Job Description: BARTENDER

After working five years as an editor and translator in New York, I decided I needed a change of pace. That's why I picked up my family (a wife, an 18-month old daughter, and a Samoyed husky) and moved to Townsend, Vermont (Pop. 729), about 30 miles north of Brattleboro (where my wife and I would occasionally go for dinner and a movie).

After a two-week job search, I was hired as the night bartender -- 6:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. shift -- at Rick's Tavern, which, for a guy who had just been living for seven years in Manhattan and Brooklyn, qualified as a "back-woods bar and pizza joint."

At Rick's, the night bartender's job was to take the tops off of long neck Budweiser bottles and make the occasional disgusting cocktail: Cap'n Morgan and Coke, Seagram's 7 and 7-Up. The bartender has to keep the bar clean, serve customers at the bar and provide beverages for the wait staff in the restaurant. He was also the last person to leave the restaurant early in the morning, so he had to count the till, put it in the safe, lock all the doors, and turn out all the lights.

So you can better understand the ins-and-outs of a night bartender's life, I'll describe the three main aspects of my job:

• Peacekeeper 
• Babysitter 
• Enforcer

Peacekeeper

Alcohol, guns, and emotions are a volatile combination -- and sometimes they get out of hand. It's the bartender's job to keep the peace so that all parties remain civil and safe. 

Clyde was an affable man who came to the bar once every couple of weeks. Trouble started when Cheryl, the woman Clyde was dating, and who worked as a ski pro at a small ski resort down the road, also started seeing her manager at the ski resort. One night, Clyde stumbled in drunk, asking whether Cheryl had been there. I said I didn't know, and Clyde shouted, "You're lying. Just to show you what I think of you, I'm going to take out the entire bar with my Uzi. I've got 500 rounds of ammunition in my van." When I expressed skepticism, Clyde said, "Come on out and see for yourself." A friend took over the bar while I headed to parking lot, looked in the back of Clyde's van and determined he was telling the truth. I talked to him about the importance of using his firearms appropriately, that Cheryl was clearly not worth his committing capital offenses and getting put behind bars for life -- or worse.

I won't lie and say I wasn't scared for the rest of the evening, but around midnight, Clyde came in -- sober now -- ordered a Coke and thanked me for the good advice. As far as I know, Clyde never used his Uzi on girlfriends or bartenders he was angry at.

Babysitter

Inevitably, part of a night bartender's job is to care for his customers and make sure they do not cause themselves or others undue harm. 

At 21, Kyle was already a depressive alcoholic. Kyle's drink was the aforementioned Cap'n Morgan and Coke. I was always nervous about serving him after a certain point in the evening, when he would climb into his AMC Gremlin and somehow arrive home alive every evening, and return the next night not having killed anyone.

I was so relieved after working at Rick's for several months when Kyle traded his Gremlin for a Rottweiler, whom he named Hagler. I'm terrified of dogs, and especially mean ones named after boxing champions. But Hagler was different. He became both Kyle's babysitter -- relieving me of my duties in this regard -- and mine, as well. I always felt safe when Hagler was curled up at my feet behind the bar.

Enforcer

Kyle was also the youngest of eight in a family dominated by his father, who had been an amateur boxing champion in Vermont. He felt he had a lot to live up to. His biceps were the size of my waist before I developed a beer belly.

One night, during the holidays, Stacy, a girl Kyle had liked in high school, stopped by to have a drink. "What will you have?" I asked. Before Stacy could reply, Kyle said, "A pitcher of Kamikazes, on me." Right after Kyle asked for the second pitcher of Kamikazes, Bart, a classmate of Kyle and Stacy's, stopped in. Stacy's face lit up. I could tell there was going to be trouble. Bart and Stacy had gone off to college, and were home for winter break. Kyle had traded his car for a dog.

At some point during the second pitcher of Kamikazes -- contrary to my fears, the trio seemed to be getting along as they reminisced over old times -- I had to go downstairs and change out the Genesee keg, which had tapped out. When I got back upstairs, Kyle was holding a chair over Bart's head and Stacy was screaming for Kyle to put the chair down. I strode over, put my hand gently but firmly on the bicep Kyle was using to hold the chair and told him to put it down and go home. For half a second, he looked like he'd bring the chair down on MY head. Instead he put it down, whined "It's not fair," and after glaring at Stacy, walked out of the bar. He and Hagler returned the next day as if nothing had happened.

It was the year that the Patriots, the Red Sox and the Celtics all went to their respective national championships. They were all teams that my patrons at Rick's Tavern followed. Songs the patrons wore out on the jukebox were Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'," Heart's "Barracuda," and Jefferson Starship's "We Built This City."

Passive Sentences: 2%
Flesch Reading Ease: 71.1
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 8

My 18-month old daughter, Sarah, 
and our Samoyed husky, Daphne. 
Townsend, Vermont

WHO YOU ARE MATTERS

Where do I come from?
 I come from a galaxy far, far away. (Quote from the beginning of the original Star Wars movie)

Where am I going? 
I will boldly go where no man has gone before (Quote from the original Star Trek TV series)

How do I plan to get there?
By getting beamed up by Transporter (Also from the original Star Trek)

How am I like my parents?

