"Why do you blog," I ask myself tacitly any time I arrive here.  You must be realistic about the venue and the purpose of it.  I guess it's just a good place to share a certain part of your thoughts, different from the notebook's more private recording of dreams and complaints and musings put down raw before filtering.  And even everything written here, you think, 'hmm, should have filtered that out too.'  Despite appearances otherwise, the intentions of a blog are largely private, an attempt at providing a geographic record, perhaps unwittingly capturing samples from layers of life's sediment, a flavor here or there, a remembrance, that later compress over years into rock of some sort, even as one would wish to be a volcano.  It's a forum, it provides a different challenge, suits a new and different purpose than previously found.

But...  but, though none of any of this is immediate or pertinent or even remotely important, each part serves as a step in the exercise of letting something out so that perhaps, ultimately, an overall shape might be gathered out of it. as if to say, 'oh, this was the sauce, this the vegetable, this the starchy grainy thing, and this the sort of main protein meaty fleshy thing to bite into first so as to get a set of tastebuds up and running...'  Or, like I say, just for a sense of an over-all shape that the writer is not completely conscious of, by putting pieces together.

Well, some of us are never good at quite finishing things.  Not to say that things don't get done.  But, like washing dishes in a  tub, a complex process, first making room in the drying rack for the newly washed, then soaking dirty plates and things, then scrubbing them off (say, the uneaten cat food that has adhered to a plate, or that bit of olive oil that lingers so), then taking them out of the tub to be rinsed, then rinsing them and placing them in whatever place you use to rack them where they can dry, I am usually one to get a lot done, but leave, well, a few things soaking, as if leaving them by for the next round of hot water dishwashing, moving on to something.  Like then go finish a cup of tea, or pour a glass of ice water with a splash of apple cider vinegar, or to half record a dream, or to go and lament something on paper such as one's continual exposure to wine-related things such that one feels obliged to finally have, at the end of the night, some of its calming potions, which of course bring some regret the next day in small and sometimes large forms.

There are many tangents you can move off on, and that is a part of the creative way really, or not much would get done.  And the thing about a blog, is that you are writing on a type pad, not longhand, which is kind of fun, keypads being light and magical now.  A better way to go fishing.  Faster, and the record is left without the extra step of transcription.  So, you ask yourself, what thoughts and impressions should I share without burdening reader with excess and whining.  I came home last night and, what was I going to write down?  Was it that sense of failure, of not living up to your own level of intelligence and promise and opportunity?  That weird way a bartender may remember, quite like the elephant, the landscapes of the lives he meets across the bar, and how to temper all that knowledge with the appropriateness of the situation, the subsets of that, like not wanting to appear too creepy just because you remember things so well, indeed maybe a little better than you should, as if you were too intelligent a creature who'd been stuck in a box of some sort, underutilized as far as what he could possibly command first off and then with a bit of training and education, so that then it might make a customer secretly sort of sad that they had found a person wasting his talents over small matters like the difference between rosé wines.  Or, like, 'Christ, I just wanted a glass of wine and not have to talk to anyone, but this guy remembers something I said a year and a half ago...'   Note that the barman would wish to carefully bring such things up to express a care for the solidarity of all who live beneath the human condition.

(Off to look for the cat, potentially save her from another cat making noise somewhere along a fence, nervous now that she won't come back in time to be taken in to the vet for a shot.)

Where was I? Speaking perhaps of finishing things and how some of us are never good at that, as if they lived in a land where things were completely open-ended...  the habit of constantly shaping, constantly creating something you don't know the shape of but knowing how to construct (or feeling a biding need to flesh something out, or get something down for the purposes of psychological understanding.)   But it's not such a great habit as far as certain practical aspects of life.  There are times when you have to nail things down.  There are times when you must move in a relationship, because that particular time is, or may quite well be, the time to make a choice, or the last chance to achieve, the last chance to open up a door that allows a discussion, the last chance to have, say, a fruitful career with retirement benefits, before it all becomes too late.  It was either as if it wasn't patterned into some people's DNA, or maybe they just never passed, through rites, from youth into adulthood, from fixation and emotional attachments to straight independence.

(A shower to calm the nerves, and then the cat comes back to my relief.  Don't want to miss the vet appointment.)

If nature made the male of the species muscularly relaxed in the state of arousal, is the same true for the female, or is it apparently the opposite, that she is relaxed when not in the state of arousal, thus accounting  for a certain excitability as if to protect her own arousal?  Or not?  Maybe all can agree that writing out all the nervous thoughts in one's own head while heightening certain tensions might be ultimately relaxing, as when you've written down what you have in a day, freeing up the writing for other tasks.  Instincts, an organic component of life that must be obeyed.  Yet, you can still want to shout at yourself, 'what's the bloody point of all this writing anyway?!'

Conrad had written his first, Almayer's Folly, referencing his own travels, not usually included in the canon, and now he feels himself at a crossroads, maybe thinking to himself, what an awful failure, why did I bother, and someone says to him, tells him, 'why don't you write another.'  A word of clarity coming from a decent and respectable, gentle and encouraging friend, providing a voice that even Conrad's inner Conrad wasn't so ready to allow through its own clenched teeth, see with his own wincing eyes or take into his own perturbed stomach, the thought.  He might have muttered, as if seeing a tree were about to fall on him.

