The problem, of course, lay in the difficulty of the transmission.

 The Tralfamdorans could do a perfectly apt sending of the signals,  the great transmission of universal wisdom.  but a problem, or a complexity of problems emerged, almost originally, and inexplicably.

The creatures of earth planet and its human beings were inherently configured to receive 100% of the transmission along with the inherent ability to perfectly understand and comprehend, and even possessed the gift of the ability to act in accordance with the wisdom of the perfect reality, perfectly seen.

But, who knows, things happen.  A short circuit, you might say, perhaps itself somehow inherent, came into the system, rendering it not very effective.  Full of static... A reboot couldn’t do it, as if a reboot were possible.

And with the frustration, it came that the most immediately natural thing to do was for the more sensitive of the earth creatures, who sensed the transmission from Tralfamadore, was to cope with the frustration, one that was wordless and, in a way, a token of the lost-ness of the original messages and media of wisdom obscured and interrupted.   In short, was that what came  about in this great pressure system of deferential, was the habit of art.  Art adopted by all creatures of the living planet earth, down to its very atomic and mineral structure...  Water came to dance, mountains of rock gave birth to great green floral pastures, reptilian life sprouted beauty and wings, sight and song...

Kittens played.  Rothko painted colorful paintings of a horizon rich as it should be understood, rather than just the cloudy sometimes blue urban sky as seen, scraped across by modern jet airplanes bearing drones of people going back and forth occupied with business matters.

It was known somehow, within the fiber of all earthly life, that all these transmissions should be coming.  Some may have received a good seventy five percent of the wisdom of the Tralfamadorans, but all bore the frustration of not the whole thing, obviously, getting through.

There was a great long era of great puzzlement, sure, of course.  One could look up at the stars in the night sky, know the transmission existed perfectly in the present, and yet, it seemed the Universe had hit the mute button.

Now and again an inkling would come through, eerie, prescient:  Kubrick, the weird obelisk in a strange science fiction movie from the earthling year 1968...  the gut sense, hearing a signal, even loudly, but the static...  the interference, or maybe the simple dumbness of human sensory organs so easily overwhelmed...

Or it could happen in something gutsy, original, a small rebellion against the agenda of the unhearing, such as Irish music, something many upright people would consider on a lark, coming about through a collection of irresponsible activities.

As if idiots were the best prepared to be able to hear the symphonic music being broadcast gently to human beings and all sentient beings...  themselves a humble mirror of life on Planet Tralfamadore...

Drunkards with Jesus in mind, Jesus who himself had made an apt and sensitive attempt of getting the great transmissions from Tralfamadore, walked home, at the end of their shifts, stood a good a chance as anything...



And even while all this was happening, hopefully being somehow worked upon and corrected, it was indeed all too natural not only for people to try their best to re-iterate what the signals were saying to them, good-hearted efforts and the like, but also for people to get quite self centered, to completely deny the entire messages of wisdom and Golden Rule sort of stuff... and whose job then became to deny completely that there was even anything being continuously broadcast down across the seeming universe from Tralfamadore to Earth.



And those who held that there was no such thing as any sort of such a transmission had to be very continuously on point—even though they heard it to, getting at least about 35% of it in spite of themselves—about a firm and consistent denial, one based widely in many aspects, dark-hearted, materialist, often technically and technologically oriented, lustful for the noises that might drown anything else, by creating a form of necessary constant attention to their own created problems  such as they kept creating in the constant illusion of time and the dawning of a new day they had no desire for but to manipulate and change, out of its original essence and being, making it theirs, thus doing everything possible to turn down the great radiant all encompassing spiritual power so that it might be barely heard, or that people should become so automaton, so misfocused, that they could be kept down.

The game on Earth became a big one, of distraction.  It became a task of obscuring the "thousand points of light," of a daily dismissal of the very things the clever Tralfamadorans had beamed down to Earth people, focused on people genetically pre-disposed to not be as deaf, folks like Jesus, like Buddha, the Awakened Ones, along with a whole cast of interesting people, varied in nature and in complexity like the light through a stained glass window, speaking of the nature of the odd gathering places of the Disciples, upstairs rooms, meeting places of publican and sinner, of the Pentecostal Feast, and other various sometimes sundry gatherings where people could let their guard down and forget the armor of interference of the current style.

