Well, I’m at work. I came in at noon to relieve Diane so she could do a professional massage gig. The bookstore was already short staffed due to the holiday, when no one wants to work, the boss has to work. So, I am selling massage supplies on v day. The place is humming actually. Last minute gift certificate sales, student clinic, supervision class, level two Saturday day class (learning deep touch today I think). Administrative duties, helping students figure out how to deduct their training from their taxes, getting paperwork together for them etc. and in momentary lulls a little blogging.

Selling. Sales. I used to call it pimping for the desert cart when I worked as a waiter. Nineteen year old Karl encouraging middle aged women to have strawberry rhubarb pie, key lime cheesecake from Hank’s… awe come on, you know you want some…

It’s good to be in the store – helps me see what sorts of things could use change, which systems are working – part of what I do is design systems. When I came to work here there were…. flawed systems….. Interesting how work is repetitive – like Yeat’s Gyre, around we go up this spiral staircase where the same types of things happen over and over again. I take the same type of phone call from a prospective student, give the same set of directions on how to get here, all with slight variation – always a little further up in this tower to nowhere, tower of Babel I suppose. Destination thinking is flawed, it fell because they tried to get the heaven, like being a child who wants to dig to China. So many people get helped here though – there is meaning and reward for the students who are changing their lives, the people who are getting healed here. This is an upward gyre on the path of health and knowledge.

Still thinking about the nature of work, at nineteen Irving Jenco taught me to cook, taught me about wine….. a good time in my life. Before him it was big Mike Jenkins – a lot like Chef from South Park, “Karl, get off that counter! Your but been sanitized?” I could very easily own and operate a restaurant. But of course they really own you.

In college I worked at a Chinese place, pimping for the buffet. Occasionally people would order off the menu. Dragon and Phoenix , I made flames leap into the air for the jade tree steak. Two years there speaking Spanish, Chinese, English kitchen language – taking the boys from Mexico to Wall-mart to buy good work boots for their fathers, and dolls for their sisters back home. Always three boys, always different boys, Northward migration. Tom wanted to be a fashion designer when he came to New York in his twenties – he still makes many of Penny’s clothes– thirty years later he and Penny own a small Chinese take out place in a small town in Missouri. “How do you set up computer? I put all my recipe in computer for you to read.” We did that. Grandpa comes from China, had a place in Shanghai, now he cuts broccoli at the round table, drinks from the brown teapot – I think it’s vodka. I went out for lunch with V the other day to a Chinese place in strip mall – one of millions – there sat Grandpa – not mine but another – his teapot was a different color and may have actually contained Tea. Tom doesn’t own China Palace anymore, I think it’s been sold several times over the past few years; a ladder rung in the ascension of Chinese families. Penny’s favorite phrase, “Oh, I just don’t know about that.” She was always asking me to explain small aspects of American culture to her.

Then on to Days Inn and Ryan’s sports bar where I tended bar for several years to put myself through graduate school. Between the endless paper writing and the juggling of liquor bottles it’s a wonder my wrists work at all. Perhaps I should be a somalia’ – still wondering what I want to be when I grow up – flawed thinking – I’m a Karl and will be that grown up or not. How to be the best Karl?

Now is a good time too I guess, though there are things that I would change (why don’t you change them Karl? Well, I am trying to, this blog is part of that. We don’t know what we think until we try and express it. K and others are under the impression that I’m wasting my talents – what exactly are those talents?

One of Diane’s clients no-showed so she’s walking up the street to mystic valley for the psychic festival, I want to go, ten dollars for a reading from any of their psychics – I doubt they’d tell me anything I don’t already know…

Is all personal writing a matter of vanity? One of six billion – I’m sure it’s much more than that now – trying to solve the riddle of the one and the many – individuality is a tough nut to crack – there are probably twenty or more people running around the planet that look like me, talk, act, etc. But we only get to the universal through the personal, we only get to the sacred through the profane that has been heightened somehow, made new by the act of framing it. Will Art save my life because it makes the profane sacred? Come on Kant, help me out here. – the moral heart of Thomas Pynchon’s Universe, “keep cool but care” I stopped looking at some point, I just stopped. Why did I do that? Am I starting to look again? Seems so.