Ok…Let’s see here. PGA Tour thingie in town. Check. End of year high school and college graduations aplenty. Check. Two new managers on the floor. Check. Newish host. Check. Chef out sick. Check. Second bartender out sick. Check. Mega amount of reservations. Check. Yup. Good old Murphy. We love you so much. Luckily I smelled the shitshow in the air from the get go. Problem was, there was really only so much I could do as far as preventative maintenance. In any normal timeline of my life I would have come in real early for this one but I was at home with my son until Jo got home from work. Ah, the life of a middle class working slob! And so the clock ticked until she arrived and then I was out the door, down the elevator, into the garage, firing up old Janice, the gate clacking open, and then vroom vroom ! I aimed my trusty steed toward the ocean down the two mile stretch of Wilshire Blvd. About ten minutes of normal traffic and spotty sunshine.

Deep breathing exercises help.

I punched in at 3:04 and juiced a quart of lime, a quart of lemon, and a pint of grapefruit. Next, I set it all up, put the bar together, cut the garnishes, so on and so forth. No time for any other prep work. At first I prepared to work through my break but realized I needed that half hour of downtime to collect whatever I had left in the tank. It had already been a long ass day. Up at seven, watching the ever obnoxious Blippi with my boy, getting in some writing time, even squeezing in a little breakfast (leftover stirfry) before hitting the kid’s park at 10:20. The outside time is good for me but eternally boring. Yeah, yeah, I’ll never get that time back when he’s young. Blah, blah. Shove it up your ass. Go to a kid’s park for two and a half hours a day and then come back and talk to me. I’d rather go hiking or take my son to the beach. The parks are full of children running around screaming and sour ass nannies. It’s a lot of sensory input.

After the park, a minute at Bristol Farms for some lunch to take home. Beef, sweet nutrient dense beef. At this point is when my boy falls asleep in the car if I’ve done everything correctly so I can haul him upstairs for a nap and then have myself a shower, some lunch, and a half hour or so to stare at the wall. An oasis in the middle of the day.

These are all good problems to have, by the way. Great family, busy restaurant with a green staff but daddy in the middle ready for anything that comes. Yeah that’s right. Daddy took all comers. He had the fuckers scrambling.

This dude I worked with a long time ago used to call the long chain of tickets coming out of the printer “Santa’s Christmas list.” This one’s for you, Sharkey.

At some point I thought to myself “It can only be so busy.” Ha. Even with my depth of experience I had already mentally prepared to be completely destroyed and boy did it ever happen. I hate it when i’m right, but that’s one of the tricks to get through it. When I last checked we had hit the second highest liquor sales ever. Everytime I thought I had finished, another list of dupes had come piling out of the printer. The servers hovered, they cluelessly fished for wine in the cooler, we ran out of glasses, I ran upstairs several times for bottles that weren’t stocked in the closet, the managers placed the drink tickets incorrectly, and of course, stupid questions came from every angle. “Is my drink coming soon? What is our well rye? What is the name of our añejo again? Can I help you with something? I know you’re busy but…” More fodder for another round of Bartender Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions.

There were a few saving graces. JM, the beast that he is, found the time to take the overflowing recycling bin out, B-Jack appeared from the ether and grabbed some rocks buckets from upstairs for me, the GM and AGM did well for their first busy, understaffed night, one of my favorite but very talkative regulars was there watching me and laughing while I was in the shits but luckily he had brought along his cousin, otherwise I would have gone down in flames.

The thoughts pouring through my head? Keep going, old man, each cocktail you make is one more toward one less you’ll have to make. Does that make sense? It was some sort of zen. Each minute gone meant I was just that much closer to being in bed, until, yup, you guessed it, everyone had gone home and I was left alone to clean up the bar and listen to my preferred choice of music by myself. Maybe that’s part of the reason why I still do it, not the cleaning part, but the time I have alone, the restaurant empty, the door locked. No one talking to me. A good half hour of alone time. No real thoughts in my head at all.

But of course, my dreams and waking morning, even my thoughts now, are plagued with all the prep work I need to do the instant I arrive at work when everyone is there, talking, talking, talking, while I focus as much as I possibly can to hammer some nails. I won’t have much time to do it all. Time is a precious resource. The older you get and the less you have of it the more you realize how much of it you wasted when you were young, slept in late, and had no responsibilities. No regrets here, however. It’s more of a daily challenge to squeeze in what I can because what happens is, you end up doing more of the things that actually matter. You go to bed earlier and wake up earlier. You eliminate the dumb shit as well as the dumb people. You don’t trim the fat because the fat is the good stuff where all the flavor comes from. It contains the densest and richest caloric intake for your buck. No, you separate the true chaff, that which contains no benefits or nutritional content whatsoever. That’s what getting older and wiser is about.

And so what, you ask, really matters? Family, friends, work. A little more than that. Putting yourself in the position to be needed by others? Maybe. Just maybe. Finding the solace, those small patches of quiet existence in the maelstrom of the universe where the mind can quiet itself for just a moment.