This is how it always goes; best intentions, holidays and pre-scheduled turmoil, you ignore a nagging ding or thirty from Siri telling you it’s time to sit down and disgorge your dome-piece, and, none the wiser, you find yourself three months away from the last entry.
That’s exactly what’s plucking the strings of the drum-beater, for me, right now.
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory had that wonderful ending, where Gene Wilder tells Charlie that he’s going to live happily ever after. He got everything he ever wanted. His elementary-school ass imagined as much as it could of the universe, he got it, and that was it. I mean, they’re not getting into Oompa-Loompa labor issues, the utilities and property tax issues with a massive factory, let alone, ::shudder:: nut allergies and gluten, but you won the game, kid.
A few years ago I read Nick Offerman’s book, Paddle Your Own Canoe, and he lays out this beautiful scene, where he had married the lady of his dreams, scored a house in the Hollywood Hills, and was bumming around in his pool, smoking a J and drinking, I will assume, Lagavulin. The end of that story is that he got bored immediately.
Well before I moved to Pittsburgh, I wanted to be a bartender. Then I moved here, and eventually became one. I tried out all of the bartending identities literature gave me, then I tried out the shinier ones in magazines. There was a (thankfully brief) period where I was the insufferable whelp toting a copy of Embury around, who’d get cranky about vodka. I traveled, I went to seminars, I took notes, I made friends with people across the country, then partied mightily with them. I told myself I would either get the job I knew I could do, or I would skip town and try again. I’m still here. I’ve been wearing the bartender identity for nearly a decade.
The best way to motivate me is to tell me I can’t do something, which explains my current position.
“Hey, hey you. I did that thing. And you’re still a fuck. Really, I’m just talking to myself, but it’s important that if we were to ever meet again, you’d know that you are a fuck immediately, as my success is so fucking bright it will sear the fuck right off of you. Which makes you nothing. You fuck.”
I’m Charlie, I get to run my own factory of delights, and my Oompa-Loompas are generally agreeable. Winning is fucking amazing. It’s humbling, beautiful and instructive. Failure follows right on the heels of victory, whether it’s missing an ordering deadline or running out of product or just bombing when you’re supposed to be the example, let alone the leadership.
My roommate relayed some wisdom to me from one of the denizens of the dive down the street, being that I am in what is delicately termed as a “Velvet Slump”. Everything is perfect in its entropy.
I originally got into this racket to provide fuel for the fire of writing. I enjoy making music, jewelry, sculpture, paintings, but most of all, writing. Nothing gets me off so completely as slaying a page or two. The closest I get to any of that is the odd email where I need more than a handful of sentences; I haven’t given birth to things the way I know I want to, not in a very, very long time. My partner and I were discussing the nature of cooking and bartending and the lassitude we both find ourselves in, coming to an agreement that while both are admirable and at times, high-minded crafts, they simply are not art. Like, big A, mission statement, precious, turtle-necked Art.
I do have friends that manage to tow a line, and I admire them for their tenacity and ability to have their cake as well as scarf it down between shifts. I’ve never had that much discipline, and I’m resigned to not shortchanging the act of creation on account of my vocation. Not to say my friends and colleagues do, but that I certainly can’t walk and chew gum at the same time.
So here’s Charlie, living happily ever after, but knowing that he’s gonna need dentures before the year’s out. This change in role has been frighteningly instructive, and has certainly yielded a lot of personal confrontation with uncomfortable truths. The most terrifying part is that while I thought this was the next step, the beginning of the next chapter in a very cool tale of bootstraps and bars, it turned out to be, at least for the time being, a bridge too far.
I’m looking forward to the future, and I’m looking forward to tacking that last merit badge on my sash when I hit 1 year as captain, but the thought of more fruit withered on the vine is just too much beyond that. It’ll be well past time for a new game, a new board and new rules.
In the meantime, there’s all types of merit badges to win, and minding my craft in the highest sense possible.
86 composure 