Maybe I'm just like my father — too bold.

Maybe I'm just like my mother. She's never satisfied.
(Quote from the song "When Doves Cry" by Prince. Released in 1984, the same year my first child was born, which made me think a lot about the ways that I was like my father and mother. The video is rather "racy," as my grandmother used to say, so watch with caution....)
How am I UNLIKE my parents?
Let me count the ways! (An allusion to a famous poem that I thought Shakespeare wrote: "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways...." As it turns out, Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote it! It's Sonnet 43 of her Sonnets from the Portuguese)

Have you developed your own expectations for yourself?
This took me a lot longer than I thought it would. After my father died, I was split: part of me thought, "Thank goodness —now I can do what I want." The other part thought, "To honor my father's memory, I will be a good provider for my family, just like he was."

To take this a little farther, for much of my professional life, if I wanted to BE a good provider for my family, I had to meet the expectations of my superiors, for it was THEY who determined whether I would get the promotions and raises I needed to keep up with the cost of living....

Now, I balance my overlords' expectations with my own expectations, and most of the time, we reach a happy medium.

Gloria Steinem serves as a model of someone who lives life with great passion and personal responsibility. Peter Matthiessen has always served as a role model of a writer who pursues his subjects with great passion and integrity.

What upsets me?

Remorseless tyrants and despots who prey on the weak and vulnerable, and don't know how to apologize. Ever.

I feel a special connection with felis concolor, aka cougar, mountain lion, and puma.

 

I have been following the work done by Jeff Sikich, Santa Monica Mountains National Park Service mountain lion biologist, for decades. The work he does, tranquilizing mountain lions to provide routine health checkups and also taking blood samples to further his research, is filled with bravery and compassion and a true love for his subjects. He's definitely a hero of mine. 

When I was a kid we lived in a subdivision in the San Fernando Valley that had been orange groves less than 10 years before we moved in. Our street was planted with liquidambar or "sweetgum" trees, which produce these hard, spiky seed pods, bigger than marbles but smaller than golf balls.

We used to collect these pods, hop on our bikes and hurl them at each other. Our bikes were those sweet Sixties "Stingray" bikes, with banana seats and raised handlebars.

 

 

BIRTH CHART

 

SUN Aquarius

MOON Virgo

RISING Sagittarius

Qualifiers to Consider Cutting

 From Pages 21-23 of Writing on the Job

More uncertainty:

 

 

 

 

 

What is Success?

Three leaders, including Marshall's Adlai Wertman, address the question of how institutions need to adapt in this age of personalization, and how to shift our ideas of success from one that is centered around the university to one that takes into account the individuality of each student.

This video comes from a January 5, 2021 article in Forbes magazine titled, "New Year, Same Challenges: How To Escape Traditional Norms That Disrupt Progress"

Astrology and Current Events

Mountain Astrologer magazine is one of the most respected publications/websites for serious students of astrology -- Richard Tarnas (see Experience 3, Discussion Board for June 8 &10) mentions it in his interview, and one of the links below mentions him.

The Mountain Astrologer blog post for June 10, "George Floyd & Our Social Unrest," talks about racism, the near absence of astrologers of color, and the unacceptability of making astrological "predictions" after the fact.

While it would be easy to try to define this social unrest through astrology (after the fact, as usual), the cause — racial prejudice — has been a part of the foundation of America from the beginning. Perhaps both the pandemic and the social unrest are events that are preparing the world for the social, humanitarian changes that we astrologers assume will be a part of Pluto’s upcoming transit through Aquarius.

Several other posts over the past couple of months discuss correlations between celestial phenomena and current events.

• Reflections on Coronavirus and the Saturn-Pluto Conjunction
• Thoughts about the days we are in.... discusses the current positions of generational planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto) in relation to the horoscopes of the Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization, and throws in a fascinating curveball related to Hygeia, the fourth-largest asteroid in the solar system, also known as the "minor planet," 10 Hygeia. This minor planet/asteroid takes 5-1/2 Earth years to orbit the sun. If "Hygeia" sounds like "hygiene," as in, oh, I don't know -- handwashing -- you're on the right track
• There are two posts by Australian astrologer Brian Clark that have more to do with archetypal psychology, maybe, than astrology, but, if you let them, can really expand your field of vision about the moment we are living. 
  The first is "At Home With Hestia: a return to center," and gives a nod to the asteroid Vesta (the Latin name for the goddess Hestia), which is the brightest asteroid in our solar system and takes 3.63 Earth years to circle the Sun. 
  The second is "Pan and the Pandemic: Love in the Time of Capricorn." This one traces the genealogy of the Greek god Pan to his roots in Sumerian myth -- the names and symbols we use for the astrological constellations derive from the traditions of this 7000-year-old civilization. And of course, medieval depictions of the Devil borrow heavily from characterizations of Pan and Capricorn.

Richard Tarnas's book is called Cosmos & Psyche: Intimations of a New World View. It is a masterful exploration of cultural and historical cycles going back at least 2000 years.

