov on the topic.  "The Black Monk" begins with a father's garden, smudgepots keeping the fruit trees warm as a frosty night falls, introducing us to the theme that will involve the daughter and the visiting student who will fall in love before he goes mad with the hallucination brought on by his illness, leading all to ruin.  A great theme rises up and takes Chekhov upon his mature explorations, "Ward no. 6," "My Life," with a confidence he cannot err from, in which he does no wrong.

I wonder if there is not some rule of physics governing barrooms and the like, perhaps similar to nature and the garden.  Something like Newton's laws of equal and opposite reaction.  If there is a good thing, a flower of a visit, a good conversation, inevitably it is visited upon by weeds and overdoing.  One cannot stop things of a barroom just as they are when they are going well and encase them in glass.  Beauty brought together in time, in the moment of wine's relaxing powers, will, if dragged out, begin to rot, and then it's time for everyone to go home.  The lasting beauty is in the longer term relationships, of give and take, that occur organically over periods of time.

But there is, of course, worth mentioning, the lasting beauty of the story itself, in all stories, but perhaps particularly in the almost shy understatement of Chekhov who does not overwhelm us, who leads our eye beyond to mysteries greater than the ones that seem to be directly before us, sometimes in areas of a story that are under-told.  What plots he has are often hidden, leading the reader to gaze at meanings beyond the normal ken of understanding, often with the element of ambiguity allowing a suspension from our usual set terms and moral judgments, etc.  These beautiful elements of Chekhov, like the schoolboy who must cross The Steppe to go off to school, like the pioneering doctor whose story is barely told as wives and artistes dally about in the social set, gently emanate, coming in from off the radar almost.

Chekhov tells us something about great storytelling, and makes us think of all kinds of story telling, political and otherwise.  One might prefer the subtlety, the laid-back quality of Lincoln, to a more self-righteous kind.  And subtlety, our abilities for it, represents the highest of our intelligence, though sometimes enabling louder voices less high come and tell cruder versions.

Carver is a disciple of Chekhov, often aped for his spare language, his middle class curiosity.  His gift is to not be overbearing, even when he sometimes is, to let things appear off scene.

It's one of those nights, called into work, at two, just as I wake from a nap brought on by getting up early and walking in the woods, as if to prove that some sort of decision must be made.  Saturday night.  I end up closing.  Get home, lay down on the couch in darkness, feet up, not quite falling asleep, and then I'm more awake, enough to lick wounds, want a shower, and just feel like shit about everything.  Howard University PBS has a good show about a musical instrument shop in Lansing, Michigan, "Elderly Instruments," home of guitars, pedal steels, banjos, ukelele, mandolins, amps, picks, guitar players.  Stuff I do get a bug for late at night, thinking I need a Gretsch Country Gentleman or a Gibson J-45.

I would prefer to just go off to bed, and sleep, but it appears I need that time to process, to chew with the teeth of my mind and nervous system the events of one more episode of my bartending life.  The boss asks me if I'd like a shift at the new restaurant, which is going to start quickly and soon.  The thought of which makes it all the more painfully obvious that I am in a particular business, not a member of the ideal Socratic academy of great thinkers, but one who is part of a team humping it out on a Saturday night to a full restaurant.

What can I do but pull out my D 28 and pluck out a few lines from Ashokin Farewell.  It helps process, along with a glass of Langhe Rosso, Italian wine to chase away a night of serving French, and even pouring it over an ice cube.  Outside the crickets still, in seamless grassy sounds like grapefruit essence rises over Sauvignon Blanc, though one can never really picture the thousand insects who come out of exquisite hiding to make such night sounds, as if joined by the tiny frogs or toads that climb trees to peep.  Every creature makes a sound appropriate to it, the quiet whale, so discreet but playful and deep, the Adirondack spruce of a guitar's sound too, the chirp of a juvenile cheetah calling for her mom.

The wine helps a dejected spirit, who shouldn't complain, but whose Monday came on one day early.

And still, Dostoevsky hates electric light, and wouldn't like much the backlit screen either, except that it makes things easy, but by making them easy, making them difficult, robbing paper of a soulful natural sound, but still a venting place for warm sweat dried misery of a professional life out of control.

