So, if you're week is strange, and out of synch with the normal rhythms of daylight rather than jazzmen, isolated, so will be the days off, the days of recovery and groceries.

You get in off the bus, crash, wake up, have a glass of wine around 4 AM to have the energy and the calmness to start looking in your brain's thought juice, as all the memories of all the faces that have dropped by, friends old and new with whom one has interacted with either five minutes or twenty five years, random visits, regular ones, made a friend of, shared the awkwardness of life's moments and the strange what-am-I-to do-now gut sense, best captured in books of wanderings like Moby Dick, or All Quiet on the Western Front, or in the Gospels about Jesus traveling and his words and his acts all a strange development to an incomprehensible to the sensibilities death on the cross...  all of it flashes through your mind, the last week, the memory of remembered things rising in a way sudden and surprising....

Even the next day, after a long decent sleep run of three or four dream sequences, followed by another one later on the couch after eating a drawn-out sandwich of Boars Head, slice by slice, roast beef with thin slices of Bermuda onion, dipping the same knife into the prepared horseradish on German health bread organic 100% rye.

I never knew how to be a journalist.  The details one has to record are always slippery, and if one thing is examined in truth, then another layer emerges, strange connections, another thing;  how can a a story that remains truthful to its subject, say, a day in the life of John F. Kennedy, not end up with an examination of the poem he would quote, Frost's Two Paths Diverged in a Wood and And Miles to go before I rest..., the constant and completely shifting recognition of non-duality...

I can only journal about the things that I know, and I think they are fair enough, honestly come upon given the un-planning disorganized nature of the being put to work with bureaucratic things to oversee as well.

Kerouac had something right about Jazz.  That a good horn going on in the forefront most top three background of the mind could set free the thoughts, particularly the thoughts of a prose writer, wishing for his imagination and its connection with the rest of the thinking mind to have some inspiration, a work-out partner, if you will, some freedom with which to go and do the actual work, as a woodsman must approach the first log of the day, needing firewood or some other wooden usefulness...

At some strange time then, out of sheer frustration of being put away from it, you let go a bit.  And it's not good to tackle down or be overly critical of this spirit, this artistic urge, the wish to catch a thought like a fish in an ever-moving stream..


My grandfathers and grandmothers worked in the restaurant and bar business.  I've always seen it as exactly the same kind of work a writer does.

Go and catch a falling star, catch with child a mandrake root, to catch a decent sentence, that's all you can do, what it's built of, made of.

The best teachers would be practitioners of their art, except that they don't have time but to go on explaining without chance of explicitly teaching, their trade one of the Universe, but not of the economy but for the enlightened parts of it.

One is often drawn to the creative process.  Places, habits...  A kid who loved to draw all the time becomes a part of the restaurant bar business, something hugely more interesting and varied than the insurance clerk office downtown...

The week ends, catching a ride on the late D6 bus with a lady bus driver.  I sit up front and talk with her.  It's just us two, westward out of Georgetown.  She takes the curves with patience, swinging the long bus carefully through the turns, easier at this blank hour of night, all having gone to bed, few cars, little traffic to speak of.  Stopping by the hospital, ambulance and emergency blinkers in the lane ahead of us, she pulls us round and through, then sweeping the long bus onto the descent of Foxhall Road.

I've treated myself to a cheese steak, stopping at Manny and Olga's down the street from work, talking with a man with a red tee shirt Grub Hub, who will soon drop off the last order, go home, sleep, hopefully, for five hours, then rise and go to work with Metro on the new Purple Line, doing "environmental."  His son wanted to go to a particular school, so he moved recently, and he's working the two jobs now.  "Yeah, it's hard to go straight to bed, without unwinding."

Fog comes as the bus draws near to my stop, trees lit by street lamp casting shadows in the air.  The driver has been friendly, just the two of us chatting, me sitting up on the front right side close to the front door, the big machine grrrrr-ing rumbling underneath us as we sit in its steel upper cage.  The door swings open and I step down.  She is from Tennessee, near Bristol.  Good night, thanks for the nice ride.


It's been a long week, the day had an air of sadness around it somehow, and I open the clear plastic to go container and tear in with a fork soon after getting in and dropping my backpack.  There is not much substance to a steak and cheese, but enough, the tomatoes are good and fresh, warm soft onion, and after tearing through half of the super sized sub, it's hard not to want to appreciate the sweet soft warm sub roll part of the steak and cheese with its mayonnaise spread and the hot acidic peppers.  I must now lay back on the couch, and an open window brings in the fog, and I drift off to sleep soaked in sweat.   An hour later I wake, strip off my jeans, shower, try to sleep again, but now not only am I still soaked, but feeling bloated, at a loss to digest the heavy late sweet succor of the cheap late night pizza place fare.

