What helped was that both jobs were a continuation of the other.  If you were to take the job as a whole, properly, as one job, then you saw it.  It almost deserved a title.  But you did not see that looking at either of the particular jobs, the neighborhood bartender, the quiet writer trying to get as close as he could to nature while living near a city, such as fate had allowed, not until you saw them together, as one.

The job had something to do with being a moral being.  Part of it was, indeed, The Gospels, or a vague version of them, or perhaps of other lessons, sutras and so forth, a kind of monkish waiting on people, literally, first hand, a pouring of wine, an offer of bread, a wit over what exactly to eat, then scraping the plates clean at the end.   The writing part, which in many ways had gone bust, belly-up, was a facet of the same spiritual inspirations, and such is not odd, if one takes in the basic drives of literature and those who write it, from Kerouac to Tolkien, Twain, the ancients, the bards, the commercial bards...  And they too had to mix the physical, the grunt work, the beating of the pavement, or whatever it is that becomes one's own personal situation, the talk, the deposit of paychecks and the writing of checks, in order to get to that magic quiet time that always offered itself up for them as something alluring, gentle, and good, and kind and somehow, one knew, quite useful, and quite honorable, even though it was just a quiet unseen thing, a thing familiar with the gush of car tires along a rainy street at night, or a dark tree trunk wet with rain while walking out free at night before going all back to it...

(One would hope that such a definition would apply;  perhaps to make it applicable would be one of those acts we perform when reading fiction, an actual acceptance in the imagination's true depths of the belief of, say, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s Tralfamadorans, the space aliens of higher spiritual realms in Slaughterhouse Five...)

It was a job.  Some job.  Just as all of us and them, self-appointed, self-appointed, just as Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut, Ernest Hemingway...  Jack Kerouac... the true free writers of America, in search of escaping the fake, the overly bright light...

And there should be a title for it, a job title, a description, something like a governing term, taxman, publican, judge, state attorney general, sheriff, soldier, officer...

And as any of those, you delegated.  You delegated, but you also did a lot yourself, seizing upon the possibilities latent in the job with your own two hands. to make something of it, a community, people able to talk to each other, to share the town they were in.  You delegated to the French guys, because they ran a great tight ship...  It was not that you delegated, it was that you participated in what they did.  They were in the institution.  You needed to be part of something.  Once there, you did as best you could.  And I closed the bar, every night I worked, I made it a bar.

There was, of course, a great humor, to tying to the two apparently completely different tasks together...  There was a great leap of the imagination to do that.

But what do you do?  You stand.  You stand where you are.  You've burned enough bridges, or rather, abstract possibilities possible, no longer now possible, so they, also imaginary, say...  There's no going back to the idle times of being a good happy student fulfilling all his professor's directions to a T.


And so.  And so on.

I was never a good writer, not good enough to be a stand alone one.  But what I did, it had certain underpinnings, and they were not revealed, without some embarrassment, without some fear of getting too personal with a customer, such as to share the book you wrote, about going through what really seems to the male mind as the biggest worst most complete failure there can ever be, meeting a great person, a woman, and somehow turning it into a disaster.


As such, with dual duties, with other duties, it is the pursuit of trying to make a living.  There is not much time for writing.


But there is time for honest writing.  For unadorned, maybe pointless sometimes, prose of some sort, some admission, some sort of spiritual journal one was occasionally allowed the energy to add to, not being a person of perfect energy....


Why did I chose Washington, DC...  It seemed there was a role here...  Was that available in New York?  I'm nor sure.  For then you'd fall, lost, as James Dean was lost, into a commercial kind of a role...  Actor.

The honest truth is, there are no roles that aren't just acts, not necessarily bearing upon the total reality at all.  So do the greatest rise above, as long as how they effect the world, a JFK, an Ellington...

Bruno got down to the bottom of Trevallon Blanc 2013 after his friends left and I came around the other side of the bar now that it was closed and sat down with my bowl of pea soup.  He talked about his farm, forty acres in Alentejo, Portugal.  There was the wine he had brought with him, his wine.  He showed me pictures of the interesting things he'd done there.  We talked a little about his wine.  His wine consultant not having enough time for him...  He showed me the mock-ups for a wine label for his red.   We talked about his handyman, how they built a long stone wall together, projects...

 Then he went off down the stairs and out into the night, to Du Coin to catch his friend Yannis for the Beaujolais Nouveau Party, he wasn't going to stay there long, twenty minutes maybe, wanted nothing to do with a tightly packed room anyway, and I was tired and needed to clean up and put things away, as it had been a long night with the bar full of The Hot Club of DC piping away in the front corner.

