To be banal, I wake at 1:30, confronted by daylight in the living room.  Jazz Night, the great complication.  Make green tea, sausages under the broiler, chop collard greens to steam.

I think of Mark 3:21, the family going out to restrain Christ and bring him in, saying, "he's out of his mind."  Done beautifully in a pivotal scene in Corpo Celeste in the meeting of a girl headed for her confirmation and the priest of an abandoned mountain town, when she asks him, what does it mean, "Eli, eli, sabacthani…"   The Gospel's story tells, there was the pull of the crowd, all wanting miracles and cures, and the family pulling back, "scandalized" by Him.

I don't know why cooking has such a hold over me.  Restaurant shifts seem to make me always want a back up of protein.

Salinger later regretted, the film tells us, writing the famous book.  What kind of writing should one do in the world?  How to be expressive and personal, to convey the inner experience of humanity without exciting the crazies?  How to take from real life the juice and the crux of matters without interfering with other lives?

I am drawn to the simplicity of cooking, the chasteness of its sufficient creations, sausage, collard greens, onions, chased by a cup of the cooking water, the green tea put out in the cold between the screen and kitchen door.  Tomorrow, will be very cold, and a dentist appointment will remind me of mortality, the sort of fetal figure we are in the x-rays I always try to get out of, not wishing to see my skull as if it were Kennedy's or a glimpse of the funny blueprint the auras and the halos and the energies and the cross the body is formed around.