Was not an easy night.  Mom calls, just before the door opens, the last shift of the week.  It's Labor Day Weekend, coming up, just not so much for me.  I'll have Monday off, but that's it.

How do we solve all this?  "What am I supposed to do?" she asks.  And she remembers how parents would come and visit, even as they had jobs too, they'd come, and then later on we would drive out their way...  "I've come all this way, and no one even drops by to take me out to lunch for ten minutes..."  She starts to cry.  "Whatever you want me to do...  I'll do it..."

And I feel the same way.  Maybe it's the ragweed, maybe it's true difficulty of five night shifts that shouldn't seem to add up as they do, or the distance...  But, one asks, what do you want me to do...  The mind shouldn't obsess over things, anyway.  Let bad thoughts go.  And maybe I simply called mom too often in one day, too much mood sharing on my part without the actual connection of physical presence...

Then, after I rise from the call, giving myself an extra minute laying back on the back banquet.  I have a coffee, and no one to pester me yet sitting at the bar with smiling anticipatory presence.

It gets busy soon enough.  A. driving hard.  The busser, M. appearing only sporadically.  One doesn't always feel like entertaining.  We're getting busy, the boss bringing up tables, seating different parties without telling us a word, who is who, in bullying mode, it seems.  He stopped earlier to give A a little polite bisous, but says nothing at all to me, as if I am invisible, much the same way as the night before.  Monday, he kept me late, to serve his family three courses.  After they cut us down to one.  Me.  On Jazz Night, to follow it up with Wine Tasting Night, after Sunday, diners showing up right at nine, at pitching closing time on a dead night.

The regulars, and the old regulars who've moved up to New York, they see it.  "How's your night going," the young man with a pretty woman of style as a date asks, loud as is his fashion.  "Oh, just fine," I mutter.  I contemplate a little pour for myself, but nah.

Bill and Ceci, down from New York, haven't seen them together in ages, East Village now, they used to be Sunday night regulars.  I refrain from telling them of the accidental death of one of their acquaintances from those days.  The anniversary about to come up, one year.  The Carolina couple, headed to the lake near Clemson, for a three stay, a good conversation amidst the intermittent, A. clearing dirty plates from the back tables, stacked in her hands, silverware;  I spend much of my evening down on my knees, stooping to brush the plates of leftover food with the silverware, stacking, washing my hands over and over.

Eventually, I warm to the three little parties before me, as I always do, as I fend off the little interruptions, all the things I must do to keep the dining room flowing.  I make my rounds to the tables up front and back, I do what I'm told, I clear tables, offer a quick quip or chat about, say, the veal shank special over flageolet beans...

The boss comes by later, into the bar area, asks if I've seen any rats, but my mind is too wobbled, to muster, more than no, no sightings, and he tells the story of the large one caught in the glue trap that he killed by stomping down on a milk crate upon the head of the rodent...  He puts the check for the jazz trio on the computer terminal cash register, most likely on his way out, and it's getting later now and I might need a nerve un-jangler sip of the red.



On the bed, but it doesn't work, I give up on sleep and rest for the time being, pour out a little wine, on the rocks, with a dash of bitters.  I need to go see mom soon.  It'll be two months almost, since the last visit.  I rise restlessly, the floorboards creaking underneath my soft weight.   The downstairs neighbor...






The last twinkling star to the east fades away as the jets lift off with lights on, banking then leveling off.

Daylight comes, too early.  I am tired.  I want to rest.


The end of the week, the end of having to deal
with a parade of people, energetic, closed
 to their narrative, too oblivious
 in their lives to get
 that constant companion of all of us,
 now, earlier and in our ripe old age,
the broken part in us.

Another week done of having dealt with the rolling crowd, and there's always those who don't seem to get it, and they, according to themselves, certainly, are not broken, but well on their way, not by fluke, to being successful, hard smart work, while the real of us, humanity itself, burn within with our despairs, our wish for the subtleties night rather than the brightness of day.  "Go and cut him out in little stars," as Shakespeare said, that the world would fall in love with night and avoid the garishness of the day...

Mom gets the broken, gets the tears.  Gets the lonesomeness.  And somehow it's always healing to go through the terror with her:  where will we end up?  I was feeling just the same, and without getting to talk about it, not intelligently, not even with my therapist on the other end of the line, without it knocking you down at gut level, you don't get it, you don't go through it, you don't process it, you don't come out the other end.