I mentioned "generational planets" above. What does that mean? The farther out from the Sun a planet is, the longer it takes to complete a trip through the Zodiac. In astrology, the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, and Mars are considered "personal planet" which relate directly to a person's character. The other planets are related to longer cycles that have demographic significance. Here are all the "planets" with their orbital lengths expressed in Earth time.

• Sun - 365 days
• Moon - 28 days
• Mercury - 88 days
• Venus - 225 days
• Mars - 1 year, 320 days
• Jupiter - 12 years
• Saturn - 29 years
• Uranus - 84 years
• Neptune - 165 years
• Pluto - 250 years

FREDDIE the Golden Doodle Grand Dog

This is Freddie Pup, my daughter's six month old golden doodle. Because he's my daughters, that means he's my "grand dog." He's a pretty great guy. I've had several dogs in my life, and this guy is rapidly climbing to the top of the hit parade. I like that he frequently chills out. He's also a pretty good retriever, which is a good trait in a dog, I think.

This is me when I was 25 or 26 and living in Greenwich Village, New York. My dog, Daphne, was the greatest of all time. Being a Samoyed Huskey, she loved the snow. You may recall a photo of her and my in my Job Description post: bartender in Vermont. That's the same daughter who Freddie belongs to.

Finally, this is me and my wife, Julie, with my friend Ted the Brewing Painter's dog, Stella, in Sonoma County. When I first met Ted, in 2009, he'd just lost a rottweiler named Mugsy and couldn't stop crying. I was the same way with Daphne when we had to say goodbye. So, Ted and I bonded instantly.

A couple of years later, Julie and I went wilderness camping with Ted and his squeeze, Katherine, whom Julie has known since she was 5 years old. They grew up together in Key Biscayne, Florida, when it was wild -- and so were they. Anyway, during that camping trip Stella was about as old as Freddy Pup, and demonstrated that we belonged to her by peeing in our tent. Ah, memories.....

Books that Push Limits

Today I'm going to talk about two books which are equally transgressive, but each in its own way:

• Ulysses by James Joyce, originally published in 1922
• Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi, originally published in 2010 in Arabic; English translation published in 2019.

My History with Ulysses

In college I started working on my first novel, which was based on a section of The Odyssey by Homer. A friend told me I absolutely had to sign up for an independent study with a professor who guided students through their first novels. We'll call him Professor Boylan.

One of the first things Professor Boylan told me was, "You know, a modern re-telling of the Odyssey has already been done."

"It has?" I blinked. You see, I thought I was a creative genius and no one had ever had this idea before.

"Yes," Boylan replied, "James Joyce. It's called Ulysses. You should get a copy and read it."

Long story short: I eventually got a copy. I couldn't get past Page 100 before I threw it against the wall in disgust. It was i-n-c-o-m-p-r-e-h-e-n-s-i-b-l-e. The Vintage/Random House version I read, published in 1961, was 783 pages. So I didn't get very far.

A few years later I was part of a group of writers working on novels. They let me be a part of the group when I told them my novel was an attempt to shed light on the seven years that Odysseus spent on an island with the immortal sea nymph Calypso. Those years are left out of The Odyssey. 

Genius that I thought I was, I set my novel on an island in the Caribbean and learned as much about calypso music as I could. Wikipedia has a nice article on calypso music. My favorite Calypso song, by the way, is "The Creature from the Black Lagoon."

One of these writers encouraged me to give Ulysses another try. I did. Sure enough, at Page 100, against the wall the now bruised and battered book went.

Later in life I heard that James Joyce had to get some friends to "leak" his structural scaffolding for the novel, which is quite intricate and -- dare I repeat myself? Incomprehensible.

Now, whenever I say his name out loud, there is an adjective in front of it -- beginning with an "f" and ending with "-ing...." The adjective is as obscene as many censors thought Joyce's book was -- it wasn't printed in his native Ireland until the 1960s, and was the subject of a lengthy obscenity trial in the United States that kept it off the shelves for 14 years. 

Recently, I was perusing audiobooks and came across Ulysses. "What the heck!" I said to myself, "It's been at least 30 years." I'm happy to say that, so far, I've made it past Page 300. The reader, whose name is John Lee, IS a genius. He's got a great Irish accent, and while I still don't understand much, I'm enjoying the flow of Joyce's language. 

My biggest takeaway from the book, so far, is that it does a brilliant job at capturing a particular man's internal monologue -- good bad and ugly. What goes on in this man's mind is, in fact, obscene at times.

Celestial Bodies

I'll admit that I had to take a break from Ulysses, and so I chose to listen to Celestial Bodies because it had won the very prestigious Man Booker International Prize in 2019. The author, Jokha Alharthi, is the first Omani woman to have a book translated into English, and Celestial Bodies is the first book translated from the Arabic to win the Booker prize.

My biggest takeaway is that Alharthi does a brilliant job of letting the reader into the private lives and thoughts of Muslim women -- in Oman, at least. And in that sense, half the Arab world must want to censor the bejesus out of it, just as half the English-speaking world censored Ulysses.