I don't feel like doing anything but being still on the couch, but my friend Alina invites me out to Mari Vanna for the old Russian New Year.  "Lots of beautiful Russian ladies, you will feel better," she texts.  Okay, I take a shower, I get on the bus.


And today, that feeling again...  religious, I guess, you'd call it.

The Russian women are kind to me.  You are a kind man, one tells me, as I dance with her friend, who is older, my age.  You should pass on your genes into this world.  My new friend drops me off at the foot of Key Bridge.  She has to get home to Herndon.  I thought I'd feel like walking, but I get an Uber, it's too cold for a thirty minute walk at this hour.

My book will never be picked up easily by happy people, any more than All Quiet On The Western Front.  People who like happiness will pursue their happiness, without need for anything as depressing.  It is your own responsibility to find your own happiness, so why indulge in tales of failure at the endeavor?

Who needs Jesus to come telling us of our duty toward those who are suffering, as we too, in reality, are suffering...  Messiah to the truth of God's Reign over the earth, which we fail to heed at our own peril.

"The breaking into human history of the reign of God is not happening in some far-off time, or in some distant land, but right now, and Jesus is saying, not in some distant land, but before your eyes..."

James Martin, Jesus, a Pilgrimage.

I remember as a kid.  My brother and I camped out the summer night in the tent.  (An old Eureka two man tent.)  We had some beer.  We took a walk through the fields to the hill looking down on 12B, in the distance, where you could hear the sound of the tires along the road when a car came by with its headlights in the summer night.  And beyond, maybe you could make out by sight a little bit of the town.

The hillbilly, the country boy, the desire to make it to the lights of the city.  The heady feeling of the beer taking hold, and beyond, the adventure, girls, bars, people. things to do.


Hunter S. Thompson:  I'm a hillbilly, in other words, lazy.  Trying to get by being a writer.  Nothing else he had any qualification for.  Tried being a cab driver, but not a registered voter in San Fran long enough.


I get close to the end of my shift.  Not quite.  I have a sense I've done my job, lit small fires of hospitality in the brains of the good customers through the subtleties of engagement.  I've waited on a former Secretary of State, who asked who I was, what my role was, am I the owner, at the old wine bar of The Dying Gaul...  Unobtrusive, connecting on a Sunday night.

Thank you, Czech friends, I say at the end.  I tell them how we love Central Europeans, tell a quick version of our Polish neighbor lady who would invite us over when the moon was full to tell war stories from WWII Warsaw....  I emphasize the Irish side, friend of Bruno the Breton chef, whose tale I tell, while forgetting my Austro Hungarian immigrant grandparents on my father's side...

I get a flatiron steak, a special, rare, discounted it will be $20.  But I need to eat.  Later I'll go grocery shopping, but in the meantime it's the last night with the young person who'll be going off to Alaska for a month, taking a year off after graduating from Washington International School...  She's worked at both the restaurants, and the tradition, now and then, not every time, for her to play the guitar I keep in the office, singing her songs, and then her friend Maritza who used to work with us comes up the street to catch up.

After grocery shopping and getting home, the night is finally mine.  I put things away in the fridge, put a gluten free pizza into the oven, with sliced soy laced Safeway meatball on top, have some of that, feel disgusted with myself, have some cheap pinot on the rocks with soda...  Take a walk by the bluff, and listen again to Charlie Rose interviewing Hunter Thompson, 1997, seeing a fox up on the top of the bluff that wasn't bulldozed, a nice little grassy knoll with trees, looking down over the river.

It was a tough job.  Just the stream of people would finally drive you to have a sip of wine, the last kitchen guy coming up...  being the father priest of the restaurant, always there.  Then when you got home, you needed some artificial company, the soothing of wine along with a hobby like taking a stroll at night.  Or listening to some old interview of some crazy bastard talking about a dying art form.