Poor Old Kerouac, Poor Old Lincoln, their mothers, their wives, their step moms, that helped them get there, realizing the universal pain spread across the face of humanity.  Another birth, another gestation, another feeding at the breast of the sudden forms of life that roll now and will keep rolling ever out of the Universe with its stardust and physical rules, all of it conscious too

(And this is why idiots like Kerouac and Yeats, the poets, the Leonard Cohens singing Suzannes Half Crazy who then themselves will dabble in the simplicities that will lead them to be either Greek Island or California Zen Monks, get it, because they are naif enough to be, to be, to be just what the Universe of That Which Is and ever will be and Which Will Ever Keep Changing and us equivalent to the moss that grows green and lovely on rocks by streams or on the bases of trees...  Such people will get the brokenness and speak little truths that then will be eventually picked up, as birdsong, birdsong truth, simple truth, real and eternal...)

And all hide from that, in their quick ever on the move success stories, always in motion, one way or another....  so it seems at this hour before I can finally go to bed, and then I sleep all day.

The old MacBook Pro heats up, so I talk with Heather, Ph.D., over the iPhone screen, my face down in the lower righthand corner.  The usual hemming and hawing about when to end this which is torture but supportive...

Relief when she lets me go, five minutes early.  Got to eat, got to get to work, got to get my mind around...

I face her with that which I've been suffering from a long time, since college really, that feeling of being taken as "weird," generally ostracized.

To whatever extent, incidental, accidental, to get a taste of that has an effect, such that you might often, if not always, be looking around, as if, "should I say this, or that; should I have said?"

The artist, or any thoughtful mind, really, entertaining thoughts that are a little extra curricular...

And when such little thoughts, ways of expression, little jokes get bludgeoned, taken humorlessly, it leaves a burn, it leaves a sting.

And who might you then turn to for support, given that feeling, "everything you do is weird, out of the ordinary, not worth the normal compensation, the normal friendship and reward.."

Then it is the people who are--as Hemingway, a natural scientist, described--broken in some way, out of having courage, the people with a good sense of the vivid reality of life enough to be broken by it, thereby all the less able to fit in but by their own mending, stronger--as Hemingway put it--in the broken places, better able to offer help and support to the rest of us, as we are all, secretly, or not secretly, broken.

(Therefore, a corollary:  Less recognition, less identity, the less of the truth of brokenness will one be able to share with those who regard themselves as unbroken.)

In the course of finding all this out, you see that it's those who claim not to be broken, functional in life and business, wreak the main damage against their fellow sentient human beings, useless, really, as far as being able to help and offer support.

Waiting, waiting...  I've been waiting all night.  J showed up, a pleasant surprise, someone to help me out up at the wine bar.  Moral support, I hardly get these days, too much estrogen at work, everyone else perfect.  Took him two hours to drive in from Annapolis.  Construction, weekend...  We get the first few sat, but soon enough he's up and downstairs, helping them out, the two women servers, Lm, and MR, and there is one busser between the two floors, or, in our case, upstairs, a food runner.  It slows, and I walk my beat, two four tops out front, a four top in back, who ordered Negronis to start, cool, except I had to run down to the basement for the liquor room as there was no sweet vermouth on the rail..., while a nice couple we had conversed with--she's from Turkey--was getting ready to go and another couple is getting impatient at the bar for a glass of wine perhaps, but you have to take things in order, and J has disappeared down the stairs at an inopportune time, that's how it always is, as she shores up the service downstairs.


Finally, the parties have reached the dessert point, except for the four in the wine room, and then, and then, here comes MR, leading an older couple and five younger people up the stairs, pitching to the seven top arriving at 9PM, that they should sit upstairs, even though there is table space that's just opening up down in the main dining room.   This is awkward, because they wanted to sit downstairs, but the party has made the false the conclusion that sitting up here is somehow easier on everybody, agreeable, Catholic types, with grown children.  I'm jee-hawing the back tables around to put four in a row.

Soon, by the time I'm coming back from having watered the seven, MR is seating another table, a two top, quite happily and agreeable, and oh, I'm so nice I'm going to take your water order...  I'm so French, agreeable, polite, confident, detached, disappearing.

And how many times has this happened.  MR sticking the upstairs with the last tables, and this is much farther away from the kitchen... the thought burning in my mind and growing bigger.


I don't even want to be writing about his.  Day two, headed to work, and I'm already tired.  I'd rather be writing about something else, say, our little perspectives, looking back on the universe, all things, consciousness...

But I am too irritated...

Up, I call my mom, round 2;30, having made coffee in the little Bialetti, only green tea is in little bags, flavorless...

