As I ride my bike home through a rain almost like a springtime rain after the cold, salt on the street a foot wide against the curbs, ice patches in the lanes, I recite Eliot's Preludes to myself.  'The winter evening settles down with smell of steak in passage ways, six o'clock, the burnt out ends of smokey days, and now a gusty shower wraps the grimy scraps of withered leaves about your feet and newspaper from vacant lots.  The showers beat on broken blinds on chimney pots...      {All the way through, to} 'wipe your hand across your mouth and laugh, the worlds revolve, like ancient women gathering fuel in vacant lots.'  Home after a Sunday night shift full of good people.  And now is a time I shouldn't be writing, but I write anyway, because it is relaxing.  Writing after having a glass of wine is different than writing in the morning.

But it occurs to me that what you go through, what I go through, what a clear-eyed person goes through, of course, what it does us let we do what we do better all the more.  It makes the job that much easier, that much more completely natural.  So that the job, what one does for work, actually has benefits.  The benefits of sharing, with great people.

So it is.  All the things that were painful to go through, well, they make the toil of life that much better, even as one does not chose these toils, but must attempt to pick an adult life and work as best one can given the information and the gut sense one has.

I quip and listen, I quote and swallow, I give and take, I absorb and pre-absorb and post-absorb, all the things people say and talk about.  I see people struggle with the concept and the feeling of this thing called happiness, the elusive thing, and I see people endure a life of work, and I often wonder what I myself am doing in it all, this stuff called life.

But again, the things you go through, referring to stuff that's hard to remember, not easy to swallow, really help fine-tune you to do the things you must do in life.  They are sometimes like Mother Teresa things but done over joy, over the wine that is God's gift to us, inextricably, acknowledging the blend of life's essence, not all lepers, not all blind sick people, but the half sane half crazy half miserable half happy people who walk the everyday attempting to get by to not make a bad show of it as they march day by day through life sometimes smug sometimes not.

A professional psychologist after witnessing the Sunday night of Mr. T and the two Ks asks me of what Mr. T's condition might be, and without thinking about it, what do I say, but "excess of sanity."