Then comes the day off.  You got some decent rest in, late to bed and late to get up.  The week was fresh in the mind when you got up that first day, and now it's the second day off.  Dinner with the upstairs neighbor, good talk, but maybe too much about art, the novelist having to talk about what he's writing about.  Leaving the man sort of awkwardly, laundry to do at 2 AM, a very cold night, the creativity sucked out for having to share a bit too much, and yet a good talk.  The town for the most part has gone to bed.   What are you going to do?  Finally you fall asleep, and then wake up, and then what?  Where did the ideas, the belief, the creativity go?  Should do another load of laundry?  Get a haircut?  Buy an electric shaver to do it yourself?  Get the humidifier going again.  Take a peek at the wine article you wrote.  Think of the dentist appointment coming up.  What to talk about with the therapist?

Seems as if something took the energy away.  You're a sham again.  Do something with yourself, go somewhere, get out of the house...  What right do you have to go on about Jesus?   Winter's a funny time.  The present is a funny time...

How many beliefs have I been through?  Flailing amateur...

But your creative process is your own.  No one can speak to it, to tell you how to proceed.  The world full of threadbare thoughts, moralizing.  The great what do you do with yourself question... when most are smart enough to be...  doing something.

The subject of work comes up over dinner.  "It's your livelihood."  Not something you want to hear.  Well, at least there is a psychological dimension to it.  Standing behind a bar.

Difficulty relating to anyone.  Maybe I just have a hard time tolerating most people.  An old but familiar pain in the knee--yes, shouldn't have eaten that half a potato.  Astragalus tablets, three, take a walk.  Dead of winter's cold.  Turn to Saramago, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, for solace, since I could hardly write yesterday.

Jesus needs to write.  He needs that therapy, that self-help.  He needs to interpret the things already written down which people, hard of hearts, are interpreting in their stickler lifeless way.  Good traditions, fine ones, a great body of words to work with, but...  Those imbedded in it take advantage sometimes, taking care of themselves and the powers that be but missing the intention and the prophetic spirit...    Jesus breathes life into stale ceremony.

And he leaves behind an account of a person who is thinking creatively on a daily basis, each day a new idea, a new way of saying something, coming up with a better way of explaining, of shedding light on the body of spiritual literature.  It's the constant habit of creativity that gets him into trouble, and perhaps the reality of such events are far from the satirical humor newspaper and the Middle East kingdom based lack of tolerance and humanity and compassion.  Easy to do a lot of things to harm a man, personally, politically, mortally;  to raise him, well-read, educated, sensitive, is not so easy.

Jesus speaks against the stereotype, the fixed superstitions, habits, interpretations.  He opens us as well to real feelings, real emotions, real sentiments.  Of course one would want to heal the guy's withered hand, even if it is the sabbath.  And one might indeed feel a little weird, coming off the street, into a quiet church and then a mass breaking out, might well make one a bit nervous if not used to and habituated to such a ceremony.

The consciousness of humanity is a wonderful remarkable powerful thing.  It's okay to be imaginative, to say how you really feel about something, as you would in any honest relationship.


The story of humanity is one of experimentation.  Peppers come from the earth, have a particular bodily smell to them, maybe they're good for us, grind 'em up and give 'em a try, and then we'll see if they make us sick or not later on, but they shouldn't, so let us cook with them.  Maybe a certain amount of intuition is involved, along with recorded experience worth sharing.  Use cork to stop a wine bottle.