I get up late.  Early morning the mind was awake, the body not able to move, then slipping back into a heavy sleep, dream, waking up groggy.

What I wrote yesterday seems a bit strange to the eye today.  Foreign.  The brain is in a different place today, its juices a different blend.  The chemistry is firing in a different way.

There is the embarrassment of putting a piece of writing out on social media, and I am considering hitting the delete button.  But the laundry is done.  Vacuuming.  I start the day with green tea, a turkey and butter sandwich on gluten free bread, take my pills and vitamins, call mom, who is happily en route with a colleague friend Jane P. to The Press Box for dinner.  I call at an opportune moment, giving them directions, over the bridge, left lane, left turn single, first street after the bridge.  She is happy, and I am glad to hear a happy laugh in her voice.

The piece was meant poetically, not to be taken literally.  By the late of day it looks foreign, not to be taken as literally as people will be inclined to take it.

As I lay in a thick red mummy bag, the bed clothes not set, as I drift in an out of the comfort of sleep, I think of the lack of physical erotic companionship.  Perhaps the consequences of events written about in Hero For Our Time.  I've always had a healthy taste for the opposite sex, but maybe I just come off as too strange, or I drink too much then, or to them I seem to have no discernible game, or I'm just a stubborn bloody Capricorn, too obviously crazy, who knows...


I look in the mirror and see that the haircut I gave myself the previous night with Ken Burns The Civil War playing in the background with a Wahl battery powered shaver lacks a bit to be desired, but rather than lamenting too long how bizarre the fresh look is, the I take it upon myself to clean it up a bit, which means shortening things with another round, looking in the shaving mirror with the reflection of the back and sides of my head in the bathroom mirror and going over, like a mower, the uneven spots.  And then finally more or less pleased with the results, into the shower, get the clippings off, shave the neck underneath the beard, come out clean.

With writing you have to be serious.  As with anything professional.  You cannot hem and haw, you cannot go halfway.  You have to write.  With focus.  Like cutting your own hair.  Like the chef owner of a restaurant.  For me, this means putting away the distractions of social life.  For me this means working in a restaurant.  You have to be dedicated.  And this is the lesson of maturity.  You have to create yourself.  That's the only way.  You have to let the God part in you reach down to the Adam part of you.

It is simple enough to be human.  You need sleep.  You get hungry, you need to eat.  You work to make a living.  You do the laundry, check the mail, wash the dishes, and try not to get distracted...

So, you wake up one day, and you ask yourself, hmm, what was all that about...  And then you get back to writing.  And you just write, like I'm writing now.

For me this means, proverbially, pulling the old books out, much as Quixote does at the beginning of his own story.  Take them out, remember them, the good stuff, the stuff you respond to, the stuff that strikes you as real.


Only time will tell, if the effort was worth it, or even if it amounts to anything.

One day, when I am old, or dead and gone already, a young fresh wise Ken Burns-type will come along, and collect the facts and remembrances of our times, of the writers who led up to our times, who armed us with wisdom, background, sensitivity and knowledge--as always, the work of writers, since ancient times--to face the current battle to save the still-alive human mind while it is still alive and independent.

There will be the technologists on one side, armed with big data and numbers, treating us as some kind of collective organism, one easily led if one is clever enough, but always to their own technological preferences, their means, their tastes, their clever way of life.    Driven by style, success, a happy social life and material benefit, their blindness will only grow deeper, and the scandals, if they have not come already, will continue, betraying the colors of their moral character in their own 'creative' state.  They will claim to be the most creative of all, open to all, fantastic, saving the world as they speak, connected.

But they have forgotten something.

Then on the other side there will be us.  There will be those of us who remember the daisy, the experience of it, and the chickadee and the sparrow.

Instead of connecting us, as they claim, through their preferred mode of increasingly inhuman impersonal connection, of hits of dopamine, artificial, for which they will profit handsomely on by charging fees, dues for belonging to the master computerized computer-friendly master race, they will secretly be profiting by destroying the means and the ability for us to meet as strangers, to meet in common places in actual not virtual reality.

They will do all they can to destroy the old meeting places, the old quaint meeting houses and public rooms of rubbed shoulders and shared tales over a benign beverage and decent sustenance, to set up their own.  They will be set precisely against such people as me, old middle aged barman who've been at it for twenty five years in a neighborhood, against such who might still claim some right to write about real life encounters in all their strangeness and wonder.   (I will be dismissed as servile, not cool enough, not enough a self promoter.)