It ate at their souls, their health, my mom tells me, about her parents, who worked in the restaurant business.

Yes, she warned me.  She cried, and told me it would break my heart, and I was still a very young man then, and I did little about it.



Monday, at work, I'm dragging, and MR shrugs off my concern of her promoting the upstairs for any diner after nine PM.  "They sit where they want to sit," in her carefree laissez faire way...  Perfect common sense, but of course.

The boss, who dressed me down for coming in at 9:45, has dinner with his family back in the wine room, keeping me with a dessert order at 10:15.  And I feel the great pointlessness of my trying to be personable with them.  Stone.

The restaurant business, abuse of a depressive, down on his academic luck, caught for a moment having a bad attitude...

In the dream at the end of the week I find myself kidnapped.  A man who came by work I see driving by, he is swarthy, powerful or rich, and in the his car, as he is not the driver, there is a woman brought along just to accompany, and she is wearing black in a revealing way under her light black blouse there in the back seat, and with the promise of them taking me to work, as I must go to work, I get in too.  But in the drive along the quiet main street they do not stop, and keep on going, and then, even as I protest (I must still take them to be reasonable somehow) they are driving across the bridge over the river, and the river is brown and rising, swollen up to the lanes of the bridge, such that crossing itself is a great risk, one not sure if the bridge can even hold.

And they are taking me to some sort of business opportunity, perhaps another restaurant set-up there on the other side of the river, a popular place, sort of akin to, say, Bethesda, if one were to travel on foot or by bus or cab solely around NW DC...  A line of restaurants...  These will be hot spots... they tell me...

But even wasting the night over, no immediate way to get back until morning, I want no part.  But leaving, it is awfully hard to gather my things, stacks of books I must carry out to a family car that I am delaying...  And I have to drive my own car, but now there is a great snow storm, and I can barely see out of the window, blind to the sides, and everyone seems to be driving like a mad person, fast, despite being barely able to see, traffic circles of ice and uncertain plowing...  and I wonder how to get back to the main road...  There is a young woman, Wendy, I vaguely know and vaguely like much, and she is charge of plowing and road treatment and tells me the best road...



At the end of the last, the second jazz night of quite an 'oh boy' week that started with the crazy Saturday night of Restaurant Week, which proceeded through an ornately complicated Bordeaux wine dinner back in the room, then a slow Monday night with an artful but very loud trio of a kind of progressive jazz hard to define conventionally, vocals, electric violin, percussionist playing at hight levels...  after a rather busy wine tasting night, because its only LM downstairs, one busboy, H, and me running my ass off like a loaded pinball game shot, out of the bar, back, around, further, pulling all kinds of moves out with precision and samurai yogi simplicity of motion, serving and clearing, here's the wine discount thing...  The four top, neighbors, friends on Facebook, just back from fantastic travels in Italy, and having brought in the fancy couple, he's tall and French, she's tall too, USA and blond and upper crust, who they've traded Air BnB houses to stay in, an extra song and extra primate recognition dance, has just left the bar, and at this point I'm getting no help and foundering, as another table comes in, and then little Lynshka shows up, telling me that she's bringing in a mutual friend for dinner (and I've just been banned by the boss for coming in on my night off, and about to start mumbling different curse words anyway)...  and I'm still turning and turning, left and right and around, to fend off the enemy chaos...  And Oh Jesus I know how this night is going to turn out, because now I have to turn into, or back into, some personable, conversational and friendly, which I'm not feeling now, and nor do I want an attitude adjustment of a beverage kind...  Lynshka cleans off the bar for me, loads the dishwasher, and I'm dealing with a table that is already a bridge too far...

And soon it turns into an excellent conversation, with our friend Nick, who has taken good care and put his friendship out there for us at a club far from my usual neighborhood with DJ music and rooftop deck, and the world is reconnected, from Persia, Iran, to Crimea, to my own familiarity with restaurant people and 9:30 Club back in the day...  Turns out he would be as happy at a Toby Keith concert than listening to the latest DJ from Barcelona or wherever, though he knows with discriminating taste this music they play at the music club...  Whatever it was, this chat, it is worth the damage and the glass of whisky...


