Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Toward the end of a long jazz night, pestered by the ADD server, the busboy slow, the walkie talkie not working properly, the cluster f of everyone coming in, filling up the tables, in a thirty minute period, having received the last high roller customers, who ordered a Pur Sang, a sauvignon blanc of absolute purity, one strong note of grapefruit, and in the final period of feeding the band, The Bitter Dose Combo, and being left to float along with the bar patron's final dance party, I remark that I should cease such work (the extra-terrestrial admitting, practically, that he's bad for earthlings, without so intending) and go off to Divinity School, and which point a gentleman, retired military, with a glass of Chateauneuf Du Pape in hand, asks if I believe in God.  (Someone, a very nice woman, had just helpfully suggested an Episcopal institution, and I shrugged and explained I was a child of the Sixties, a Theosophist, a Buddhist, all of that 'sort of.')  I put on The Pogues, "Streams of Whiskey," in attempt to get rid of them all, but only lose one couple over in the corner doing the courtship talk.

There are days when I feel myself burning.  It's all my sins and bad decisions, a morning feeling that everything I touch turns.  I feel like Fredo Corleone, not that the guy doesn't get a bad rap somehow, a weak completely fallible guy who both falls into complete sin and faithfully, unique amongst the family, believes in God, and who, if you remember, is the one person who supports Mikey's decision to join the Marines.  I go for a walk, muttering to myself all the while about work, about how I'd like to call in sick, sick, that is, of jazz night, all the while thinking too of preparing myself for the dreary expectancy of wine tasting night.  Well, that's why they call it work.

We are burning, Buddha says.  We are all burning.  Does this mean that we are going through time, constantly changing all the time, or does it connote a kind of purifying fire?  I don't know.

Everything people do is fallible.  And because a church is a thing of people, then it too is fallible.  And the Church, facing empty pews, the rise of social mediums that leave it behind, seems to be admitting this a little bit, that it is indeed fallible, as I listen to some sermons from Virginia Theological Seminary, excellent ones by the way.  And then, too, there is the difficulty of belief when they intone "God," as I find it hard to believer that this notion of God is a figment of the fallible.  I believe in the goodness of the message.  And I do believe that at least in someways we all are, indeed, 'broken,' though this requires a deeper poetry of the mind to entertain.   And in a way, I might believe in God on some days, but it's hard for me to keep it up the way they, the Church, must go about it.  The Buddha addresses this intelligently.

I will go off to another night of work, another completely fallible evening, where all things are slowly burning.

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