Monday, January 26, 2015

Restaurant Week.  Finally comes to a close, nerves shot.  Would you like to look at our special Wheel of Suffering fixed price menu?  If you want to go a la carte here at the Dying Gaul, you can order a veal tongue salad or the sweetbreads appetizer, and for an entree there's a Swiss-style choucroute.  Here's a wine menu?  Your reservation?  I think that's for downstairs in the main dining room.  Do I have space for you up here, let me see...  And I didn't even have to work the most brutal nights of it....  The young guy who filled in and tended bar for Friday and Saturday comes with his friends, taking up four bar stools, insulating me, telling me the tales of running out of everything.  Even the boss grabbed a beer at ten Saturday night, tucking it away and slurping it down in the office...

Loaves and the fishes.  It sounds like it was a stressful day, but they managed.  They sat people in groups of fifty and one hundred down on the grass, feeding them out of baskets after breaking up the loaves.  They were pretty much out of stuff after getting them all fed.  Jesus went off on his own afterward, and the Disciples he sent out on the ship to unwind, and then it's later on when the wind picks up, the boat can't get back so he walks over the water to them...  The stress of running a church, a church supper, pancake breakfast, fill the coffers, serve coffee.  Free here at least, without the money changers and the doves and the animals ready for sacrifice.  But still it was work.  Getting them all fed.   One hopes they had some wine afterward.  Jesus Christ.

But every time you eat, it's a miracle, when you think about it.  Taking sustenance...

Hemingway's subtle joke from Big Two Hearted River, eating hot beans after fishing in the stream.  A hot mouth trying to say Christ, Jesus Christ.  You know, when your tongue gets hot.  That could easily happen over a campfire.  And how since he lugged the cans in he had a right to eat the beans.  Loaves and the fishes.  Hotcakes and coffee in the morning, portrayed with the clarity of morning light.  Gathering grasshoppers from under the log, putting them in a jar.  Here is the man feeling comfortable with himself, no societal standards to try to run and catch.  No sirree, out here a man is free.


But the thing about that 'Writing Your Way To Happiness' piece in the Times, you get the sense that writers need to change their narratives.  They're the very people who most need to change their own stories, or need to get down to a deeper level to work through some stuff.  Seamus Heaney wrote that piece about his father digging potatoes, honest work, and how he's beginning to justify the legitimacy of digging for the roots with his pen...   Maybe that's why they work at it.  You can't change the facts but you can change the mythology.  Is there something in Ted Hughes early life that prompted him to tell not the story everyone else might have seen, but a liberation from that, the influences of his sister's occult knowledge or the nature of Yorkshire itself.  Change the narrative about your father's memories of being the only survivor of a World War One company...

Change the things that depress you.  Change for Shakespeare the facts of his family, wife, kids, back in the countryside.  Change the story that you've fucked everything up...  Cope by involving the crazy parts of family into some kind of noble or normal, simply more honest, more real, or just true, at least....  Create a self independent of all family type things, as if creating your own family, your own fresh reality free of the past.

Is that why the story of Jesus has its appeal to us, that instead of being the faulty people we are we see ourselves as, one hates to say, Christ-like?  That we could rise above our depressions and our inabilities to cope in the adult world as normal family-type people, that we wouldn't see ourselves as people stuck in jobs well below our talents, that instead of being the failures we are we would be that incredibly wise person with his disciples healing people of what really ails them...  Change the facts.  Change all of that into Christian values...

I dunno, Doctor...  appeals to the imagination anyway.  And maybe it does indeed represent some attempt to sort of figure out how your own mind works, given the evidence that you have...

I got watching the Catholic TV channel, EWTN, last night, about family values, anti-baby killing, anti contraception, and I was reading the Gospels with this in the background trying to figure out something literary or whatever or trying to find serenity, and all the Catholic Church stuff is on in the background...  And I had to think, I've done so little, I've not done a right thing by family, I've not stood up for family and children and health and love, living in my own creepy little world, not fighting to get out of it...  Horrifying when you think of it...  And now at fifty I'm too old for any of that, and I don't even have a job I can rely on...  Man, what's happened to me?  I had every advantage in life, except my own craziness.  Self-indulgence... pure selfishness.

Reasons enough why I'd want to change my own narrative...

But then again, where did they get all that out of what Jesus actually said?  Did he stand up like a politician and say "I have family values..."  No, not quite...

But the Christian message, you know, it's one of faith and redemption and good things, positive things you can do for your fellow man...  And maybe you can do good things through literature, seeing as people almost have to view faith as a bad thing these days, I mean, they are highly skeptical and practically minded...

And perhaps the message of The proverbial Church is a bit heavy handed, narrow, judgmental...  So that I might not have to think for the rest of my life that I have spat in the eye of family and all things good being who I am.  Or that because I masturbated once I am anti-family anti-woman anti-you name it.

Who knows, maybe Jesus himself was into Tantric sex from his time in the East studying under the Buddhists...  He's not the biggest family man Super Bowl watcher, wife, four kids, two car garage and suburban house...  He questions authority...

He's a thoughtful guy...  And maybe that's why I find myself in the situation I find myself in now...  Too thoughtful.  Too Christian, if you will...  I dislike snobbishness, the ways people cut down other people to put themselves as better, more capable, more adult, less illusioned, whatever...  that hypocritical side of people, the elevation, claiming the first pew, praying loudly and conspicuously and so righteous sounding.  (What sins are they hiding, putting other people down?)

I've gone and waited on people hand and foot for longer than I care to admit.  Yeah, 'where has it gotten me,' lay down with dogs you get fleas...  I have a soft spot for just about everyone...  And like Jesus I have to follow my own way, which has something to do with creativity or writing or something... as if, like Jesus, bent on something, knowing instinctively some great truth about everything...

I don't know, I don't think I'm here because I'm a bad person.  Just don't know what to do with myself.

A sense of Christ's inner realities... like, you know, the patterns, that we get abandoned...  that we have wise things to say but some people, entrenched, feel a need to actively dislike you.  No one is a prophet in his own hometown.  People are bound to misinterpret his intentions...  And yet the masses come, knowing a good thing....


A writer is always working.  He always is who he is, in the way that Jesus was always doing Jesus stuff.

Where, how, why did the church make stuff up?  Why did it take what old Jesus said and run off with it they way they do?


I feel odd when I don't write.  That's all I know.

No comments: