Letter

I’m taking the bus to the bar. There’s a street festival on so they need a third bartender. I’m sort of dreading it. The money will be good but what I have to do to get it will not.

Watching young people do mating dances can be fun but as the decades of watching them slip by I have to psyche myself up for it. The trick to surviving any service-industry gig is to remove yourself emotionally/psychologically from the interactions. It’s unhealthy and unnecessary to expose much of yourself when you’re just a means to others’ end. It’s a simple job: ask what they want, bring it, take their money, say thank you, wash glasswear, repeat, repeat, repeat. I’ve rarely had trouble achieving the required remove but the older I get the odder it feels to even be occupying the same space with those on the other side of the bar.

The bar is reasonably full when I walk in. I post up in the nook behind the photobooth and ask Mike for coffee. He tells me about the intense Wisconsin fishing trip he just returned from. Hip-waders and hiking through wilderness in 80 degree heat. Sounds miserable but he sounds happy about it. I wonder whether they’ll even need me. Maybe I can just go home.

At 10pm they start piling in. I get ice from the back, then duck in behind the bar. It’s not much room for three guys to navigate but we manage. They’re tipping large tonight. We don’t know why but don’t complain. It’s funny to still be doing this. Mike and Augie do it all week but these days I dip in and out. I wonder whether they’d like to be somewhere else too or they accept this as their life. It’s not that bartending is beneath me now, only that it feels more and more like an out-of-body experience.

Mike cuts me at midnight. $156 for two hours’ work. I don’t even stay for a shift drink. I say goodbye and walk east down Division to the bus. The street is filled with weekend revelers. I feel like a ghost. I go into Wendy’s and wait forever for my order. Then the guy comes over and tells me they’re out of big buns so no Baconator for me. I ask what they can make and eat the baby burgers near the bus stop. A homeless man keeps asking everyone for a light. He’s two-fisting mostly full bottles of vodka and malt liquor as he assembles a rollie. Everybody at this bus stop looks exhausted. It’s a party all around but not to us.

On the bus a woman announces she doesn’t want to be sitting on this bus, then sits down next to me. She puts on a face mask and apologizes anytime our shoulders graze. She’s very fidgety. After a few stops she finds a better spot. I’m not sorry she’s gone.

I talked with Ricky about my books and art again and with Mallory about The Return of the Living Dead.

I learned a new word the other day. It sort of means love and sort of doesn’t. I’ve been rolling it up, down, and all around the bag of sawdust between my ears ever since I heard it.

Don’t know about you but I’ve always assumed that everyone else is basically unknowable. You can watch and listen and think about the object of your affection/hate/obsession/whatever till the cows come home but the thing in your mind and heart is not them. It’s a projection. In the best-case scenario, their image of you and yours of them does a dance somewhere in between.

The word I learned was coined by a psychologist in 1979 in order to study love in a scientific way. Admittedly, I’ve only read the Wikipedia entry, but it just sounds like love to me. Or, whatever it is that I’ve always felt toward women I’ve been drawn to. To differentiate, she observes the fact that her participants really saw the object of their affection’s personal flaws, but simply overlooked them or found them attractive.

I’ve never heard of a romantic attachment without this. It has to be a kind of dream that two (or more) people believe in for it to work.

And yet, the article goes on to say that this thing can be difficult to understand for those who have never experienced it, and it is thus often derided and dismissed as undesirable, some kind of pathology, ridiculous fantasy or a construct of romantic fiction.

Anyways, whatever it’s called, something like that seems to be happening to me.

Answered a couple questions. Talked to Rick Kogan about the whale book, which Biblioklept wrote a nice note about.

Nathan Knapp wrote a very generous review of my old cabbie book.

I’m fighting myself over yet another social media platform. I tried Substack for a short time a couple years ago as a newsletter provider but quit soon after noticing how many celebrities and creeps they were paying to write for them. But now there’s a lot of writing on there via their Notes feature—like Twitter but with no word limit—that has sucked me in. I’ve posted and deleted several messages. I don’t think this will replace my newsletter. I don’t write it as a way to interact on a daily basis with others. Sometimes people write responses, but they are not posted publicly, whereas this new Substack thing is all about in-the-moment reaction, about community and cross-pollination.

I don’t know if I want to be part of that. I also worry that to truly engage with this new virtual scene would end up as a hollow time-suck, as so much online activity is. A distraction bloated with empty calories. I have a few things I need to get done and the feeling the time to do them is far from infinite. Do I really need to be reading/thinking about/responding to thousands of words on subjects I’m only marginally interested in, from points of view I mostly don’t agree with?

The thing about making art the way I do it, no matter the medium, is that it’s a solitary thing. I don’t need anyone’s approval or input by now. I just do it. Publish, print, hang on a wall, upload to some cloud, move on to the next one.

What goes on on Substack—as it once did on MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and the rest—is like-minded aspiring people crossing paths to push their work forward under the guise of casual public friendship. I’ve never been comfortable—even when I was knee-deep in it on Twitter—with this blurred line between commerce and community. As these networks gain traction money and power always win. Then there are a million nostalgic epitaphs written about how great it was when it was beginning.

It’s the honeymoon period for this new thing. I don’t know whether to bum a ride on the car with the cans tied to the back sending sparks or just wait on the side of the road and watch it run off into the ditch.

Had a long talk with Ben Tanzer.

Reviewed Trap Door’s amazing production of Brecht’s “Galileo”.