Tuesday, June 9, 2015

Well, I got through the night, Monday, Jazz Night number one, with Satin Doll, a trio, my friends.  It's a sleepy night.   And then right toward the end, with the kitchen about to close, it gets a bit more complicated.  Get the band's dinner order in, their cop friend shows up...  Send the waiter home.  Clean up after the water leaking down from the ceiling in the big summer rain.

I take a bottle of Pinot Noir home with me.  The first few sips right there at that stressful hour of waiting to get the last dessert orders, oh, here come five people in from Nebraska, be their wine shrink, the first few sips taste pretty good.  There's a pleasant law school professor at the bar by herself, I ask her about her sister's wedding on the Jersey shore, so a little sip of Beaujolais, a sip of the Pinot, one of the Chinon, what's the mood tonight...  Then at that hour, it tastes pretty good.  I pull out a little Tupperware container with Merguez sausages wrapped in wax paper, munch on them, right when the stomach pangs suddenly hit.  They taste fine cold.  Cut in half I can down one piece in between this and that.  The busboy sweeps, I try to clear the last dinner plates, he's got his little system, the floor mat has expanded, producing a bump.  We're in each other's way.  Law professor H wants maybe something sweet, a dessert wine perhaps, after her plate of the vegetable du jour.  She had an omelette at home, and here a glass of chardonnay.  She likes the Jurançon I recommend.  Late harvest, deep color.  Met the guy who makes it once at a tasting.  His father was a wine-maker.

I put the red road bike on the stand, put on cycling shorts, got the remote within reach, the History Channel, the twenty-four hours after the Kennedy Assassination, then the same on Pearl Harbor.  There was a pretty girl I could have had a nice stroll with I noticed when I stopped to look over Rock Creek Parkway from the Massachusetts Avenue bridge.  The one Sunday I've had off exclusive of travels in a long time, and she had a book with her.  I turned to walk down the grassy field and she kept straight.  Idiot.

Somedays you wake up feeling, or thinking, what a big jerk you are.  How you messed up everything.  You feel cowed, cowed.  Twenty five years later, I still feel cowed.

I cling to yoga today.

Writing, one might well conclude, is a thing for depressives, depressives working out their thoughts.  It might be largely about just getting things out of the head, down on paper, something a bit satisfying about that process.  As if you were menaced by unknown creatures at the edge of a wood and wished to know each one and where it was as you made the dark journey.

The whole point of sexuality, looked at it from one way, is primarily the enlightening quality of it, the sacred quality, the healing quality, the bringing together of two halves.  In the highest being it is not directly procreative, and it really serves a far different purpose.

And when people are denied this basic bread of life, as they do in a world that commodifies and trades and elevates those who are skilled bargainers, who are necessary people who attach external rather than internal values upon a thing, the denied people become very vulnerable, they take a big knock.  Christ, all I wanted was a kiss, and she makes it impossible.

And in particular, a young man, at a certain stage at least, is highly vulnerable.  He knows intuitively the beauty, the great spiritual joy of contact with the one he obviously desires.  The external value systems, though, tend to bleed over innocent souls reaching for each other.

I do yoga, the depression lifts,  I can go face another night in the slow crucifying that is hospitality.  And hopefully, hopefully, I will feel some sense of hope and not succumb.


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