What does one do with time?  Get a new haircut?  Apply for a job, go back to school, become a full Buddhist?  Acknowledge the awkwardness of getting back to the strange sort of leisure that leads you to write, after a four night work week (not so bad) of physical movement?  Seek out a few healthy activities, yoga, bike ride, walk in the woods, find a book?  Drink more green tea?  Do the laundry?  Try not to fantasize about members of the opposite sex?  People are sitting in offices doing productive things, and what are you doing, not-so-young-anymore man?  Try transcribing that dream in which you were, even in the dream, inadequate about making adult choices, confused about finding a responsible hotel accommodation given one's means as you traveled back to a certain town but fitting into the dream a young woman who came into life since then in the course of your wandering years?

"Life is good," a friend emails me, referring to her own.  And then she adds a refrain as a general note. "Life is good, Ted, enjoy it."  Hmmm.

The cat is back from the vet's.  The vet couldn't be better, or kinder, about providing medical care at this stage of the cat's cancerous growth of the rectum area.  She had her shot of prednisone, I carried her back in the old wooden toolbox/lobster trap cat carrier, she has eaten for the second time and licks now her chops and begins to clean herself, licking her mitt, rubbing it across her brow.  Since the last, there are more dishes, and they are done, down to the silverware left over from the last foray.  A phone call to mom, the planting of some tomato seeds.  Cats have to eat every single day, come to find out from Dr. Drummond (an awesome guy.)  They do not have the fat reserves dogs do.  A cat gets stuck in a garage for forty-eight hours, unable to eat, it will sustain liver damage.  I'd like to ask the vet how the bigger ancestors survive out in the wild, but the thought slips my mind.  No wonder the little things are so intent on being fed in the morning first thing.

I have to think that an artist has a way of seeing things in terms of a very long vision.  The artist sees the detail of one day and senses somehow that detail will fit in to a very long story.  The story will eventually be edited so that it won't seem so long, and the story will come out with a natural beginning, middle and end, an arc, just so.  I don't think it's the 'tension' thing that makes the story go along, because the story goes on by itself organically.  Maybe the story if you could take in its whole doesn't really have a particular beginning other than birth and a particular ending other than death, though we could usefully take a particular slice from it, a couple of years, a part of it, and find a satisfying meaning, the sense of something whole within.  And perhaps it is, that one slice of that whole life has basically the same meaning as any other you might take.  Beneath the picture of that larger understanding of life, maybe you find a better way to focus on or understand a particular moment of life, and in doing so not feel so bad about it, but understand it rather.

Joseph Campbell has a nice passage in his The Hero of a Thousand Faces about Job.  Job, heroically, is able, is allowed, to gain a finer higher conception of God and the nature of reality, greater than that of his peers who sit down with him and say, 'hmm, you must have done something sinful,' applying the familiar logic, though Job knows in his heart that he has done nothing but just things.  Hearing, finally, the voice of God, Job is given to a better understanding.  Of course, it doesn't come easily, in just any old way, no.  And it sets Job apart, and makes his part of the story worth sticking into the Bible at a sort of crucial moment in the developing revelation.  Job is drawn into focus, along with all his woes, and all his myriad woes are transformed into a significant part of the great legend of humanity figuring out life.  A sacrifice, as it were, transformed.



I go for a walk at dusk, again, across the Massachusetts Avenue bridge and down into the woods and along the stream.  Departing from my usual route I go upstream rather than downstream, which is very pleasant in the light, the stream running below in the bare sandy banks beneath beech trees and poplar, to where I can cross a small footbridge to walk along the other side of Rock Creek, herons down in the stream, rising from it as runners pass.  It is a wonderful feeling to walk along with the creek below on my right heading underneath the bridge rising great with ivy climbing heavily up on either side of its arch.  It is easy to imagine the form of Roman ruins even as the parkway and the great arching aqueduct-like bridges are still being used quite steadily in the empire we live in today.

I walk along, the herons, little blues and great blues, rise and off into tree tops, the traffic fades, the stream runs with its pleasant sound of water over rocks, here and there a deeper stream.  Life, it seems to me, can indeed be about these moments where we are discovering who we are, through echoes and rediscovery, in the imaginative ability to summon a sense of someone like, let's say, being here in Washington, a President Lincoln or Kennedy, as if one heard their voices from within, in some form of Yeats mysticism of the dead being 'thrust back into the human mind again.'

By the time I've walked on toward the river under two more bridges and past other structures evoking ruins slowly taken back by fecund nature and night sounds and vegetation, down to P Street and back over that bridge back toward Dupont Circle, then slowly back up the hill, I am certain that the people out and about in society necessarily by their involvement in it can not understand something very important, something that I will somehow try to put into words when I get home after the freedom of my walk.

Life is about learning who you are.   Life is about seeing that you are indeed in a situation like Job's, heavy and lamenting, but then being awoken to the fact of the Divine that is divine and has its own way, such that the lamenting is completely transformed, into something almost gentle and understanding as the stream beside a path.

Epiphanies do not come when you are involved with the crowd.  They happen when you are alone.  Emily Dickinson knew this.  In his own way, Shane MacGowan.  And probably someone like Beethoven.  To be a genius you have to be an idiot.  That's the funny thing.  Perhaps, one day, the species will evolve to better understand that, to allow and accept artists more on their own vulnerable quiet terms.