Then it's the Hot Club...  And I get to work with the kid, nice kid, who did not hold back on any info  when the boss called him wondering about how the stove behind the bar was left with a knob open, a potential gas stove burner disaster, mentioning my reaching for a bottle so my old friend from a long way back, my most intellectual friend, Aziz....  the band rounding out the week, pumping along like a Popeye cartoon with their Gypsy Jazz Swing...  and our lovely friend and neighbor Cathy has come in, ordered a bottle of bubbly to mark her husband's birthday who is no longer with us, a hard working lawyer...  She's there still at the bar, at the end of the night after everyone else has packed up, not having finished her bottle, and I talked her into a little bit to eat, crusty boneless pig's feet...  And in order to eat my calves liver, rare, I come around the bar and have a nice chat.  "Your mom did a good job raising you," she tells me, and that's the nicest thing I've heard in a long time.  I change the Pandora station from Cool Jazz to Judy Collins, and when Leaving on a Jet Plane comes on, she remembers seeing her husband off to Vietnam at the airport.  We talk about her background, a bit of the Sicilian, and the eventually the guitar comes out for a little session for the Irish in both of us...  "I love this music.  My kids grew up listening to the Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul and Mary..."  (The old house was walking distance, short walking distance, to the lawn of Wolftrap.)

The lady is garrulous.  The boss, tall, rises from the table where he was looked over a younger couple, probably European, now that they have left and comes by the bar, and she asks him, what was the first movie he ever saw, and he explains that it was a small and quiet town, a small city back in the South of France, D'Oc, that did not have a movie theater, but he remembers seeing Jungle Book, and he smiles, and says it was the best movie he ever saw, with his quiet polite and manly sense of humor, and my mind, not having any soothe of late, nor a glass yet, goes back to thirty years ago, when, looking back on it, I should have showed up to the college weekend movie night, the very same film shown, but I blew it, I forget what the hell I did, maybe just went back up the hill and fell asleep, and the nice chat from Friday afternoon turned into a total shunning in the dining hall by Sunday brunch...  "I wish I was free of that," I might have said to myself, seeing the sad beauty, the good, the sad, of all deeper conversations, not that they happen very often, and maybe this is why that is basically so...


The next morning the boss texts me a picture of the dirty plate I left behind, left on the little table at the top of the stairs...  He sends it around ten AM, when I'm still out cold, and when I see it, after mom's helper texts me about mom's cable TV bill, action needed, mom had called before that, and the AC somewhere over there in the foreign apartment is whirring...  I can't get up out of bed to do anything more than pee before past Three in the afternoon....

That's how far the plate got in my effort to get everything back in place, the closer, there at the end, turning off the lights to head across to the Safeway...  I talk to my pal Bruce late night checkout aisle 7, about remembering Woodstock, and Jimi and the National Anthem, and another woman who works there sings a few lines from Hendrix with a deeper knowledge, and Bruce played the snare drum in the high school marching band, then an Uber cab home early in the morning.

Okay, so that was it, my worn-out mind body remembers.  I took the gentlemanly act of walking our neighbor down the stairs.  In fact, she stumbled once, on bottom steps, and hurt herself, though it was not us who had served her alcohol of any sort that night.  The lights were low, I got her out and down the stairs, offering to walk her down to the corner, and I've learned a lot, a lot about the neighborhood and her way of life and being in this world, and how she worked with the Shrivers in Special Olympics, and took the Shriver kids to the McDonald's in Rockville a long time ago, paying for it herself with cash from her own pocket, having to drive the big Cadillac, later reimbursed, told by little Maria to go down the hallway and up the elevator and back to the boss, and once seeing Sargent coming by in his business suit, pushed into the swimming pool, throwing out his watch, his wallet, his shoes...

Somewhere in all the riches and fond thoughts and the sharing of memories with this good Catholic feminine spirit from some old country, my brain rewired itself, back into the transporter and holder of the imagination and memory like carrying a good and sacred ring, forgetting to take down, in the darkness, the last dirty plate, mine own...

Okay, so soon it's Saturday night, back to work, and it didn't really feel like much of a weekend.  Ah, you clean the kitchen, cook a bit more, leaving it not completely clean, you do loads of laundry, take the recycling out, didn't even get out for a walk under the moonlight, how it was.

Well, Restaurant Week, at least the point will be decent.  Will help bring down the bills, the Amex.

I've made it up to chapter four of Being Peace, Thich Nhat Hahn, called "The Heart of Practice."   Since we are all connected, each of us carries within the whole of societal problems.  One enters into meditation not to be separate, not to become removed from society, but to reenter it.  And as I drink a tea brew of different good roots, turmeric, licorice, ginger, and sip from yesterday's left out pot of Moroccan Mint green tea, as the window AC unit puffs away on fan mode, I will reenter society soon enough, via the D6 bus and back into work to face the night but also the redresses from the boss and the small society of the Gaul.

Never go out when you are hungry, unless you can afford to eat.

The judgments are the boss are true and righteous altogether.