I packed up my little bit of stored food stuffs and my nalgeen water bottle, put on my coat, made the call for an Uber and soon enough I was back at the apartment to unload, unpacking a small container of curried chicken salad and a paper fold over some sliced roast beef, and to be done with the week, cracking open a Pale Ale and catching up with stupid things on the internet, and then I went for walk, around four AM.  My cough was still there, entrenched, but I needed some fresh air.

I walked down to the bluff over looking the great river's dark blank space below and the trees on the other rising bank, escaping what I could of the light pollution, taking a walk along the old trolley track trail clearing underneath the cool clear sky.  There might be deer out in the season, there was a big fox I saw up from the bottom of the hill beyond the maple tree a week before, the fox sitting there upright surveying his territory until he got wind of me and dashed away into the bush.  I walked along, below me Canal Road under the street lamps, the stone wall, the dark canal...

I'd found a YouTube of Prince performing Purple Rain from 1983, one of the first performances, for a benefit in Minnesota, and so I walked along under my trees listening to it all.   Doing the best I could to get away from the lights of neighborhood and city, the wild animals invisible and quiet, remembering Bruno talking of how there on the farm how he sees shooting stars every night.


A strange year, moving, losing many things, like the old family canvas Eureka two man tent my brother and I would camp out in on summer nights in the yard, lots of books, doodads, little historical things, spices, vitamin supplements, glassware, plates, cookware, the move coming on short notice out by early march, finding out around my birthday in January...  a life of twenty five years on the same street, well, that's how it goes, and then mom's condition, the mind's frailties...

Things which would indeed lead you to reflect upon your own use of things like wine when you are all alone and the hour is odd.   Relaxing must be good for part of you, but there are health consequences, as we all know.  And I just felt isolated, and then you look outward from your own deeper nest of feelings and about where you live, mentally, spiritually, in words and thoughts and memories, and you do see the kind of individual places an artist can end up, through their rebellion against those things which put aside the making of art, deeming it impractical and not of much use...

Everybody, everyone, is creative, and just to survive, swell, they have to be creative, I'm sure.

But there are some, the ones who have a certain kind of a reaction to the things that you come upon in the stages of life...  Rebellion, it might look like, slovenliness, but that too just a thing of a concentration upon artistic expression, on the expression of what it is to live.

Would there be some sense that one would enter into relationships for a larger reason, a trust in that the relationship will be inspiring to the creative drive...

I got to thinking on my own forms of participation in the artistic realms of writing and music, the study of literature as it is made, the study of religious stuff, and how they all might apply to each other, but the side arts too, the ones we may end up spending far more time at anyway.  My art of creating a barroom of people, a regular moving wave of thoughtful people...

I thought of myself as an old school guy, a creator of a community, even if looked down upon for all things come with it.  Bachelorhood.   Weird hours, the physical effects...

Were you ever married, the chef's friend, a restauranteur asks me, blushing I thought...  No, I...  I try to explanation, like how exhausting the job is and who would have me anyway.  I tried to tell him, before wandering off tangent, back to the restaurant business, as if that were life, mutual restaurant friends, owners, relating how hard it is to keep a place staffed these days...

Gorgeous, as always, he offered, with a bro hug before he left and I stayed.



I think it perfectly normal that, in the end, we try to recreate the social experiences we had, when we are alone.  I think it perfectly normal to ruminate over them... to do a retake on the chemistry of the social event, the talk, the look in the eye...  that particular mysterious things we have with another person.


And sometimes that takes a lot of space.

I take my walk not with wine, but with a little bit of Guinness Stout in my bidon.  Is that part of it, that one just drink something relaxing in order to think for a moment, outside of all responsibilities...

We are driving out to Fairhaven, as mom wants to go for a ride and have a little adventure.  I'm not convinced there will be any place to eat, but she has faith, and I relent, though I will be driving back to DC later, seven had a half hours on the road in the darkness, then take the rental car back.  I've had a persistent cough the whole trip, finally finding cough syrup at the Big M, patiently going through my grocery list while mom is home with the cat.

Did you sleep well, she asks, several times, earlier.  No, I didn't, and it is hard to wake up, but I brought green tea loose leaf and that helps, though the thought of how the day will transpire is getting me down.

I tell her about my thoughts at night.

No, you can't think that way.   You need your energy just to deal with the day before you...

But journal entries are just that, journaling.   I need a narrative structure, to not waste the time and energy...

I wake up with mom calling.  Talk her in off the ledge, over a series of phone calls over a landline that has a significant hum to it.

Try to get time off from work.    Go up to check on her this week.

