But I cannot wake without a sense of regret of a night's adventure.  After work I go join my buddies for a wind-down glass.  The talk is good.  It's good to have a friend, we share some red wine.  And today I wake up late.  A good conversation about Catholic school education, the spirituality inherent in all learning (which is not well respected these days as it should be, a thing crucial to education), but I'd be hard-put to assemble a narrative of the evening, but that we sat in front of television I don't remember while one buddy talked on Skype to a young lady in South America in the far room behind glass doors.  The bike ride home, uneventful, required calm concentration.  I pull up my street with the sense of having been out too late, shoulda' just gone straight home, put my road bike on the stand, got in a slow roll, had my two glasses of Beaujolais...  And where do such late-night conversations go?  Except that they are useful, you have to admit, and these guys are your friends, and shop-talk is necessary.  And they are at that hour in which you've finished up work, where it's good to sit back on a couch and listen.  Yeah, man, I get it.  But, when you're in a rut, you need to think outside the box.  Which is perhaps why it feels reasonable to light incense when I get home finally.

Is it that a Kerouac has less that sense of maybe-I-should-be-doing-something-else-with-my-life that hits once responsible old schoolboys.  Having less that sense the doors to the narrative are open.  Whereas others of us might wait for that final cleaning up of one's act, finally, a clean Coltrane going down to the studio to record A Love Supreme...  We feel too much guilt over current palliative habits to set our creativity free.

In the space between falls a job.  Falls the facts of life.  Falls the individual who is a good guest but ultimately stays on a bit too long after his dinner and makes you nervous.  And there was enough angst over getting things done in a shift that, yes, a little calming medicine is necessary.

But the puzzle in the train of thought here seems to be that there is plenty enough evidence of school-boy guilt in Kerouac's work.  There doesn't seem to be much self-reflection, Hamlet-like questioning of self, in Neil Cassidy.  And there obviously needs to be some for the lot of us wanting to be part of a respectful respectable useful society...

Take this back to my own job, which seems harmless enough, but it can seem the job for weak men, weak men who are at a loss of what better to do with themselves, not bold enough to try a few different things before settling...  I do my job, well enough, and people have a civilized time, a bottle of wine for four, appetizer, entrees, coffee with dessert.  Respectable people, who, in turn, thank me and call me Sir for my little helpful acts and good hospitality that cannot be faked.  The musicians, who play the jazz for us, I am good friends with.  We're all in this together, no I in team.

But where falls in, after reading Buddha's words and the Gospels and Corinthians and letters from your old Dad, after listening to JFK and RFK, and Roosevelt, where falls that sense of the right way, the moral way, the respectable way, the way that is not fraught with the sense of cumulative missteps, of things like 'not standing up for yourself,' and things like that.  Too many bad influences, not enough studious reading, and all of this catching up with me at some point.

And Kerouac, yes, he definitely had the circumspection, here and there, in Desolation Angels, in many passages here and there where he is really really trying to be good, to be a good boy, clean, living in harmony with nature, his cabin with good nutrition, a good little system.  But, but, but...  We know how he ends up.  Even when he sings lyrically, is it in Dharma Bums, at the end, "a new life for me."  Alas.

Bringing us back to Shakespeare, where, by dint of dramatic structure, there are too many characters and situations not to allow the final circumspection, even if a character is helpless to do anything but recognize, too late...

Lincoln never was much of a drinker (though all they had back his the days as a young man was bourbon whiskey, and ale, and he had enough example of relatives gone mad to be careful.)  A sip of wine, maybe, at dinner, to be a polite political figure.  And he did not have, as a result, so many sins as some of us, to live down.  Though he did, it seems, have that illness, melancholia, a state of blues he could not help, clouding his mind, making thought painful.  The lists of wine and booze had for his inaugural parties, along with the roasts and the oysters, are quite long, and ample, but for the crowd, for lesser men, not he.

Put a vice in place, yes, maybe indeed, it becomes a crutch.  When you could be out doing more useful things as the world turns...

Alas, it is not the barman's place to get as cross with the self-indulgent as he would like to be, from the boss's perspective, nor the client who comes in regularly and spends.  Or, one day, does he get sort of fed up, my father's temple of learning you have turned into a crass place...

It retrospect it was a good conversation, my pal Ray talking about his education at Damatha High School, his class in religious traditions inclusive of the wide range, not even any emphasis on Catholicism.  And I'm able to do my yoga after the shower, after writing.  And perhaps after such considerations, the ability to act to the sort of values and morality you'd really like to inhabit and exemplify, maybe becomes more possible, more supported.

Must one know the sickness inside himself to surmount it, curing it...