They will create a master race who goes where the machine, the big data tells us to go, the hot new place for something better, improved.  They will create the dopamine-seeking monster in all of us , that creature who must go, happily, to the new places, the new scenes, in so doing discarding the old ones, the old templates of decent things.  And that new humanity will not be able to provide any real dialog, despite professing themselves to be the great facilitator of such dialog.  They will create experiences of a virtual reality, as a fetish, experiences of the computer screen, ones which no longer allow, even wish or hope for real human dialog, as is only in their perfectly defined self-interest to do so.

To go to the new scenes will be a desire unquestioned by the masses, and unquestionable.  And anyone who does not follow along immediately, as millenials already seem to do, will be ostracized, trivialized, treated as an old fogey, irrelevant, uncool, uncouth, not following the latest in style.  The haircut will be their symbol of belonging.  Their style will be a uniform, and their actions will always include the new technology, worn on the sleeve, proud, proud of ignoring the fellow passer by, the human being sitting next to you, wearing no particular function but that of being human.

I get up around three on day off number one.  I don't care, meaning, that's life, you need your rest.  The life of the aging barman.  Those who will like him as a writer will like him, and those who don't will not.  (That is one of the lessons one learns in college;  people will judge you.)  There is no particular space, no particular place or recognition he seeks.  If he did, he would not see himself as worth calling a writer anymore.  There was a politics to it, quite essentially.  A loyalty to the arts themselves.

Perhaps the object of the game was to do the utter opposite of what Facebook or Google, Twitter and Instagram and the like were doing.  The most important and essential piece of writing was to remind everyone of the great obscurity of the human being, of the human soul, of the human just as he or she was, without dressing themselves up.  The more you did not pretend to be important or worth any attention at all any more than the next person, the better you were doing.  You were reminding yourself, and hopefully others, about being human, about the projects of the soul and spirit.

We might not have really understood that about Hemingway, as we criticized him on personal grounds, the bully, the blow-hard.


One day, when I am old or dead and gone, a young fresh wise Ken Burns type will come along, and collect the facts and remembrances of our times, of the writers who led up to, who armed us with wisdom and knowledge--as always since ancient times--to face the current battle for the still alive human mind.  There will be the technologists on one side, armed with big data and numbers, treating us as some kind of collective organism, one easily led if one is clever enough, but always to their preferences, their means, their tastes, their clever way of life.    Driven by style, success, a happy social life and material benefit, their blindness will only grow deeper, and the scandals, if they have not come already, will continue, betraying the colors of their moral character in their own 'creative' state.  They will claim being the most creative of all, open to all.  But they have forgotten something. Then on the other side there will be us.  There will be those of us who remember the daisy, the experience of it, and the chickadee and the sparrow.

Instead of connecting us through an increasingly inhuman impersonal connection, false hits of dopamine, for which they will profit handsomely on by charging fees, dues for belonging to the master computerized computer-friendly master race, they will secretly be profiting by destroying the means and the ability for us to meet as strangers, to meet in common places in actual not virtual reality.  They will do all they can to destroy the old meeting places, the old quaint meeting houses and public rooms of rubbed shoulders and shared tales over a benign beverage and decent sustenance, to set up their own.  They will be set precisely against such people as me, old middle aged barman who've been at it for twenty five years in a neighborhood, against such who might still claim some right to write about real life encounters in all their strangeness and wonder.   (I will be dismissed as servile, not cool enough, not enough a self promoter.)

They will create a master race who goes where the machine, the big data tells us to go, the hot new place for something better, improved.  They will create the dopamine seeking monster in us who must go to the new places, the new scenes, discarding the old ones, the old templates of decent things.  And that new humanity will not be able to have any dialog, despite professing themselves to be the great facilitator of such dialog.  They will create experiences which no longer allow real dialog, as is only in their perfectly defined self-interest to do so.  To go to the new scenes will be unquestionable.  And anyone who does not follow along will be ostracized, trivialized, treated as an old fogey, irrelevant, uncool, uncouth, not following the latest in style.  The haircut will be their symbol of belonging.

To stand behind a counter, a bar, and offer the basic good things of life, as recognized by Jefferson and the Renaissance, will be a forgotten, regarded as a tradition now worth keeping, if it does not fall into that created diorama of the desirable, the fashion, the hipster connected cool.  (I once had to ask what a hipster was.  I guess I know, better, now.)

