Confessions of an idle bartender

“Don’t worry, we’ll get you back to doing that as soon as possible,” said my surgeon after my examination.

“Hey, doc,” I replied. “If what I was doing is what caused this to happen, then maybe I shouldn’t go back to doing that, right?”

He looked at me quizzically and then put his clipboard down.

“You know,” he said. “I’ve been doing this for a very long time, and nobody has ever said that to me before.”

There’s an old joke that goes something like this:

Patient: “It hurts when I walk this way.”

Doctor: “Then don’t walk that way.”

It seems logical, but then again, the world isn’t really a logical place.

My response to my surgeon was not ultimately reflective of my thinking because even though bartending wasn’t the cause of the injury, the thing that caused it does need some modifying. But regardless of the cause, the end result was the same, and I have not been able to bartend for some weeks now, and I’m still a couple of weeks from returning.

The realization I’ve made while being out of work is that I actually really do enjoy my job. And while every day behind the bar is different, there’s always a certain logic to it. And that makes it different from the real world, which can be confusing as hell.

Here are some examples of the confusion that I have witnessed during my time off:

My injury requires that I do some arm exercises, which I do on my daily walk. Those exercises further require that I raise one of my arms repetitively over my head. More than one person has commented on it. But there was one person who actually scolded me for it. She thought I was waving at her and her dog. I had “disrupted” her. In fact, she told me to “stand still” while her dog ran up to me. That’s right, I wasn’t to move because I was risking startling her illegally off-leash dog.

On a different walk, I was walking along the pathway with all the young families, dog walkers, children on bikes and the various groupings of adults of all ages. It was a typical sunny summer afternoon with about 75 people milling around near the waterway. Directly in front of me, a man around 65 years old separated from his companion and walked over to the concrete brick wall that lines one side of the path. He then opened his fly and urinated on the wall, right behind a group of children and directly in front of me, as if it were the most normal thing in the world to do, and as if there wasn’t a bathroom 30 yards further up the path.

Then there was the car that came down the one-way road going in the wrong direction right in front of my physical therapy building. The driver parked their car on what would have been the wrong side of the road, even if they were going in the right direction, which they weren’t. I thought about saying something until the driver started putting money in the wrong parking meter. I figured it might be best for them to find out the hard way, since the easy way really wasn’t working.

And the final straw was when I headed into the Presidio to meet a friend. They have installed several traffic roundabouts there. Roundabouts are a perfect way to help alleviate traffic since cars are constantly moving — until they aren’t. Standing there waiting to cross the street while driver after driver got confused and stopped was one thing. But the real shocker was watching the Waymos (driverless cars) getting stuck too. It wasn’t their fault; they know exactly what to do and probably how to handle a few variables. People, on the other hand, do not. There’s no algorithm that’s going to explain why a person would back their car up against traffic, go over a curb and then cross laterally through a sidewalk with pedestrians in it at high speed. Just try explaining any of that, much less all of it, to a machine that only thinks in binary choices. Those poor machines don’t stand a chance.

The other day I received an email from a regular couple telling me that they have missed me since I’ve been out. And it dawned on me that I have missed them, too — not only them but all the other people who I normally expect to see regularly.

So, for me, I can’t wait to get back to work, where, in spite of all the surprises, everything makes a certain amount of sense. And if it doesn’t, then as a bartender, I’m empowered to make it make sense.

Leaving me with these thoughts:

• “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t,” once wrote Mark Twain.

• I received a letter last week from an attorney who was concerned that in last week’s story I appeared to be buying alcohol at a liquor store for a licensed establishment with my business credit card, which is illegal. My business credit card is for my writing, not for my bartending, and I was not buying for any establishment. I hope that clears that up.

• There’s a big difference between “having” to go to work and “getting” to. And I get to — or at least I will soon.