That said, I'm the one who gets to close the restaurant every shift I work, and where they, except for the busboy, go home, I need to eat.  I get a thirty percent discount on my dinner.  I'm feeling some bitterness, I'm feeling very much alone, therefore lonely--it will be okay to go through the ritual of going back, and being back, at work--but now I will make my coffee, on top of the tea, shower and shave, fold a shirt, put it in my knapsack, try to reach my old lonesome mom on the phone, feeling like a big loser as I do, check if a slice of the very rare bison new york strip I cooked last night  and kept cold in the fridge might somehow make for a palatable breakfast...  Stop off at the little Korean-run friendly local neighborhood market for a sub on the way to the bus to work...

And work will be a meditation...  Or something...


After shaving in the shower, looking in the mirror at my Whitey Bolger mugshot face, I take the Harry's razor to the stubble on my cheek I've missed.  The Prodigal sum of society's troubles...

I turn on NPR for some background, a comedian shouting rapid fire like Seth Myers, along with the whirring AC, and looking down into my iPhone at Facebook and mail, nothing that does more than barely assuaging the isolated feeling of being so, a human being...



I get to work.  It's going to be very busy.  Restaurant Week, after all.

LG comes up the stairs, passes me as I put everything in the bar into place, including silverware back-ups for serving the tables.  "Could you do me a big favor?"  Hmm...  "Sure," I say, thinking she has something to ask me about the schedule, covering a shift.  "Could you not do any tastings, for LM, not even for your friends..."  I nod, but inwardly, the insult is lodged.  Even as LG smiles.  "Oh, sure..."  Of course.  Do you really take me for being such an idiot, really?  I've seen what the reservation book shows...  I've done this a few times before, yes.  Are you questioning my judgment?  I see.  I know how it's going to hit.  I know exactly what time it will turn into chaos.

I don't even want to go downstairs and eat now.  Foods ready, busboy says, as he comes up the stairs. What is it?  I ask.  Fish, and polenta.  Okay, tilapia...  I have time, things are pretty well set, the wines are open, ready to go, pretty much even if nuclear war happens, I'm more or less ready, so I go down, and the chef comes out and gives us the specials sheet.  Peach tart, I ask.  Yes.  I eat, and go back upstairs.



And it's pretty much that way the whole night.   Toward the end, LM is explaining, what to do when it's two and they only order one dessert.  The check is up on the screen.  "There's just the Isle Flottante..."  No, L.  Look, there's the croquant.  They ordered it to go.

The boss is by later, to eat at the bar.  Earlier he asked me how I was.  Given the usual reproach for being such a giver of free drinks late at night.  I gave him a quick thumbs up, as I turned away.  And he had swung by earlier to stand over me explaining how the Bordeaux dinner will go...

Later, after he's ordered his grilled salmon with spinach from the kitchen, and sits down at the bar, he asks me more explicitly, if I'm okay with the getting dressed down for the last kerfuffle, and truly, I am, fine, and I tell him, you know, I hadn't even showered, I get a call, I tried to catch a bus...  I shrug.  Wasn't premeditated, any of it.  Just wanted to go get something to eat, got thrown off, just trying to be a...  whatever...  not worth any more words.  I might have talked with him a little more, whatever kind of chat, but mom calls and I have to answer it, tucking away behind the bar, talking her down off the ledge of whatever small but understandable crisis can blow up in the mind.

But to be unnecessarily ratted out, over a detail, adding to my getting bitched at, and then, now, tonight, Saturday night, toward the culmination of Restaurant Week, to be treated so... an idiot...  It's not good for your own morale to feel everyone's watching your every move, thinking you don't know your job.  There is and was, always, each night, a tremendous support of the appreciation of the people who come to the bar, who get you, get your little humorisms, follow the speed and accuracy, the ability to put out lots of products of all different sorts, who get your Ninja, and who get you as a human being as you get them as a human being, and always, a kind of surprise kindness, the joys of being Present together, in a place, in a moment in time.

A barman...  Good Christ.  How did I get into this sordid mess anyway, a mind might ask of itself.

The last night of Restaurant Week comes.  There's not much on the books for the wine bar, but there is a complicated Bordeaux Wine Dinner, five courses, five wines, and I'm in a tired place when I get in on the bus in the real August DC humid falling heat, a low lasting bitterness stewing in my stomach, but I'm in early, I've chilled the reds down, and now decanting each of them, carefully watchful for sediment shining the flashlight from iPhone upward through the bottle necks as I slowly pour the wines, easing off as I see the cloudy trail of tartaric precipitations.  From which I get some satisfaction.