No one had ever written about it before, from what I could tell, about the proverbial Fall From Grace With God that is falling into the job of tending bar.  There wasn't much exciting to write about, mild antics, an off-running of humor coming from serious people who knew they could now not leave the seriousness of their lives and jobs, having been schooled to know not to take their eyes off the ball, alcohol-filled gatherings spilling out onto a night, a crowd coming late for some fun.  Reason enough why bartenders avert their eyes from what's in front of them, looking off to duties on the sides or down into coolers, if not turning their backs to the drinking crowd getting toasty to polish a bottle, why mirrors are put in bars.  I can only think of Dostoevsky, who wrote a fine book about his years in a Siberian penal colony.  And I think of him and his habit of how he liked the quiet of night to write, despised electric lights, wrote by candlelight, rolled cigarettes that he was not allowed to smoke as he thought out what he wanted to put down, sketching on his margins drawings that show he was no slouch as an artist.  The calmness and quiet brought by the night to the city of St. Petersburg did him well and let him do the work that he, being noble and educated and self-disciplined, thought he was put on earth to do.

It seemed to me the main thing were not the particulars, that of individuals and behavior, of the rituals of relaxing, unwinding, dating, simple dining and conversation, but the constant tension that went on in my own head, probably for the most part with dignified secrecy, as I wondered what I was doing with my life and what I should be doing.  This is the modern selfishness or Narcissism, but also a part of the process of dealing with that very scary thing of how we must make a living and be part of a profession, so that we don't end up homeless and starving, one thing going bad after another such that we find our books and our guitar and our clothes and other impedimenta out in the street, as there is never really any back-up in life that we do not make for ourselves.  And this involves whatever we might scrape together for ourselves by way of pension or real estate and retirement plans, and I, pushing fifty, found myself, while not completely unhappy with the stimulation and company and human touch of my job amongst regular people, with little reason to feel comfortable, and knowing that, in fact, it might all end tomorrow.

Plan B, of course.  But what is that?  What does that mean for me, when theoretically I am a writer, one who grew up so steeped in liberal arts as to, like old Fyodor, find purpose in doing such?  There's always grad school, but when you close a restaurant four nights a week after hustling over a fairly large territory of service and have many friends and acquaintances to talk to and taste wine with, I found, or find, myself with very little energy left over to even think about such things as graduate school and library science, an MFA in poetry, and even teaching prep school would require such a massive shift as to lead me to not know where to begin.  Writing, like serving wine and talking to people, was a duty, a cross between noble savage and noblesse oblige, and the reason people rightly get starry eyed when talking about the nobility of wild animals such as the cheetah or the domesticated feline or the dog, creatures just as smart as you and I but without the wordy parts, such at we, the human creature, rightly despise those who do not take up words and public chatter without a great humility and a sadness that such is necessary.

(Which is why I find myself disliking from what I've seen on television tonight not so much Newt Gingrich himself but his enabled habit of talking about things the rest of us have difficulty understanding, a kind of plotting, calculated, as I suppose we all must be when we realize, selfishly, the things at stake.  I'll take Lincoln any day, to Gingrich's Steven Douglas.  And the news people, many of them, reveal their distraction as they fill our spaces as if reality now were endless filled aisles full of cheap bargains at Home Depot or Lowes, the same cheaply manufactured door knob that will last a while, with little aesthetic value, stamped out, no work of art.  The news filling us up with stuff and emotions we do not need...  the delivery of the trite.  And no one seems to be able to state simply that putting people out of work and depriving the poor day by day is spiritually wrong.)


In the daylight of a day off, rising past two, it feels like a deep hole I cannot get out of, week after week, flying by me.  But then, if I got out of the whole, what would the alternative be?  Did I fall into this pit, this miserable routine of drinking wine alone at night, then waking late, out of thinking too much about the spiritual aspect of humanity?  Such that I would then become a prodigal son?  How could I have ended up so, quietly doing my job reasonably well, graciously even, without great complaint, but finding myself haunted by some misery I cannot put a finger on, involving how I am not a great provider.  Where did I become troubled, veering off the path, I ask, scratching my head as I drink green tea, bits of dreams remembered.  A day off and the clock is already ticking, and I have little idea of what to do with myself but go for a walk outdoors, down in the woods, before going grocery shopping, by bike or on foot.  Years go by and I get no where;  that's what we all say to each other in the restaurant business.