The Ken Burns type out there in the future will, with the benefit of historical hindsight, treat this old corps of writers in a way that will be similar to the treatment of the soldiers, the generals, the political leadership as done in The Civil War, or perhaps in his piece on Baseball, or Jazz.  The creative types, for all their jazzman struggles and health concerns, will be seen finally as patriots of a sort, perhaps in the way that Yeats wrote of the Easter Rebellion.  His writers and artists will be a sort of natural history museum, naturalists, people who remembered how the human mind and the human psyche worked, what they might have looked like, before the great brain washing, the new communal new Communism, destroyer of the human soul.  They will be seen as brilliant vivid alive types, passionate hotheads, men barely in control of their emotions, caught up with some archaic and old fashioned concern, if there still will be such words.

Strangely, the works of Ken Burns converge upon a center.  The jazzman, the Lou Gehrig, the John Muir, the Robert E. Lee, the Lincoln, the Vietnam soldier blend at a cellular level, all up to the same thing, in different ways.  These are people who led actual lives, with actual ups and downs.

Day off after four straight busy nights.  A decent mood is essential to this day's creativity.   Sometimes I've been too tired and low to make much of the day off beyond the couch.

I can understand why Hemingway was shy, why writers are shy.  The good mood can be fragile.  Insularity has an importance, for the writer in a world which operates separately from his ways.  He is a quiet Zen monk of routine in a world he does not figure into, an economic stray, doing something for absolutely no discernible reason nor logic.  Who has left it to him to be his own preservation society, his own museum of odds and ends most grown ups would take to be childish as toy soldiers and such, mementoes of old neighbors and departed dad and grandparents, of old letters and pictures over the years.

The decent mood is necessary for the concentration, for the calm, for the meditation, for the creative nature, for the cellular level of such work.  Too much time off will drive one crazy enough.  A bright outlook has to be summoned.  One has returned to the library.  The spiritual star crosses over the accumulated literature of one's shelves.

Light box, Vitamin D, classical music, the start of putting things back in order.  A good apartment is uplifting.

Down in the basement, I put a load of a sheet, work shirts and a pillow into the washing machine, a fairly new one, one of those high efficiency low water kinds.  I watch it fill, slowly, spraying down from the lip of the canister, light in flow.  It takes a while to fill, but I stand over and watch;  how does it do its thing?  I've looked at these new models and options more carefully, now that mom needs a new one.  In a quiet way, here on a cool drizzling Thursday evening, dark out, watching how something works helps the wheels spin, in an uplifting way almost.

I suppose I came a bit closer to a bad place than I would have wanted to.  It had been building a long time, a long time finding the fears and anxieties difficult to hold off.  Building to a bad couple of years with a lot of things in question, up in the air, it seemed, causes for concern on several fronts, even as I pursued therapy and a serotonin uptake inhibitor and other measures, sometimes going to work was difficult.  Going out of the house was difficult.  What were these deeper values I had, apparently, tried at least to follow?  What was work?  What should I do for a job, a real job, and even too tired and out of synch to do even the slightest thing about it, about looking for a new job, benefits.  At one point, in the last days and months of the Obama administration my brother began to strongly suggest I get a federal job, the kind completely unskilled people have to take, something like a travel scheduler, for clearly I had no other skills, and the restaurant pay wasn't, would never be, enough to made anything close to local rent.  I tried, I added another shift, I kept going, but it didn't really work.  The one attempt at security I tried was an unappealing and ultimately failing enterprise that basically left me back where I had started.

But slowly it dawned on me, I would have a hard time not being physically involved with work.  And that entity within, with such tastes and distastes, to aversions and proclivities, that was as much the writer as anything else.  For writing books and anything else is some kind of physical labor, and the books on a shelf are comforting, for they show that writing is physical, in a way far less evident on a computer screen.

After observing my mother growing elderly, I began to understand, somehow she needed these over piled shelves and piles of books.  I did too.

A book, a sentence, hides the labor it took to make it.  The cover does not belie the long hours, the late nights, the travels to and fro in heat, in rain, in cold, and all other conditions of weather and hour, day and night.  The cover does not tell how the writer fed himself, much of what he ate, what he cooked, the energies spent.  The cover does not tell of difficulty sleeping, nor of difficulty falling asleep, or difficulty waking.

And if you're lost, if you lose the bulk of the reasons why you are doing all that which is on the side, but which is rather full-time, if you lose the understanding of the greater purpose and the sense of what writing a book might be about, might have to offer, then none of it is happy or satisfying.