Three servers downstairs, and me left alone to do set-up, but when LM comes up to the bar she's in a helpful mode, it seems, and tells me just to call when they are sat, sat back in the wine room for the dinner and the wine-makers talk.  And the whole thing has been delayed, as the importer is stuck in 95 traffic coming up from Richmond, and when he arrives, immediately asks for two glasses of rosé, frazzled and sweaty.  No worries, my friend, it's all set up, all ready to go.  Survival stress the world over...  In the meantime, I've got the party up and running, serving the first wine, a Right Bank...  Frenchie might want the barman to be completely socially inert in the background, but I've got the boss's wife a bottle of room temperature Badoit bottle of sparkling water, and the customers soon arrive, including a friendly couple familiar with jazz nights...  and the parties, two by two, are coming upstairs, none with reservations, and soon I'm running.

(I might gather that to standard French hospitality and ways of serving--very polite, aloof, very proper--my form of friendly American barman hospitality amounts to a difference, a weather pattern. Immediately it was understood that my services provided a good general atmosphere to the wine bar, even if it wasn't perfectly French...)

As the night develops, just around 8:30 as the walk-ins end up, inevitably, upstairs, and another, 3 women, a reservation downstairs, also end upstairs, just then the computer system goes off-line.  The boss is back enjoying the wine dinner, and LM tries to get the thing back working again, so checks can be printed, orders sent down to the kitchen, etc., I'm left with the last orders, meaning I have to go downstairs, sign back in each time, just to do the smallest thing, including firing the different courses, and now the orders, as happens with later people, the orders are subtly stranger and more complicated, and the women are asking for bread, and I have bread ready, but must go downstairs, and by the time I get back, the bread-obsessed busboy, who's just now telling me not to use any extra bread, because it's all we'll have for tomorrow, he's thrown the bread at and it's hard not to yell at him...

Meanwhile, after the third time the power goes out, the boss comes out and turns off the AC unit that is plugged in, blowing its exhaust through a tube you might see on a laundry dryer out the window, sending the temperature back up to 80...

Waiting for the last entree of restaurant week, the last deserts, to come up from the kitchen (and H the busser is now focussed solely and resetting the wine room now that the party has left and moved on except for the boss and a small group) Mom calls in lonesome crisis mode, having only lousy pizza in the fridge, unable to figure out the air conditioning unit, in tears, apologizing...

It's Thursday, and I'm getting a text from my friend who's birthday it is.  I look at the clock.  9:20.  If I hustle I might just be able to catch the bus up there, to work, hmm.  I haven't even taken a shower yet.  Turns out it's already gone by, I find out from two young women speaking Portuguese, talking on the sidewalk in the light of the Korean market.  So I get an Uber, an Ethiopian cat who has NPR on, a piece about the supremacist ranchers out West, and get dropped off about 9:45 in front of the restaurant just as my friend is showing up.  It's Restaurant Week.  They've had a busy night.  I don't see but one busboy, and there isn't any other server in sight.

Ten PM and there are tables still.  I don't want to be in the way, but, more out of habit than anything else, we sit down, doing what's familiar to us in this place, and the barman is kind enough to pour us one, and we sit and chat with the two other regulars.   My friend who is a regular doesn't have a drink in front of him, and I don't want to bother the barman so I reach for a bottle and a glass and pour him a little bit of scotch.   A. the server had brought her brother in for a visit earlier that week, could see that I was frazzled, and told me, don't worry, I'll just order myself.  And she did.  Serving herself, coming behind the bar finally to pay her check, after getting bread and set-ups for the table.

But I know, it's stupid to be there, and I know I'm stupid doing this, but by now the need for the sugary water has stricken...  I'd already poured myself a glass back at the apartment, for some energy to think about dinner.

In an attempt to compensate for bothering him, I let the young guy go, telling him, you get out of here,  I'll clean up, and I put the bar mats through, load the dishwasher with the last of the glassware... wipe down the bar, etc.

The latest stupidity in the barman's work life...  As a sign of eating poorly over the week, cold cut subs, steak n cheese, as I'm enjoying the conversation from behind the bar, four very well-educated and interesting people speaking in turn, I have an immediate need to go to the restroom, in a gut sickly way...  But I come back and finish up cleaning the bar, and keeping my quiet birthday friend company, as she keeps a good sense of humor about things...

As we drive down the street, under the full moon, to park by the late night pizza delivery counter, things are chill.  We've had many a soulful conversation my friend E and I on such summer evenings in August before the work starts up for her.  And she has amazing stamina, as far as I can tell.




