Spirited

I woke up hungover today.
I terrified my parents last night by being horrendously drunk. There was a storm on the other side of the mountains and the clouds above looked like a lint tray from a dryer, the kind you have to clean or your house will burn down. Little lighting strikes lit them up and I wanted so badly for the storm to come. I was and laying in the grass using my phone to FaceTime friends from across the United States while drinking large formats of shitty yellow fizzy piss water. I got to talk to some people I hadn't seen in a while, and when it did rain, I went outside and let myself get soaked by it, much to their horror. Then I went to sleep. Then I woke up.
I woke up very hungover today.
It's the tail end of football season in a town that exists solely for the University and the football team that pays for all the nice stuff we have around here. The town is very loyal to the football team. Fuck, people were willing to look over child molestation for the football program. It's pretty powerful.
Tomorrow is the day that we play our age old rival. Every time I've been in this town and we've won against them, some kind of riot ensues. People use other words to describe it, but that's what it is: a riot. No political purpose, no nothing. In fact there was a riot here when there were actions taken against the football program for the covering up of a massive child molestation case. Not because of the child molestation, but because of the disrespect of the patriarch of their football team. People take this shit seriously here. Those people are all arriving today. I'm going to have to deal with them about 130 at a time for six hours while cutting fruit, stocking beer, shaking drinks, grabbing ice...
and I'm so fucking hungover.
I get up, I take a massive shit. It's loose as fuck.  I look at myself in the mirror and can see all the pores of my face wide open .All the spirits of last night come out of me slowly. Not in a cool way, not like a mist, but instead just a long, sinking heavy breath coming out of me, lightly sinking to the ground like a feather, like an orb that people see in pictures and claim to be a ghost.
Ghosts.
Spirits.
Hmm.
 I need a long hot shower and to go back to sleep. But those Mich Ultras aren't going to open themselves, get poured down the gullet of some alumni, thrown into a recycling bin, and restocked six at a time. A finely tuned mechanism all the way down to raise the mood of people returning to a town where they spent 'the best years of their life' and then went out and moved into some suburb somewhere and made a child with someone they don't really like all that much and now that kid's fucking here too, and they're all in front of you, getting drunk, and you can see the moms eyes in the kid.
What is inside of my mind that is so hateful of people wanting to grow up and have kids and have their kids have a good life too? Why do I think of this so mean spiritedly?
Spirits.
Hmm.
I step into the shower and I can feel the caked sweat in my hair. I shampoo and rinse it out, wipe some soap over me, and brush my teeth as fast as possible. The sweat in my hair is somehow drier.
I get out of the shower. I wipe the mirror off. I forgot to trim my beard. Dragged a razor across the parts of my face where there shouldn't hair. Rinsed it off. Looked at myself one more time. Mirror steams back up. That's the last time I'm going to think about my face today, I tell myself.
Throw clothes on. Head in to work. Town's busier than usual Walk in. Say hi to the kitchen staff. Open the bar. Stock straws, ice, mats, beer, analyze what the night crew did or did not do. They are very thorough though. They are a part of this mechanism that opens and closes every day as if nothing had ever happened.
A finely tuned mechanism.

TO WIT:
A hunger arises in a person. His body is telling him he needs sustenance. There's pains associated with it. It's like a little alarm clock. He needs to eat. His stomach tells him that. He can do this in a number of ways, but we're concerned with the kind that go into a restaurant.
(There are people who choose to eat supplements, sustenance through science, rather than dabble with cuisine. These people are no good bastards. These people are why fascism rears its ugly head. These people vote libertarian. In short: these are people without spirit. )
We are concerned with the spirited.
The non-spirited might describe the exchange in a restaurant this way: stomach tells person, person tells waitress, waitress tells cook, cook cooks food, waitress brings food to person, person eats food, person pays.
A spirited description would see the beautiful ways these gears grind together. The music, the lighting, the temperature, the televisions. An entirely immersive experience, a feast for all senses. A waitress who genuinely wants you to have a good time. A cook who wants to put the best he can out as quickly as possible. A bartender who wants you to have the best drink you can have. Some sort of driving force inside of all of them. The argument could be made that its simply to survive and make money. But no, there's a pride. A spirit of hospitality. And why?

What the shit do I get from it?