So you wait on people.  You wait on the appreciative, the distracted, the self-concerned, you listen to talk of what people find to be justifying of their own seriousness and self-importance and all of their projects.  And sometimes, this hurts, all that getting a whole lot of the self-justification and reward stories of other people, while what you yourself are trying to do grows more and more twilight and obscure, sound and fury, signifying nothing, a tale told by an idiot.  Who would bother to read it anyway?

Tiredly, closing up shop, the painful last mile of it, the last glassware to polish, the paperwork to do, the cleaning of working surfaces and countertops, the feeling of running on fumes...  That college boy bright and concerned is a thing dim and tarnished, dusty.

But one thing they will tell you, in therapy, is that it will benefit you if you try, at least try, to follow through with your own values.  Remember them, act on them.  Continue to carry them.

The catch is that this requires one being able to keep in a decent mood, to not be down too often.

And maybe, to make a break through, that one which you have striven for, you need to go through a long dark night of the soul, the obscurity of the darkened wood, the obscurity of obscurity itself.  You have a point to make, one which held a value in physical work, from landscaping, to reading, to writing itself.


Of course.  It stands to reason.  The people who are capable of tangible success of the financial sort, give them credit for what they do and their hard work, must be, almost by definition, entirely selfish, unconcerned with the planet, with the human condition.  They might offer useful innovations, sure, to their credit.  But, they have succeeded in looking out for themselves, not that they do not help the un-clever...  Good for them.

But that is them.  And this is us.


I wish the best for all writers making a living today, making their modest hay on current issues, on being visible in milieu of social media, satisfying the primary need of perpetuating the animal they ride upon.  Louder voices than my obscure one, theirs of import, mine trivial.



Writing at the end of the period of humanity's useful literary effort, simple observations are necessary on the craft and its meaning.  It takes a kind of courage to face the breakdown, the manly/womanly breakdown.  You understand it finally as something necessary, a kind of credential, with literary precedence. The breaking apart of conventional thought, the entryway into the thinking beyond.

In such a state, one finds himself drawn to the writers one had always been drawn to.  Lincoln.  Twain.  Sherwood Anderson.  Kerouac.  Books in hand.  Which of them did not have a breakdown of some sort, and then a break from, then writing about the process.  They reached a point upon which let them not care for what anyone thought of them, finding it made little difference what anyone might think.  It's a good habit, anyway, for the maintenance of one's own integrity.

'Tis a dreary day in DC, the temperature having dropped twenty five degrees, pouring rain.  Monday night jazz at The Dying Gaul, always complicated, no offer of any help restocking, the old shared server up and down routine, the busser tailing off at the end of the nigh, singing to himself quietly in the corner, eating something.  Good help while it lasts, and we get through the night, the food run up from the distant kitchen, the band's needs seen and conqueredBut at the end of it, after the last customers, I get a nice lesson in Gypsy swing jazz guitar from my friend who's been playing music with us for eleven years.  We start with some Hank Williams, and he has his custom made Craig Bumgarner guitar, a beauty, solid sound, followed by a  chord tutorial.  The guitarist's fingers and hands move so quickly I've not been able to decipher exactly what they are doing, it all looking like ninth chords and minor sixths, up and down the neck at speed.

Earlier, I've made an Aviator cocktail, for friends, a Georgetown couple we go way back with here at the Gaul--she tells stories of personal Obama encounters, he's just back from a colonoscopy--and they end up engaging with our two guitar players who are talking a bit of shop at the bar.  I take a seat next to their low table, to be friendly, and then for me some red wine on ice with a little orange and lime and a splash of soda water.  I'm obliged, earlier, to taste the gin and maraschino cocktail, and of course that's enough to get me started.  But they are kind to me, and we are overdue for a chat.

When I get home, finally, after eating my veal cheeks with rice instead of oriechette, no cream, but still the vital dash of truffle oil, I'm stirred up.  I don't necessarily want to turn on the television, but I do, crack open a can of soda water, and the CNN news desk is bright blue, offering the late night brain the drug of blue light in a large dose, stay up, stay up.  But I gain will power, and turn the damn thing off, take a trazodone sleep aid and go off to bed, the lights out, the bedroom door chinked with a towel at the base to avoid the front stoop porch light's stray beams.  And it takes a while to fall asleep, laying there in the pitch dark, but I wait it out, and even with the anxiousness of running like mad to take good care of everyone, I refrain from getting up and having another glass of wine.  I've not had too much, but with any drug or stimulant, when you've had a little bit, it asks you to have some more, to maintain the effect.