And then I get a text, from the boss, just as I'm tentatively getting up...  Please call me.  Thank you.   Uh oh.

What happened last night...

Uhm, well, it was E.'s birthday...  She wanted to meet up...  Who's E?  You know, she's a school teacher, been coming to the wine tasting night forever...

Well, tell them to come by when you are working...


Okay, well, anyway, two things, the boss says, not happy with me, obviously.   First of all, one of gas burners of the stove behind the bar was left on, we discovered it this morning, and good thing there wasn't a fire...

Second, it's Restaurant Week, people are tired.  (I know... )  And you reach behind the bar to pour A. a drink...

Okay, sure, yes, be happy to pay for it, the scotch in question.   I think you should, the boss says.  Fine.   I love the guy, but I don't want to be giving away free drinks....  Sure.  (He doesn't get free drinks.)

(The boss must have called around, and in so doing, getting the story.  I knew it was a stupid thing to do, and sensed at the time it would come out this way.  And anyway, seeing that the kid was busy and probably tired of customers I didn't want to bother him, nor trouble him by asking for a check before he closed out the cash drawer...  The kid is fit, works as a trainer, gets up early, hardly drinks at all...  Sweet kid, good with people, easy going...  Wednesday night was a hard-fought battle, me and the kid, and we did it together, and my not having to deal with a female co-server for once.  And with such simple joy did I walk out of work that night, walking down to the late night food counter, pizza, wings, steak and cheese, then getting the bus home, with enough wine to chill out with after having climbed the mountain since Saturday, closing every night, then reaching the summit, and then to rest and have time for the body to have to itself.)

You come by on your night off, people are tired, you drink...   And if you fall, or something happens...   We're screwed.

Ted, I love you, but, you come by...  you drink on your night off...  No.

Sure.

Well, no skin off my ass, that's how it goes.   Shouldn't be going there anyway.  Wasn't my idea.

And never once, never hardly ever, did I turn away a late guest, nor not allow for some therapeutic conversation the bar, whether or not I was involved with it so much, or whether it was just me and poor old departed from this world Uli, just the two of us, and hell I'll have a glass of wine anyway while we listen to Dire Straits, and do you think I'm sorry for any one of those moments of nights he, ostensibly, kept me and parts of the kitchen late, to have a civilized European style Sunday dinner in good company...

The effects of meditating and good readings, you take everything circumspect, fulfilling a certain unanimity, perhaps of an almost fatalistic kind.  Sure.  No problem.  That's how it is.  I agree with you, that's what happened, I'm fine with any outcome, any judgment.  That's how it is all the way along, each moment, really, in the barman's life, achieving a certain kind of magnanimous unity of letting the people think they are leading themselves.  I don't give a rat's hindquarters, God will let it work out as it is to work out.  And goddamn Jesus knew all this anyway, as does the good Buddhist monk, "is that so?" from the famous Zen tale.

Anyway, it was nice the boss could, in the midst of doing his duties, allow for the expression of his appreciation, along with the old "watch it" sort of thing.  That is not lost on me.  We've been through a fair amount together, and there are things we cannot say, in manly form, when we are out hiking up on the ridge of Big Schloss with a fire going.

Attempts of those who never get lonely and alone, to disparage the Good Samaritan, who does what he can to take in the lonesome, those needing an ear listening, who do not see the forest for the tree...

As well as a chance to, proverbially, come clean...  How little we know each other.  How little effort we make...



And I'm tired and dehydrated to begin with.  And feeling guilty, and how is mom's cat... anyway...  So, that's how much of the day off is going to go, a bad feeling, and not enough energy to go out and do yoga.  I knew it at the end of the night, staring up at the full moon, tired out, something would come out of the night's visit to the bar upstairs at work.  I don't have many friends outside of the place, really, except for the nice guy, fellow Irishman in background, who takes me out to Clyde's sometimes, buddy of mine, otherwise that's pretty much it.



Connecting, well, it was good conversation, but...  comes with a cost...  if it's all built around drinking...

Feeling stupid, the awkwardness of time alone again...  Laundry to do.  Too down to really get much out of Thich Nhat Hahn today in world of drunken lies and excuses and getting very little accomplished...


At the end of the day, though, whether rightly or wrongly, you have a sense of why Jesus might ask of his Disciples, what do they think of me, who do they say I am, who do you think I am, what would you call me.  And Peter, of course, has the right words, the Son of Man, meaning, more or less, the son of God, meaning more or less, a person educated somehow in the nature of deeper reality, and of the sciences that we entrust to people of more and greater spiritual insights than that of what we might normally come up with ourselves, would we have the time to do so.