It's half past 12:30 into day shift and I'm still hungover. Just at this very moment every seat at the bar has filled. The gears are grinding though and are moving together.
A finely tuned machine.
My hands never stop moving as I pull and polish bottles. Two guests that have occupied my bar for the last three days, in town from Seattle, sit down. I have their drinks ready for them before they order. They are very happy about that. They're comfortable. That feeling goes in to me. I feel good about it too. They don't know I was barely able to look at myself in the mirror long enough to get a couple of stray hairs off my beard.
Shit, I told myself that was the last time I'd think about my face today.
Come to think of it, I'm pretty sweaty. I should probably wash my hair.
Ten people just walked through the door. Three groups of four within the next five minutes. Every seat is now taken in the place. This is when we get crushed.
My coworker talks to me, we discuss how we are on our fruits and stocking. We both acknowledge the rush is coming.
"Bring it," he says. Fuck yeah.
The first restaurant job I ever had I quit because of panic attacks brought on by situations like this. An Outback Steakhouse. Turned each table ten times a night. I didn't know where things were. Wasn't fast enough. I still have horrors of the ice machine. Getting yelled at by high school girls at the hostess stand because I couldn't be in three different places at once. Nobody knew what was going on. I had to leave.
Now, years later, years behind the bar, years taking chaos and turning it into money.
A finely tuned machine.
I worked a thirteen hour shift today. I'll do it again tomorrow.
My mother told me 'that's crazy.'
It's true, you have to be insane.

'You have to be insane'

Hi, I'm Alex.
I'm in the service industry, erm, pardon: the HOSPITALITY industry.
You'll find me often drunkenly blathering about how utterly important that distinction is. That the words you choose to use, the language that spills out of your mouth must be carefully chosen. It's not service, we don't SERVE them, that's belittling to us. We create an experience for the guest out of a sense of hospitality toward them, and at the end of the entire shebang there's a little paper with a number on it that shows how much it cost them for this experience, and if you did it well and they aren't scumbags, you'll get 20% of that number (or more) as a gift from them. You most certainly will have worked for it. So remember not to call it service, or to ask your guests if they are still 'working on their food.' No, don't ask anything that could possibly suggest anything other than sunshine and rainbows. Or, in the back, I'm going to tell you you're fucking up.

But, of course, like any self aggrandizing fuck who decides the world not only needs his words to reverberate around the world and possibly hit your ears but also thinks they should be digitized and filed online, I plead you to 'do as I say and not as I do.'
If you did as I do you'd wind up in legal trouble every two or three years, burning through jobs and friendships and most importantly of all, that pile of tips at the end of the night. If you did as I do you'll have lived in 5 different cities in 7 years, at one point having five addresses in three states over one year.
So do as I say instead, and save that money, pay off your student loans for that liberal arts degree, don't drink and drive, drink responsibly, and for God's sakes eat healthy.

People always ask me if I'm going to get out of this industry. I say 'no! I fucking love it!'
"You love working 12 hour shifts until three in the morning?"
Yes, and even later.
"You love dealing with drunk people?"
To a certain point, yes.
"You love serving food and cleaning up after people?"
I love food, why should I not also love serving it?
However many more questions come down the pike, it always ends the same:
"You have to be INSANE to stay doing that!"

..........

How many well-meaning people on their odious trip to self-actualization, in their cartoon Tasmanian Devil fashion brought on by the words of some guy with bleached teeth, ask you 'do you know what the definition of insanity is?'

Merriam-Webster can fuck off here, because its always the same bullshit out of their mouths.
'Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.'

In that case, getting into the restaurant industry is absolutely insane. Most new restaurants close real quickly. The shelf life of a successful one is about 5-10 years, and that's pushing it, Yet they still pop up, almost more than anything else in our culture. A restaurant might close, but the essence of it isn't going anywhere. It's been there for as long as people were too busy to cook for themselves, and it's not going anywhere.

And the people who are going to work it? There's always going to be those people. The people 'who must be insane,'
Well what do you know? Yes I am. Yes, a bunch of us are.
 I am an alcoholic, barely functioning. I used to be a drug addict. I am Bipolar type 2, I have horrible anxiety and I almost dropped out of high school because I couldn't get with the schedule I was forced into. I was also a very gifted student and child and have been able to coast on my intelligence through life without having to work very hard and still getting a B+ as opposed to busting my ass for the A. My first job in a restaurant ended with a horrible panic attack and swearing it off forever. Three years later I showed up to an interview for a bartender stoned off of my ass, babbled about Black Flag for a while and somehow got a job. Since then I've worked for famous chefs, lived in several cities, created cocktail programs, and learned more than I ever thought I could or would want to. And I fucking love it. Every day in this industry you learn something new while doing the same fucking thing you did the day before. Something changes each day.

So yeah, I must be insane.

This blog will be about food, cocktails, hospitality, mental illness, alcoholism and whatever else I feel like. Enjoy.