Earlier in the day, the day before, a walk through the woods.  My best friend Dan has taken up painting with house paints, and after some Rothko like experiments, some canvases of stylized owls.  Coming up the paved road, two thirds of the way up with the stone eastern wall of Dumbarton Oaks and bamboo above, there below, near a maple leaf flat on the wet pavement, a small gray snake the size of a number two pencil.  I stop and take a picture of him or her, and it stays still, then lifts its head, turns slightly toward me and flickers its little forked tongue as only snakes can do.  Hello, my friend.  I've seen at least one of these little guys on the paths here through the woods, in my years of commutes, and I've very glad this one is alive.  I go on to work, happy for the encounter.  An Englishman who passes in the opposite direction on a silver bicycle coming down the hill bids me a good afternoon, and I return the greeting, sir, and look behind to make sure he's on the right side of the path, not to run over my discreet little snake friend.

Hemingway, I've often wondered what he meant in that passage toward the end of A Moveable Feast. His regrets for having ever gotten involved with the rich and their pilot fish, with those who patted him on the head to praise his writing efforts.  Nearing age 60, he writes he should never have listened to them, in strong enough terms, that he should have ran in the opposite direction.  Hmm.

There was a tall gentleman with cool but understated style who didn't look like typical DC in for dinner at the old wine bar Sunday night, and engaging him, I find he's in from Vancouver, flying out tomorrow.  He orders soup and dinner, a glass of Cotes de Bourg, and I engage him later on with a little sip of this and that.  At the end of the dessert, handing me his credit card, I see his name is Karsh.  And he's Canadian.  He has cool round glasses.  Sir, may I ask if you are related to the photographer.  Yes.  He was my great uncle.  Cool, I say.  My parents got me a book of his portraits.  His pictures of Hemingway, how he was the shyest man that he ever met...   The man tells me the story the photographer included in his notes on the encounter, a story of asking for a daiquiri, then the writer peeking his head out of the kitchen, Karsh, it's 8 in the morning!  I thank him for the story again, as he, tall, departs down the stairs.  You're welcome, he says.


And Hemingway, too, even as a sophisticated observer with the built-in bullshit detector, even he was an innocent, the kind of idiot who manages to bring some perspective by seeing with fresh and wondering eyes.  I make my scrambled eggs and eat them straight out of the old teflon pan, a simple family heirloom from the Sixties, and I think of him up in Michigan, camping, making hot cakes and coffee over a fire.  Even Hemingway, who'd sort of laid down the classic claim of having seen it all, gangsters, wars, courage, death, riding the rails with hobos, sex and marriage and drunken fishing guides preying on newly married couples and dining and oysters and wine and Paris, and old ladies and bullfighters and travels in Spain on the top of busses, in trains, places to go swimming, far far beyond the normal range of American experience, yes, even he too was an innocent, a newcomer, and one with that typically dumb naive idea that he wanted to write and that he could teach himself by reading, and then matching, the greats...

Only far late in his life would he reveal, behind the bluster, that he too was a kind of Dostoevsky idiot, caught up in immature adventures, clueless, attempting to learn, attempting to be himself, as is revealed in the incandescent early works, the Twain like offerings rich in physicality, of the story collection In Our Time.  Then, he would be in the role of knowing he was a writer, or thinking so, having to protect himself with his bluster, looking for new material, to keep up the same pace of insight, of capture.  The spiritual moments sprinkled throughout his writing career reveal that big kid, the person behind his persona, even as he tried to live simply and cleanly as he could.

And Hemingway, maybe he too yearned to have some profession, some professional life, but one on his own terms in tune with the natural chemistry of his being.  Something like being a fisherman, or the waiter back in Paris he was fond of who kept a garden and had to shave off his mustache under the new bistrot management, or the tag-along kid who hitchhiked to Key West to study how to be a writer, taken under the Hemingway wing.  That sensitivity one sees in a late letter from the Mayo Clinic, an ailing Hemingway writing a very ill boy, with the unmistakable tone, on weather, birds, mentioned by author Paul Hendrickson in Hemingway's Boat:


                                                                     St. Mary's Hospital
                                                                     Rochester, Minn.
                                                                     June 15, 1961

Dear Fritz,
I was terribly sorry to hear this morning from your father that you were laid up in Denver for a few days more and speed-off this note to tell you how much I hope you'll be feeling better.
It has been very hot and muggy here in Rochester buy the last two days it has turned cool and lovely with the nights wonderful for sleeping.  The country is beautiful around here and I've had a chance to see some wonderful country along the Mississippi where they used to drive the logs in the old lumbering days and the trails where the pioneers came north.  Saw some good bass jumping in the river.  I never knew anything about the upper Mississippi before and it is really a very beautiful country and there are plenty of pheasants and ducks in the fall.
But not as many as in Idaho and I hope we'll both be back there shortly and can joke about our hospital experiences together.
Best always to you, old Timer from your good friend who misses you very much.
                                                                       Mister) Papa

