General advice to myself

When I go to the bar, and it's less and less these days, I like to order my martini "bourgeois." This, I explain to the bartender, means measured by eyeball and served iced in a rocks glass, not shaken, stirred with a butter knife, olive dropped in by hand. I also order wine this way, sans olive, but if they have a fresh berry or two lying there and there's nobody around to call me a sissy...

Anyhow, drink only takes me so far. I need to acknowledge self-doubt and accept it, and to speak with the confidence of that acceptance, those limitations, a man who looks his foe in the eye. My words may be halting at first, despair coursing through my thoughts, unable to articulate why because I don't know why. No one knows why.

Some mock me out of fear, and others laugh to relieve their own anxiety. Laugh, laugh, laugh, I speak to alleviate. Others too speak from that same place. They fear also, the compassionate more so, but they accept it and deem it more important to tell what they see. That person who doesn't fear others' unedited honesty is an idiot or enlightened.