I'm just going to stay in, order Chinese, boring, get over my cold, but my best and most understanding and things in common friend I have up the wine bar finally gets back to my text, another crazy night, short staffed, just too much.  So I hop a bus, walk a few blocks, and in up the stairs...    I help him clean up, bussing a few tables of leftover glassware...

We end up going down to Clyde's.  J. had a friend who worked there for a stint, and the Irish looking barman, a big guy with a blond red beard was buds with the guy.  "Ted built the wine bar," J. says.  A quiet compliment.  A glass of Sangiovese...  A steak frites, sub salad...

I sleep the next day, and sleep more, barely getting up till finally at four.


Reasons for a writer to be religious, Christian:

Feeling like Jonah.  Being ill.  Feeling sad.  Feeling ostracized.  Knowing that one has been a decent person, kindly, in his dealings with other people.

Within the gospel, the Christian story, the writer, a reject, has room, room to play with.  Hamlet is as Christian as anyone.  Polonius is a Pharisee, which additionally complicates his relationship with Polonius' children, Ophelia, Laertes...  He turns to words.  Excessive words, some might say.

The only way to redeem himself from his life as a bum writer and whatever job he maintains...


So, at the start of his shift, the beginning of a new week, Sunday dinner, heading into Restaurant Week, the bar set, mineral water chilled, fruit cut, olives out, dinner specials on hand, he fills the water pitchers.  Four stainless, two plastic, taller, ice from the bin first, then running the tap of the small bar sink til it runs cold, less lead, filling each of them.  The start of another shift, that’s all, after talking to his mom over the phone as he walked to work in four in the afternoon sunlight, a warm day.

Digesting the staff meal of fried tilapia, he digested with a taste of coffee standing over the cutting board on the stove.  The front door opened, then the click of the door knob opening as the unseen party filed into the main dining room downstairs.  No foot steps nor loud voices coming up.  A regular woman passed as he cut the foil of a Cotes Du Rhône, assessing the butter situation...  she says hello.  Good to see you.  She has rose glasses, he notices, as she passes by the bar again, returning from the powder room. Those are cool.  The optometrist, she explains, I’m light sensitive.

He sorts some wine glasses, beginning to feel normal again, back at work.  A couple, seemingly unfamiliar, wander in up the stairs.  He finds their reservation, explains it’s for downstairs, a two against the wall.  You’re welcome up here, but down...  more lively...  gestures a quick tour, the restrooms are up here...  They go off down the stairs, coats still on, thank you, and he’s alone again, sorts through the stacks of black woven plastic bread baskets with folded linen napkins.  Some have butter, small stains, wine droplets, some a worn feel.  He’ll put them through the wash, fold new napkins...

And then the first couple was sat upstairs, and he remembered he knew how to do this, easy as pie, once you went through all that, the emotions, the set-up physical and mental.  Yes, the woman said, they had been outside, in the garden, for much of the day.  Oh.  Yes, planting bulbs...  oh my father, he did too.

He’d been about to watch a new piece, putting together the seven minute flight of the plane that had been brought down...  imagine that... on his iPhone after looking up the new pinot noir on the Vivino wine app, but now, finally, let's get to it.  Nice people.  Good crowd.

So what job is there...  for a writer...   as an academic, you'd get fired before long...

And you have to remember, one side of the interpretation in reality has others.  What you noted yesterday is not the truth today, not the full truth, not the emotional truth.

Your hero on one day, say Hunter S. Thompson, who you researched through whatever you could find and watch on YouTube, viewed from another angle of the truth was not much of a grown up, was an angry aggressive person quite miserable to live with to those who would know, his wife...

And in your own self-wrought craziness and bad habits, your mother is not to be blamed, but a good influence, a sweet person.

We all have our own struggles.

And coming off a cold, I'm feeling pretty lazy, and too crazy to want to go out and be amongst people, even as this is what I need.  It's almost dusk now.  I need to get out of the house, for a walk, for something...

Don't be crazy.  Stick to the straight and narrow.  There's no such thing as a great writer, without it becoming very complicated.