Best to all the family . am feeling fine and very cheerful about things in general and hope to see you all soon.
                                                                       Papa





He seems to have liked working people, the physical sort of work, fisherman, Gary Cooper the outdoorsman, identified with cowboys, bullfighters, waiters, maitre d's, professional soldiers, outdoor guides...  As if he were looking for the kind of a job that he could actually deal with himself, without getting bored, hemmed in, stuck in an office, a place in the world as a useful professional in a way that would have agreed with him.  Indeed, The Pilar was a refuge for him, the sea a safe place, upon which he was a naturalist as much as a hunter, fisherman.  (Hemingway died half a month later.)



I feel the same, ultimately, when I get to work.  The clock is ticking and I must prepare more or less blind for what might happen in a night, the reservation pad, the stocking.  Movement, physical, carrying, dragging the night's supplies and prep up two flights of stairs.   Bar work is part acting, naturally, movement, precision, entertaining...  I enjoy it, once I get there, wake up after the commute, shake the cobwebs off, get the adrenaline going.  Speed, the challenge of figuring out the things people speak of when they're ordering wine...  I like the physicality of it, working with hands, opening wine bottles, lining things up, then finally after all the talk is gone, quietly cleaning up in Zen fashion.  I always have.  Working a bar with hands, legs, arms, back, offering up the working man's wit, it always agreed with me, after my fall from academia.

I couldn't think of any other sort of employment, I really couldn't.   And I feel bad about that, to live here in Washington, D.C. where adults have figured out professional lives, professional existences, money, income, security, the law, the ins and outs, real estate, marriage...  The workman writer at the edges of polite society, struggles with security and aging, courageous.

So, Hemingway's line in the personal reflections of his early career, days in Paris, of the praise of the rich and their pilot fish, how do we interpret?  Is it that Hemingway and his like are stuck in the jobs relegated to those who've never grown up, the wealthy and powerful giving him lapdog praise while he struggles on, poor for all his life, as a way of applauding themselves?

And I wonder, is this in someway a background for the story of Civil War monuments, that by now we are divorced enough from, the physical work, horses, farming, mills, making trains run, building the original infrastructure by hand as much as machine, that we can not comprehend, enough so that  men who led armies doing terrible things in a war they might not have chosen of free will have become alien cutouts...

The writer stands on this edge of a disappearing frontier, the disappearing habitat of the satisfaction of physical labor.  Fitzgerald closes out The Great Gatsby on the note of what the original Dutch settlers would have found, the "fresh green breast" of the land unsullied by modern economics and New York banking.  Peter Matthiessen looks for The Snow Leopard, the Tibetan monastery, the life on ancient trails, guides, monks.  He writes Men's Lives, capturing the last breeds of water men.   Joseph Mitchell prowled a vanishing New York of oysters, rats, eateries, Iroquois steel workers comfortable at heights.   (Ted Hughes writes with direct experience of fox fur and hawk and owl.)  Twain anticipates the change.  Sherwood Anderson...

And these writers must also inhabit the world of modernity, of the financial world, of modern responsibility, taking us further into the strange realms of the computer screen, of high speed banking, of legal minutiae preying on all aspects of life, of the thoroughly computerized home and car and office.  The financial rewards given to the kind of people who figure out how to deepen the mire of our involvement into the virtual increase with the greatest generous speculation of a world we have yet to fully comprehend.  Orwell and Vonnegut write of the new world, of the anticipation with each and every human being implanted with the computer chip and marked according to big data and the mind of artificial intelligence, while the clever creators of such innovations reap impossible wealth beyond all fairness of relative labor.  The missing piece of Marx's puzzle...

So I work, physically, not as a writer who simply gets to write, nor one who will even ever make a buck out of it, the whole thing operating as a costly and dangerous loss, but as a writer who stands at that edge, of recognizable human features and actual physical work...


There are things about literature a college kid can read, but will not be able to comprehend until far later in life.  He might be able to recognize the importance of certain things, accept them on grounds of somewhat blind perhaps somewhat instinctive faith, but he will not be able to understand, not for many years later.  His innocence and naivety, perhaps, will drive him, lead him to a point.  That point itself might be hard to describe.  Some would call it the point at which the wool is pulled from his eyes, a kind of stripping away, perhaps.

