...

I move into the kitchen and pour some more coffee. It's an expensive blend from somewhere in South America but I have yet to master making coffee on my own, so it doesn't taste very good. I always prefer when I can to buy a cup: lazy, consumerist tendencies unspoiled there as in so many other places. Why is it that everything always seems to taste better when you buy it?

Shouldn't it be the other way around?

Junkies, Consumers - a word I fear ten times more than the last - the final epitaph that should be engraved on all of our tombstones. Maybe not everyone everyone, but most of us at this point in the attention deficeit disordered first decade of a new and shining millenium have reduced ourselves to little more than quivering masses of self-important ganglious urges. I've studied Magick for years, and while making several sizeable breakthroughs attempting to hack into the local reality grid*, it's this consumerist tendency in me, in you, in everyone reading this right now, that unplugs any real progress. That and a hearty love of alcohol, movies, music, books, comic books, drugs. All these things (with perhaps the exception of recreational drug use, which, while not exactly a myth is not exactly a truth either) get in the way - they are distractions we let our Id's and ego's get caught up in to effectively procrastinate ourselves out of any real commitment to the things we want most in life. 'I want to write a book'; 'I want to be in a band'; 'I want to own a restaurant'. All of these things are well and good, but if you want to do them, and I mean really fucking do them, then you better just stop taping the your favorite shows, renting 3 movies a week from Netflix and going out to the bar, because in the end, when all your minutes are collected and totaled, when you find yourself in a bed in a convalescent home or staring blankly at a dinner tray in an insane asylum, old folks home, rehab center or morgue, well, these are the minutes that will reek so bittersweet with the oils of wasted time and pointless endeavors.

We're not here long, use it.

These are things I thought about while Bono preached about God's Country over my stereo speakers, probably too loud, not loud enough the spark in me counters grabbing my large blue coffee cup with a cute baby Penguin on it, moving down the stairs to turn that resistance potentiometer up another half a dozen notches or so, coming back upstairs to continue typing, this, a sort of last minute manifesto to ignite the stories I would be otherwise unable to tell.

Spark, spark, Flame.

Everyone thinks they can be a good bartender. Some can learn like monkeys to make the drinks the way the boss wants them made, but in the end its three things that separate out the cream of the crop.

1) Observation
2) Patience
3) Simple, gentle human compassion

Now, I am not necessarily known among the company I keep for any of the three of those, let alone all of them together. That doesn't matter. The thing is, after a while behind the bar, that person waiting on you retains many of the best attributes I have acquired, while the thing that walks around day to day, cursing and nodding its head to one album after the next, well, that's the formula but relaxed - ill defined like muscle long since out of use. The one in the mock tuxedo shirt and black slacks behind the bar, shaking Martini's, opening bottles of Chateau Montelena a smile and a nod for a cunt boss and her cunt husband, surrounded by their cunt spawn, that one, that's the focused, exact essence at any given moment. Yes, still prone to anger and outbursts, excitement and hypocritical modus operandi, this job, when it gets inside you and forces you to concentrate, pay attention, believe in the people walking in and out of your life day after day, night after night, this is the focused exactitude of what I am, because now the muscle is flexed and lifting, struggling to get the barbell off its chest for just one more day, trying to make a difference in just one more persons life even while slinging poison down their throats.

Bartending is, as I've said before, babysitting. But at it's best it's babysitting for people who don't want to be pampered, they just want to be listened to and taken seriously. Their muscles can relax here and you can oversee their own trips into the imperfect state - that is why alcohol and intoxicants are so important to our communities and continued existence in the first place, why booze will never be outlawed again and people still do drugs regardless of the dangers they've seen on the news, in the classroom educationals and in their everyday lives since the moment they could think for themselves.

We need to get fucked up so we don't fuck ourselves up.

Not buying it? Well, you shouldn't, because I'm only half right. There are an awful lot of people who the booze and the drugs do fuck up. DESTROY may even be a better word. And even those who do manage to manage their habits will mot likely loose in the end because of them. But that's just it. We all loose eventually anyway. Something's going to kill ya? - a clichéd' Charlie Sheenism that is not untrue. People who don't drink or smoke or snort or shoot still die, and probably with as much frequency as those who do at a young age.

So I ask you, 'What'll it be?'

As a bartender however those need not exist to you. Sure, you will encounter people who can't handle their shit, who grow violent or angry or needy. You're even going to have to wait on and deal with them. Best thing to do is learn to recognize the warning signs early and let them make their move. But be ready. Be quick to catch them and excise them from your shift, your bar, your life. These people never last long anywhere in public, that's why they tend to go out late, bar hop, have/ attend parties and get banned from the nice places (which if you've been listening to my advice all along, you'll be working at by now). Sure, get rid of one and five more might take their place, but a multitude of assholes in one room will, you'd be surprised, tend to work itself out rather quickly nine times out of ten.