A Prayer for Sober Servers

I've talked of this before and as I approach my repetition on paper I realize there is a scary, tangible pattern in my life. I work in the restaurant feverishly, pushing all boundaries of mental and physical capacity. Then I shakily get in my car in the cold, empty Glen Park neighborhood. I drive down San Jose till it spills onto Guererro and I race over the hills of Noe Valley and fall into the lap of the 16th and Mission to watch the hipsters spill themselves out of faux taverns. I get home, park outside, clamber up the stairs and sit in my apartment wondering how I could possibly recover from my masochistic experience of employment. My whole body is tired and I feel bloated and fat. It takes extra effort to sponge the makeup off and finally I sit in my apartment and write down verbatim the excess that spins around my mind in an attempt to exorcise the compulsions pulsing beneath my temples. And that's exactly how I get here, realizing that I've written this all before; this exact same series of events.

And the Juno soundtrack strums in the background of this room:
The flower said, "I wish I was a tree,"
The tree said, "I wish I could be
A different kind of tree,
The cat wished that it was a bee,
The turtle wished that it could fly
Really high into the sky,
Over rooftops and then dive
Deep into the sea.

So the scoop is that there was neither host nor busser tonight. Our chef was out sick so Abel, the host/manager/bestest, was working the salad station while Shannon and I took orders, took plates, took parties of 6, told people to wait outside for an hour, ran down the street to the bar to find people (more than 10 times), answered the phone...and the phone never, never, never stops ringing and people walk in the door and stand in it blocking the way and then they say, how much longer..um,there'll be 18 of us, do you have half baked pizzas, can I just have a coffee and salad? And then after a while Abel's friend Amo came to help us and Amo used to work with us for like a week but then she was over it and she's in a band and went to Princeton and we love Amo and she totally had our backs and bussed tables, filled water, boxed pizzas and all that good stuff. It was fucking nuts.

And honestly, when I do 16.8 things at once with people coming at me from all directions for 7 hours, I have no idea how anyone can really manage to not drink after work. I couldn't believe that I had to go home sober and drink tea and diet coke. I mean, obviously I'm not going to go have a drink but fuck me, I wanted to have one to really knock me on my ass. I think its an adrenaline thing like go as fast as possible and then crash into a brick wall. Maybe I'm not looking for the high or the low but the impact; that moment when the madness just stops. When I go home sober I perform a series of rituals to replace the drinking ritual; all of them built on making me as happy and relaxed as possible in a short amount of time-like a shot of Jack Daniels would but instead of being Jack Daniels, it's tea and bathwater and lavender and music and writing and television, bad television. And once I'm here doing these things it's not so bad, it's good actually.

I sit here clean in a clean apartment with Gardenia candles burning and Beirut now wafts in the background:

the lights go on
the lights go off
when things don't feel right
I lie down like a tired dog
licking his wounds in the shade

when I feel alive
I try to imagine a careless life
a scenic world where the sunsets are all
breathtaking

And these things that I do here, these repetitive rituals of my Saturday or Sunday nights; these are the soft cushions that catch me when I crash. I'm not looking for a brick wall tonight. You've read this story before and I plan to tell it again, probably many times. This story, the cotton against my skin, the music, the tea- these are my active prayers to the servers not drinking tonight. This is for the hard working people who bust our asses against the masses only to face a sometimes harder task at the end of the shift. Let us find the things that bring us peace on these cold nights.