Only finally later in life will it dawn upon him, the nature of the work he has attempted to be engaged in.

Could we fairly say that Ernest Hemingway had lots of worries.  But that despite them, he kept on the side of working, of the labor of people physically engaged, even as bygones, in the increasingly modern world.  Would he find our world recognizable?  We know he was a suicide, but perhaps that was the awareness of a man in touch with himself knowing that he was dying...



    The rich came led  by the pilot fish.  A year before they would never have come.  There was no certainty then.  The work was as good and the happiness was greater but no novel had been written, so they could not be sure.  They never wasted their time nor their charm on something that was not sure.  Why should they?  Picasso was sure and of course had been before they had ever heard of painting.  They were very sure of another painter.  Many others.  But this year they were sure and they had the word from the pilot fish who turned up too so we would not feel that they were oleanders and that I would not be difficult.  The pilot fish was our friend of course.
      In those days I trusted the pilot fish as I would trust the Corrected Hydrographic Office Sailing Directions for the Mediterranean, say, or the tables in Brown's Nautical Almanac.  Under the charm of these rich I was as trusting and as stupid as a bird dog who wants to go out with any man with a gun, or a trained pig in a circus who has finally found someone who loves and appreciates him for himself alone.  That every day should be a fiesta seemed to me a marvelous discovery.  I even read aloud the part of the novel that I had rewritten, which is about as low as a writer can get and much more dangerous for him as a writer than glacier skiing unroped before the full winter snowfall has set over the crevices.
       When they said, "It's great, Ernest.  Truly it's great.  You cannot know the thing it has," I wagged my tail in pleasure and plunged into the fiesta concept of life to see if I could not bring some fine attractive stick back, instead of thinking, "If these bastards like it what is wrong with it?"  That was what I would think if I had been functioning as a professional although, if I had been functioning as a professional, I would never have read it to them.


From the last pages of A Moveable Feast, Scribners.

The barman is left isolated and alone at the end of the night.  Five straight, including two of live jazz, and one complementary wine tasting...  And then, the day off.  I'm talking on the phone with my brother about holiday and travel plans, and work calls, leaving a message, call me back.  So, when things are wrapped up, I call work, the manager on duty, L.  Do they need me for Saturday, maybe.  But it's not about that.  On the tip sheet, I left a question mark on the tip out amount for the busser.  At the last meeting, I'm pretty sure, the agreement was, one busboy for up and down, 20 percent from server tips up and down.  A busy night, even the waitress admitted we could have used a busboy for our own floor.  Well, L. is not happy about the question mark I left.  The previous jazz Wednesday from last week, the musicians excruciatingly loud, yes, I quipped a lonely little remark on the reservation list as I turned the paperwork in, I thought in good enough humor, the simple word, "disaster."  I guess it was not taken well.  I have hurt some people, deeply enough, with said habit, my lonely late night isolated comment upon the night's affairs, as I eat my veal cheeks with the pasta, not the vegetable, as I have tried to, but not the way the dish was intended to be enjoyed.  Five nights, I've engaged a lot of people, many strangers more or less, with my good humor.  But yeah, maybe before I leave, after running around just so, hungry, I have a bit too much wine.  "It has to stop.  Your comments are deeply offensive."  Well, yes, I agree, a meeting would be good for morale (where we can talk about these things, with less embarrassment.)

Yes, I guess it added up for them.  M. leaves at 8 in the evening and still gets a point (credit for a shift) when I am there hustling, working 'til midnight.

The call ends.  Oh.  Great.  I was looking forward to a useful evening, but, coming from work, where I carry my weight, so I think anyway, this is not a good set up for a Zen evening.  And yeah, in light of the phone call's words, it all seems to look kind of futile, the effort I make.  And then having been an asshole and hurt people on top of that, to add shame.  I poured myself an early glass of Beaujolais.  You're cut out for bigger and better things, mom says.

I talk to mom.  You do more than your fair share, there, she says.  That must gall you some.

When I went to dinner down at old friends, pork butt and beans from the Creuset, I didn't bother mentioning it.  But work had always been a place I earned my keep, worked hard, engaged, politely greeting up, talking to them, what kind of wine they liked, a little explanation of the menu, not just a blank "do you have a reservation..."  So, if one in my position were to feel less comfortable, then the gains are not as rewarding for that simple sense of satisfaction, deeper down, of doing the job the way I thought it should be done, as such jobs are open to interpretation and wit.   Like remembering the guy who came in months ago.

