I became a writer out of spiritual reasons.  It was as if there was a silent understanding between my father and I, that I understood the core of his teachings, and that this sort of thing would be my life's work.  I read Dharma Bums and drank tea in his apartment down in the village of Clinton.  I had no idea what to write about up in the college library up on College Hill my first year after college, but the bookish life felt right.  You just needed the journey for material.  But it was all that Zen stuff, the Void stuff Kerouac referred to in Desolation Angels, this seemed like, yes, my politics.

It is a different trip, being a spiritual writer, different from academic, magazine, and basically has the sole distinction of not fitting in anywhere.  Short stories, poetry, crime novels, yes, but not often that kind of journey, perhaps because you never know along the way how the journey is going to turn out, for well or ill.  That's how the restaurant business was for me:  there was, and is, a great potential for disaster attached to it.

My journey, as I worked away, was to slowly come to an understanding, as of how to really live in the present, to not live in the past, to accept.  And so it was long journey, really, to say that and mean it too, that I could not, nor would I want, to return to the past as if a few crucial things had been wrong and that over time they had been righted, or better appreciated, or something like that.  NO.  Things had simply happened, as things happened.  There should be no expectation about the past, because things happen for a reason.  My past shaped me to be a writer, and as far as I am concerned, I earned it, largely through the time spent, technically, away from writing, doing a job, chewing on the reality of humanity, my reality.  You could say there was not a lot to write about, not a lot for someone to read about, and I even might agree, but, the fact that you are a writer shapes you.  It makes you a pilgrim of the kind the race must have respect for.  Buddhism is built on a deep philosophical base, in case you didn't know, not just a bunch of chants and robes and laziness.  The dharma happens to make a lot of sense, and for some of us, it is very vital and necessary, as if it were, indeed, the very thing that kept us from throwing our hands up and going crazy.  Such things keep some of us focussed, on track, still making sense in our own minds, knowing finally to grow disgusted with all the informational interruptions...

My journey in the restaurant business I took as no professional direct thing, but just for the experience that I thought a writer might have, as he went on crafting some of his Vanity of Dulouz, though really it's about the spiritual practice in the end and not so much the writing.  Then, one day, having figured it out, you become a sort of monk, yogi, lama, teacher, what-have-you, wishing of course to belong somewhere where it could be like you went there for work everyday.  And then, you realize, you don't want to hear about the restaurant business at all, you want to hear about the monk stuff, the holy elders, the patriarch of Karamazov...