Lankavatara.  Remember the Lankavatara Sutra.   Nothing is real.   Only the teaching that nothing is all that real.  If you try to make something seem real, more than it is, the illusions of it will come out.

Halloween is not real.  Old friends are not that real either, as they will have differences with you as well that make the friendship pointless now.  You yourself are to blame, for taking things real, when they are not.

Results from physical:  cholesterol high, 200 range.   GGT, 90, high.  Monocytes (absolute), high.



So it's not really enough, the way things seem to go, to be done with work late Wednesday, early Thursday morning, and then to be going back to work Saturday night.  But it's Friday night, I'm not biting off more than I can chew, I'm having a few Goose Island IPAs and I get the guitars out, plug in the Epiphone Casino, the Shure Microphone.  Practice a bit.  Turn up the old Lab Series amp...  It's gotta come out, somehow.  The creativity needs to come out.  I'm mindful of the hour.  There's a knock on the door, I think, so I unplug, and to my surprise it's not the guy next door telling me to cool it, but the downstairs neighbor, sweet kid, married, with his Yamaha rosewood six string.  We jam out.  One of the first nice things about living here.

Tim goes back downstairs to his wife, and I get an order for Chinese in just in time.

Later, I wake up, anxious.  All my stupid fault.

Hugo is running around kitchen close at nine, he's taking the bread away, saving it for the kitchen to make toast.  Close at nine.  Everyone, the kitchen is closing at nine.  It was busy enough earlier.  We dealt with it.  Then everyone, with the exception of one couple, just sort of sitting forgettably over in a corner watching the band play, the singer crooning, the accordion easing in an out, the bass studied. He's ripping plastic garbage bags up out of their containers, both recycling and food trash waste, and just then, after the beginning of his mad gorilla act, up the stairs comes just the group that I had mentioned just minutes earlier to the gentleman busman.  And he had joked back to me, mentioning the name particularly associated with the late night, the chaos.

And just now, up the stairs they come, smiling.  One of the guys comes up to the bar, smelling of smoke, hey man and wants a handshake, I can't do it.  I turn back to the light over the stove and the cutting board for the bread on top of it.  A defeated boxer.  They switched the game on him, in the eighth round.  You  know what this means.  This means I'll be driven to the wine again, and goddamn, wasn't I good earlier, but now these people, smiling at me.  My friends, in fact they are my friends...

Okay guys, kitchen closing at nine.  I shout the specials at them over them.  The stoner guy always wants to deliberate...  The woman says, we can do this.  Nine O'Clock, I remind them.  It's 8:56.

"I told you."   The busboy man too is spooked, by my prediction, my clairvoyance, and by his own.   "What I say come true," he says, as he had mentioned the name, Rumpelstilsken, standing with me in the bar's space, with our backs against the cooler, looking out into a middle distance, as if we were looking at the edge of a great impenetrable forest, trying to read it.

"We came for your lovely personality," the woman says, a sort of in the ballpark of a guilt trip kind of a quip.  You've just added three hours to my night.

Even A. chuckles when I tell her, quietly, behind the bar, "I'm going to down the stairs out across the street and stand on the corner and yell at the top of my lungs.  I hope you don't mind.  Then I'm going to come back in like nothing happened."  

I get their order in.  Two salad with frisee, lardon, quail egg, one salad endive, one salmon tartar, then followed by cheese plate, liver, but not provencal, just red wine sauce, and the chicken curry....

Has it been busy tonight?

Uh, no.  (We dealt with it, earlier.  Full bar, on our asses early.  Then they all left, and we all said to ourselves, let's just pack up and go home.  We were busy over the weekend, blood coming out of the ears...)

So now you're stuck.  Now you're caught.  Off to the inevitable conclusion, they even choose to smoke some weed, and by now I don't care, there's a rat walking by my feet, and I'm, for the first time, abandoning my mother for her doctor's appointment down in Fulton, a fact which will dwell on my increasingly over serving, clearing plates, serving, clearing plates, get the damn dessert order in with these stoners...  "There were crystals in the mint ice cream and in the vanilla last time," I'm told.


The apartment really was a palazzo.  It wasn't bad at all.  It had a nice breakup in size.  My brother's tribal rug comforted the living room.  Things were still in boxes, as if to get shipped somewhere yet known.

We all  need some lovin'  I sing to myself as I clean up afterward.  I mean it only as a song, like a nice Early Beatles lyric.  How we all get so shy over the years...  We all need.  It's such a hard shell to break, after years.  To reveal all that would be a more intimate act than anything bodi

kkjm on the radio tonight.  A, as dj, m.r. controlling the wires, H on percussion.

little jokes and sayings race through my mind.  Hey Joe plays in the background.  I'd like to play Hey Joe now, on guitar...  Have I abandoned mom, her next doctor's appointment..