Nothing like friends to help you see your own craziness.  And at the end of it, I get on my bike, stop for a couple of burgers at Shake Shack, giving one to the homeless guy across the street, even though he's not making so nice with everyone with his rant, and still hungry, McDonalds.  Sleep, and then getting up late, as usual, moving to the couch by the window from the bed, but still falling into dreams that by now I have forgotten about in my unease to start the day late.  On my work schedule.


Down in Bladgen Alley the young people are like ghosts.  Or I am a ghost to them.  Arriving, I see a tall young man with everything that is the look, long beard, short hair, tall black combat boots, blazer over black tee shirt, black jeans, the attitude as he waits for his young woman to retrieve her bicycle.   But ghosts they are, used to being in close quarters with other people but engaging anonymously, only with their own group.  Pods of people from agricultural units joined in an agreed upon collective without word, cell phones out.


In the end, a night off, I get a kind a kind text from L., with the boss's blessing to have an extra busboy on jazz nights.  I feel like a pain for having been the trouble to behind it all, but the waitress had the same thought as me.  I feel bad enough not being around to help my mom, up there alone where she's retired.  That big sense of not having figured things out, as one should, as an adult.  Health insurance is going up significantly.


And then the clocks change.  Getting ready for work, I scout out the television for the weather, but the Weather Channel on Sunday afternoon is playing Why Planes Crash, and on the news, another mass shooting with many deaths, at a church somewhere in Texas.  The extra hour is merciful, to the body starting the work week, but soon, as the wine bar opens, it will be dark.  I turn off the television.  Human made systems will fail, be they aeroplanes, or guns and gun laws, and even churches.



Wednesday, a week later, there is a busser for the main dining room downstairs, and there is one for us up to, for jazz night.  It turns out to be a very busy night for all of us.  And at the end of all, I see the two servers have dipped out their busser twenty five percent, just as we do upstairs.  That's the agreement, as far as I know.  The question mark I put on the tip sheet was precisely about that, the agreement that both downstairs and upstairs will tip out twenty percent when the busser is shared between two floors.

It would not be important to write down.  The dream, after five nights of work, closing every night, busy nights full of entertaining, job well done, of returning to a campus.  There is a reunion going on, a return, as if I am redoing my senior year, another try, and my friends are there too, but they are keeping up with adding information and sophistication, whereas I am learning, or attempting to, through the experience, as if I were filing it all away in hopes of gaining some form of wisdom.  I am back trying to figure out the dining halls.  There are stands, shops, places serving food, charging money, and then there are the free college dining halls, serving the specials of the day, and ones serving sandwiches based on one's preference.  I am walking.  There are many new contours, hills, stands of woods, rocky outcroppings, that make it obvious that the campus was carved out of pasture and countryside, places I have not seen.  I cannot seem to figure out my schedule of classes.  I want to badly, but it doesn't seem to be happening.  I spend a lot of time walking, and there are many vistas, a war memorial on a distant wooded hillside ridge.  Fog and mist, light.  Remarkable and interesting old buildings from the 19th Century that I have not noticed before, made of brick.  There is a concert to welcome the new school year, a famous band in name, modernized, with many unrecognizable musicians.  I see Roger Daltrey over there, but not Pete Townsend.  Unfamiliar music, modern, funky.  Walking around I come across military equipment and vehicles.  And during the concert there is a show of military fireworks that strike me as dangerous.  I am wandering.  I have doubts that I will fit in enough, after my experiences in the real world.  I belong, by pedigree, and temperament and native intelligence, and yet, I don't belong, as seems usual for some of us.  Outsiders.

Beyond the campus, to the east, beyond the hills where I lived as a child down in the valley, beyond those green pasture towns, there is an interesting steep hill where I would like to hike, just north of a town center where there are restaurants and shops and large grocery store and a department store.  It's a small mountain, lovely to climb.  It draws me, a kind of national park or nature preserve.

Toward the end of the dream I am coming down a hill, circumnavigating the outside of an event, and there is a gentleman from the college, a communications person, who greets me, telling me he appreciates the notes, the letters, I've written to him (as amateur as they are.)  I am embarrassed by these efforts, but he is kind and I fill up.  My oldest surviving professor friend, WHP, has grown a beard, and looks a bit like David Letterman does with his own beard.  He is still teaching, and friendly to me.  He beckons to me, come over here, and he greats me quite warmly.