Well, doc, there's always that one last Falstaff in the room, a person you have affection for, a mutual loyalty.  Okay, I'll have a drink.  These things happen at those gates where information is exchanged in public.  And maybe I needed to nurse the end of a busy wine night into the music and the Beaujolais, then go home and play Van Morrison's "Stranded" on the guitar.

But then there are restaurant impossible computer last-party kitchen-closing dreams, 'where the fuck is this new part of the menu on the screen,' and the kitchen is already closed, and you're trying to put this last rush of jazz night together, and you can't do it. and then you finally almost got it then accidentally erase it.   Then waking around two, ugh, no real time to work on the chakras and the prana...

And I think of Chekhov's long story, My Life, where this guy is an unemployable bum and his aged father strikes him hard with his old muscles for screwing up one more (final) job situation.  And how can I ever trust my own judgment when I missed the obvious gestures of peace from the girl I loved and should have married back in college but I was so busy with my own gloom and my own sort of bad student literary path, or some sort of ego thing...

And I even got cross with my lovely old mom about computer passwords on such on the way to work...  Yes, it's good to be through a real week of feeling very low.  Maybe it was all that yoga, trying to unblock, that did it.  Maybe one of my lower chakras has been messed up ever since then..

And I want to write her, you know, like, a letter to fully apologize to her and her friend, to explain, to say, well, at least I'm in therapy...  Sorry about the whole thing, my misreading things, my recalcitrant egotistical stupidity, my sado-masochism, my unfriendliness, my lack of male grace, my...  lack of humor and kindness and compassion, and I'm the one who ended up suffering so much because of it all, stupid kid...

How could I, how can I, not repeatedly cringe about the whole thing.  And that being the basis for all my decisions henceforth, the final gloomy Beethoven writer thing, to seal my fate of not making decisions, thinking I could beat the system you cannot beat...

Well, maybe if I listen to Pema Chodron talking about compassion and tonglen practice, maybe...  I'll get to a better place than I've been in the last 25....  Breath in the hot heavy air of your own suffering, which is everyone else's suffering, and then, and then, Ode to Joy...



But you get through the week, whatever, it's always there, the colossal failure, the breach in life...  I don't know...  It must mean something.  Something Buddhist.  Maybe some sort of drama of the Universe, or some lesson about ego and projecting your own ego, which is a false thing, upon a situation, thus not being able to see it as it is.  Maybe the ache is also some cry of an ego trying to dominate the true Self, tell it a story, where the Self is, of course, whole and perfect the way it is.

So then what do our lives mean?

I medicated myself again with Beaujolais after they all had left.  (It's only twelve percent;  you can't do too much damage.  It gives you something to nurse on, while I eat my hamburger...)  Am I just going to stand there alone in my misery with all the clean-up work left to do?  My body began to hunch over, gloomy, after all the rush rush rush, all the running and doing.  Then it does indeed feel like my spiritual quest has been hi-jacked, that I'm reading from a script different from my own, and that's probably what I was doing back in college, the script of my brother's way in the world, which, as we see, doesn't work so well for me.  The drinking...  As if I was telling myself, 'this is what you are supposed to do, right?'  Well, I'm built more sensitively than that, I guess.

So then, you realize, you have to do yoga.  You have to do a daily practice.  Writing is far less important.  Your health has to come first.  And then maybe you stand a better chance of knowing your self, tuning out the ego, getting back to your own thing...

I'm being overly dramatic.  But that seems a part of expressing what you need to get out there on paper, not so internalized and tied up...


It all makes you wonder, doc, like, how could you be so stupid, so utterly foolish as to act against your own fondest wishes, as if you were intent on destroying everything, if there weren't something within you that you absolutely cannot trust.  And that must be the ego, according to the literature.  So then what do you listen to?  I mean, you always try to follow your heart, but why doesn't that work out so neatly?

It's like those times in life when you are standing there looking at yourself stand there and go through things, things which are completely separate, alien, a kind of sleepwalking, from the things you want to be doing in the world to be who you are...  Who is this person, figment of people's imagination, the self has fallen into, people pleasing... tolerating every last one of them the people who come and bring their own worlds with them, and yes they say nice things about you as the babel on, but what does any of it have to do with you, their drama, the deals they make, the travels they take, their quest to go meet chicks or play in a band, or unwind...  You really need a shell.  That's how it ends up:  pull up the draw bridge, fill the moat, don't engage.  Let the egos fly around like so many bats trapped in a room, flapping about, confused, hearing themselves talk as if it lets them echolocate.   Eventually they will find the open window, when you don't engage with them anymore.  Old Jesus was right...

The pain is your path, they say.  Be open to it.  Breathe it in.  Have compassion for yourself, and then you can give it to others, and there are other people out there just like you.

So maybe that's where I'm at.  Youthful insecurities in that arena of first love, like, how to give young people who go through such things a positive direction...  Good for self-confidence, that sort of a thing.  It's like there should be a Jesus for such a thing, who comes along and heals the young people, because you have a chance when you're young.