To make a proper Old Fashioned, I would have go down out back the kitchen and play poker for an hour, before thence coming back with some corn liquor.

Praise, very kind, from Phil and Julia, really kind, after talking about God's Covenant...   about how I bring people together.  There was Pete, who just got married, who on the right...  P and J, joined by Anjna with great pictures of her two sons for Halloween, the younger dressed as a Raj umbrellaed by his brother servant.  Charles.  Fitting him in too.  That was earlier.

It's not easy.  Stone-mason's work.  Physical, mental, an art form.  Psychological services of a high sort.   But do you get paid for it, other than the tolerance of friends who show up and see you, busy, busy, you fit them in, it feels good for everyone, that's the way it works, stress and relief, stress and relief.

Hateful old passive aggressive Patoola.  Therapy session:  Be wary of self-sabotage, be careful you don't see your successes as betrayal of your mother...  You've found a nice match, a new friend you like spending time with, in age and interest and temperament.  Situations are honestly frustrating you, tension at work from the unfairness of always closing...  Be careful, be wary of the aggressiveness comes out of frustrations, let it out in a beneficial productive way...

No wonder, then...

But I work, have a job, the one I've kept for fifteen years..  It's physical, emotional...

I took a wrong path in life.  I got mixed up, like, in that time of college, and post college...  that's the time you should go do it, but me,  I had my mom to think about, I wasn't quick in making any move, I ended up where I ended up...


So by the end of the week, even as the lovely musicians put on a great show, a whole crowd of people, even as the main guy sings out your praises, as the backbone of the whole place, the guy who makes it, strangely I'm in a strange mood, and as a bartender, working away, getting stuff done, wine tasted so people are happy, jokes, politeness, facial expressions, the whole myriad of give and take, you really do not feel like being in the spotlight, even if you are one of the main actors of the night, a character...  I'm not in revel mode, unfortunately, even though it seems I might project that appearance a little bit better.  Oh, he's speaking of the end of the night, when all musicians come and sing their songs of Babylon's rivers in this town which is new but old at the same time, bubbling, confused, but, the same stuff as ever applies just as always, kings, prophets, tales, jokes, prophecy, mumbo jumbo, tribal war, factions...

Oh, by the end of it all, Saturday through Wednesday night Jazz, closing every night, and some late nights there I'm not proud of maybe, but for the marketing aspect, adding to the known lore of The Dying Gaul as it is experienced and remembered, by the end of it...

I'm feeling, by the end of it, raw.  I feel depressed.  I feel like crying.  I clean up.  Let the hood cleaning crew out the back door with a free Sprite, hard working late night guys, part of a clean working industrial bistrot kitchen...  I eat the few bites of salmon tartar, which is just kind of simple and raw, not as elegant as it is up the street at the sister restaurant, while the busboy man, the man from Mexico, Manu, sweeps up, sighs, goes to take a dump in the men's room as a final comment on the night and all his physical efforts incredible over two floors...  The pig's feet, crusty and boneless are tired by the time I get them out of the over which has stopped heating up properly to 200...

Fuck me, the math, the report, the last paperwork, I'm beat and some low pressure system of manly lonesome funk has come over me.  It's hit my brow, and my shoulders were already drooped a bit from the heavy load...

The workweek ends the same way it starts, with a kind of American cowboy depression the likes of which the Old World, with the exception of Ireland, does not know...  ha ha.   What is there to do now, but get the Uber cab home anonymous, then to go and reflect, and it's hollow, not even a cat to go home to, but, you deal with it.

I had indeed pondered Kerouac in the period of landing at the new apartment out in the Palisades on the upper floor of the old three story G.I. type building near the reservoirs off of MacArthur.  I'm not going into the depths of any great literary criticism now, but to heed how one might have, as a reader, puzzled over Jesus's parables of the vineyard, as he struggled along with Kerouac and his own choices and actions over his own finite time.   (Jesus Christ, Jack Kerouac, take good care of yourself.  You're too brave!)

Those parables of the vineyard and the keeper, the owner, the son, the wicked servant, they strike me as literary lessons themselves, in that at least sometimes as a reader you have to read and return, read and return, and in your gut, yes, there's something there you see, but you don't really know what it is, what the kernel is, the point, the applicable meaning, so you keep reading, while the perception of what that meaning might be slowly simmers.

And indeed, one day that slow simmering might reveal some wealth of thought, some riches.