Late at night, folks, this great American writer here, before you, has small experiences.  And because they are so small, little things in a sort of microscope of the normal reported activities and events, they too are worth reporting, for a suggestive educational scientific purpose, almost, or rather.  Small things.  An action that is a blend of memories, many of them, and the movements and physical stuff, getting up to go the bathroom, doing the dishes, making the tea, ordering carry out sushi, then downstairs to go get it, taking the recycling out, as I talk to mom and the phone, who manages to call in a decent mood and bright, and I try to tell her my own little bits of what Harry and Meghan are up to, their wish to retreat from royal public duties...

I watch some things, what I can find, Charlie Rose interviews, Conan, short pieces, longer more document type things, Hunter S. Thompson.

You try in life to avoid creating a big persona, a personality to live up to.  I think that's natural.  Like Emily Dickinson writes, in My Life had Stood a Loaded Gun in Corners ('til the oversoul or transcendentally realized being comes, the master...)  Let yourself at most imitate quiet things, things of tradition, the roots of things, the base musical or story core.   The template.  The old god story, except that they can be very explicitly wise and quoted, historically.  Just little notes of Jesus, a small application of his wisdom to whatever you do.

So.  Yes.  So.  On my own little 2001 space ship odyssey, I am quiet, a background type, a person who lets the rampant insult of Washington DC cramping of style just flow over, as I quietly tend bar and listen, hardly a personality to be seized upon, as if, in the end, no one would notice, but for that quiet smile, the laugh, the listening, to all the stories and to all the facilitated unwinding.   He was a blur, an affable person.  He appreciated us.  He bought us drinks from time to time.  he seemed to allow for an interesting crowd, perpetual, rotating, like a tv talk show or something...

As far as shifts, it was only a three day week.  Skip one because of the holiday breakfast, which was exhausting enough.  A luncheon, a dinner, for my schedule, my coworkers dressed up, more than I, who came in on the D6 bus from the very west of the town, Fogo De Chao, meat on skewers, gaucho style, good for the team, I'll need a nap when I get back, again on the D6, roughly a four hour trip....  And, of course, I'd been busy the night before it.

Three nights of long company through the whole shift at the bar, from 5:31 to 12:31...  Even if it's just two at the bar, three in the corner, four more coming up after dinner, regulars...  It all adds up, to a long swim.

And then, for Jazz Night, the betrayal.  They did the usual, oh, we're not so busy;  Server A. tells me that she'll be floating between two floors, oh and that also, save one seat for her friend from the club, N., is coming, at 8:30, save him one seat at the bar.  Not much investment in the set-up,  I'm covered with grumpiness and sweatiness, when the door opens, minutes after I'd brushed my teeth and tied a tie and found my pen and my little notepad of stapled scrap paper for the night's orders, a couple, who turned out to be Irish, I still had to order dinner for my mom from Canale's, delivery, in Oswego, snow, Mary the helper staying in on such a night...


The end of the week.  Today I am exhausted.  I try twice to get up.  Twice fall back to sleep.  Does anyone appreciate how exhausted I am...  Well, that's the problem of living alone.  No audience.  Just echoes.



Anytime there is any one you know, anyone the house knows, it's a double-edged sword, to say the least.  Good that they are there, of course, but this is extra to an already tweaked barman, stretched in his entertaining, on the spot since the door opened...  Stimulated by sharing the talk of the town...  Politics, entertainment news...  Travel tales... Holiday tales...  Exclamations, family history tales...   People are telling you tales of The Twenty One Club, or about visiting Ground Zero, the memorial, you listen...  You have a cheers with them...  You have to a have a little bit of Pinot on the rocks, for your soothe, your head, your spirit, to share, in these experiences you'll never have yourself.


And not exactly using all of his talents to their fullness...

Tired.  Just rather tired.  Should be able to get up and go to a day job, but somehow, because it is offered in the city, his own services, sweat and blood, there are takers, ring side seats...  Every time.  That's how it is.  Every single time.  Even if it's just two people, and then four coming up for an after dinner drink, while the two at the bar, an older couple, talk of taking care of a difficult aging mother with a cataract procedure tomorrow at noon...

Looking at distracting things, Facebook, Instagram...  looking up old chapters of life...

Remembering the bewilderment of the busiest time of night, cocktail drink making in one hand, four tabs to close out...