And yet, the community a neighborhood bar can offer, is of spiritual service, filling a gap, with some compassion, bringing people together, letting them speak their minds, and I have not much channeled this into personal profit, but rather what I take to be some form of good deed, even as I'm sure there is skepticism about all that, often my own.  It does cost money to go to divinity school, I don't believe in celibacy, and the rewards for such paths might not be any greater than those of my present toils.

That's the problem with the world, it's worldliness, as the Pope makes light of recently on a visit to Assisi.  And the problem personally, is that some brains are less inclined toward that worldliness, more toward love and faith and a peculiar sense of human struggle.  If you aren't trained to of a particular faith, but amenable to religious thought in general, if you're not a knee-jerk believer in accepted tales, I guess you end up reaching out for such things.  First, you love people, even as they are caught in worldliness, and a greater unselfish spiritual love comes forward.  How do you recognize that within?  How do you bring such a general faith along?

Inclined toward writing, inclined to explore a way of making a living out of it, I wish that I did care to inventory the worldliness of the world.  But I never feel inclined to do that without boredom setting in.  It is by some faith that we must look elsewhere to solve our real problems, even as such a thing might seem irresponsible.  (This is the problem of a lot of education today.)  For one must love things out of spirit, not practicality, not by a marketplace.  At least then you'll find answers to questions, know that we all suffer and need love and need to give it.  Then maybe I might see, better, happier, that it was a lack of worldly intention that I fell in to the crowd and the bars, not that I would or will ever be a Francis amongst lepers, a Mother Theresa.

The world's problems are depressing and confusing, too much for shrewder more clever people who like comfort.  And the core of a bartender's task, to me anyway, is not the pleasure that leads to misery, but to the spiritual presence that is clean and free of selfish motive and the stuff that clogs the mind.  Then, I think, you come to understand your acts, put them into a form that has some shape, gather then into some overall sense, and that would reinforce you as you must go on.

I liked the restaurant business more or less immediately because of the teamwork.  People working together.  A democratic equality.  Friendship that went beyond a shift and the drink after.  I'm here because you're here.  If we offered judgment on people it was because they were assholes to us, self-important, and we cut slack for for a lot of them, because they suffered the same things we suffered from, and there was a great spirit of generosity, a buzz that happens.

What would a shrink say about Chekov, or about Lincoln?  How, to what extent, did they seek, or were they so familiar and use to such situations that they had little other natural choice to make but go along with complexity, the acceptance of the great unclarity we all ultimately live under?  Did they seek complex situations to live in in order to feel a simple satisfaction, an engagement in life as it is?  Chekhov had a love of material.  His stories are the crowning accomplishment of his depth, of his embrace of all the stuff of life, the things that do not make it into the commercial's happiness.  His best stories are personal, close to memoir.

A comfort level, by being accustomed.  A sense of humor.  Wisdom.  Familiarity with a place where things are learned, written about, studied, the humanity of political thought formulated.

I liked tending bar.  I did it for me.  It made me feel alive.  (This is where Breaking Bad is a good television event.)  It gave me a sense of the constant shifting story of life.  I started as a busboy.  I served beer and margaritas and shots of tequila, along with tacos, burritos, enchiladas, queso, chili, nachos, chicken wings.  And then later, after a lot of that, I made it into wine, honestly enough.

One of the good things was the jazz.  And the musicians sensed in some creaturely organic level that I appreciated them.  I cared about where songs came from.  I loved the people who could bring them across, the songs.  I loved the sounds of the guitars, the drums, the cymbals stroked with brushes.  I loved the beat.

Somewhere along the line, when given the Friday effect, the chance to reflect, you see that you turned into the person you wanted to be.  There you are, and the lady singer comes up to me and thanks me.  You get, better than an important tv news journalist, the little stuff, more than you would otherwise get. You get the Chekhovian, the sweet sadness that is in everyone.  Like the nice person whose husband has just passed away, who, understanding history speaks of how. before the digital ends, saints used to thoughtfully walk the earth.  And you are the person there to listen to such things, as no one else, certainly not professionally, really is.

Some teachers are good.  Some less so, in that they don't provide you a model to always enable, let, you be a teacher yourself.   They seem to blame the system.  "Well, if you want a PhD. you gotta be like this..." but they don't help you face life.  The good ones do.