So, feeling nearly homeless and on the road at this new fresh juncture in my life, as I tried to make up for my juvenile irresponsibilities as such that had led me here, the new apartment, without the old shelter of good old George's house and all my books, I read Kerouac.  I read Kerouac, as if that whole reading thing had fallen out of the blue, against my will, and not on any whim, but very serious now, as I had no more juice to write with, too scared, and I needed an Old Master to consult with, and Dostoevsky was not around at the present time.

So, I came across his, Kerouac, having found again The Dharma Bums at my new local library, in this period of my whole library gone up in upheaval along with the rest of my life.  My own Kerouac books were kindly stored by a dear friend, the Scroll Version of On the Road, a red covered Desolation Angels, a Penguin Big Sur, a Visions of Cody, along with some others...  stashed away over in Virginia somewhere by the kindest of persons who was there, a good mystic Christian soul, when I had to move, actually had to move.

And even as I write, there is all of On The Road in mind, including the brilliant beginning, about an illness, his father's passing, etc., all very much to make you jump into this presence of mind that is the most simplest and basic and most effective writing way, which is to, in effect, light a campfire, one we can sit around.

I read Kerouac, picked up a used copy of the fire watcher book, by happenstance found On The Road again down in the basement laundry room...  And as ever, the mind goes back and forth.  Completely irresponsible, madman, partier, slacker, but also, some form of saintly monk when grasped on his own terms, thereby allowance of insight.

And here, having found yourself so devoted, even as you live life as life goes on, trying to take suggestions of friends and therapist and mom to heart, to do new things, to keep up with the good things, here you do find a sort of pay-off, and one that you wouldn't have really expected nor anticipated.

Saintliness and insights are never really found in careful preparation, nor in things that go in accordance with plan.  No.  These are things that happen on the road, not quiet planned, live, happenstance, a night one gets through, somewhat just barely, finally sneaking off back to bed where the rent has been paid.

The moments where there is a ceding of perfect control, when you're along for the ride with life, maybe even in a feeling of being far too exposed and open, drifting, swept up in the vagaries of life, it is here in such places and times that one will come upon the spirit and the meaning.  The things from which one will leave, and find that safe place, and say to himself, Depart From Me, Oh, Lord, for I am a sinful man.

And this is Kerouac's business, not that he always gets credit for it.  His spiritual endeavor is so front and center, so strong, that we too must recoil, wishing for someone to put the brakes on in this grade slide downhill into American fevered madness.  We feel the discomfort even from years and miles and miles away, life habits far away, reading material far away--Kerouac was a well-read individual versed in the life of letters, an interesting choice for a poor man in this era, the same era which gave birth to the G.I. Bill educational benefits--just by reading Kerouac!  And in doing so, facing some form of death, yes, along with poor Jack, poor Jack who has no idea where his next meal or place of rest and safe sleep might be, literally, as we read this in our great little schoolboy or fallen schoolboy sense, uncomfortable, yes, we get something.  And maybe even, through his light Kerouac, as fallible as any writer, Kerouac really is giving us access to The Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount, just as clear as anyone might.

Just that we don't expect it so much, given all these characters, Dean Moriarty... To mention nothing of all the poor women involved, who too must be dragged uncomfortably, to saintliness.  A whole 'nother story, which other voice are better off at telling than I.


Again, saintly understandings come through that weird light, that strange very strange but powerful present moment.    There's St. Francis going to talk to this big scary mean wolf...  There's the Awakened One Buddha with this crazed elephant bearing down upon him in fury in a very real present moment...  These are things that happen live, on Live Television, in Live Time, just as if you were a bartender, just as if you were a bus driver, just as if you were a cop, dealing with, yes, like an old Irish Beat cop in a great American city like a Chicago, a New York, a Boston, the talk, the rapport, the contact is the key to keeping crime and weirdness down, and even maybe in going out an looking for it.  (Irish:  so good at being Beat Cops, so good at writing, poetry, music, and all the spirituality encapsulated, within, allowed to develop as they were, in Ireland.)


Thus, to me, the vineyard parables of The Gospels are themselves most clearly understood as being pictures of being out on the road, where things cannot be planned so well, where traffic, good and evil, whizzes by, pulling over and stopping sometimes, and sometimes, even you are mad enough to go along with the ride.


In the end I cannot condemn Kerouac, not at all.  I would rather celebrate him as some form of see-er visionary of real timeless eternal insight.



When people revile you, "god, what a piece of shit you are," that's when you are a saint.


The literary life?  Pretty much a curse, but it's something in the genes, something you have to figure out, after all the years...