It felt like a bit of a stretch, but I get up on Monday mornings anyway and walk down into the town to see my therapist.  The alarm goes off.  I rise, have a cup of tea, today, same socks, same tee shirt as when I got in from my shift last night.  I throw on a button up shirt and a sweater, find my wallet, checkbook, into the courier bag along with a notebook with a worksheet I didn't get too far on.  Down to the office building, in through check-in at the front desk and up in the elevator to the second floor.  Downtown people are dressed professionally.  It's a little early for me.  "I started back up when my father died," the conversation of the security people at the reception desk, about smoking.  Yeah, go easy on yourself, I say inside my head.  Wine's better for you.

And so my therapist, Dr. H., comes out to the area in front of the virtual office reception desk, a meeting room with a long table looking out over Connecticut Avenue behind glass.  The internet is down, word spreads, and as I walk down the hallway, she tells me there was a fire alarm this morning at 9 AM, and the person will have to come back later for his session.

I plop down into the soft chair, pour myself a plastic dixie cup for water from the pitcher, brush up my nose with a tissue, and what are we going to talk about today.

Well, I think I made the right call, watching the literary fest speakers, live stream, on my laptop.  And one of the writers, a Michael Chabon did an interesting thing which was to dissect a work he called a failure and he had a good take on failure as being an honest thing, a realistic way, where as, big moment of triumph, you know, victory, that's just an isolated temporary moment sort of a thing...  He went through these footnotes over what he'd written, about word choices, about using a dog to look sensitive...

And in the meanwhile, this week I gave out a few copies of my book, and one was a gal who'd down a poetry MFA up at AU, but would that be worth $100, 000...

In the q and a, he was asked, is 'write what you know,' good advice?  Well, no.  None of us are all that interesting.  One book, maybe two.  But then you're pushing it.   There's the danger.  You need to go beyond your own knowledge, to know more.  He gave an example of a New York writer, whose later work benefited from tagging along with policemen...

But those literary people, there's kind of exclusivity about them...  They belong, and you don't.  They have that MFA brand of writing, a club, a kind of Ponzi scheme as one poet guy once told me, with the literary journals, and I dunno, I guess I just get sensitive to that kind of ostracizing impulse in people.  I wrote my book, it was the book I wanted to write, more or less, and it's good.  I mean, it's not workshop perfect, but like Pani Korbonska said, you're a writer.  Don't need to go to school for it. I mean, it buys you time, gives you a few shortcuts, makes you apply yourself, and the dude said good things about workshop support holding you up when, like, go off on tangents, or fuck it up stylistically...  And those, the MFA sort of stories, they are clever, and they sort of mine unlikely or outrageous things often enough, I don't know, just something...    You know...  I mean, take poor old Kerouac, he just wrote.  I mean, he had a lot of literary friends, he wrote a lot of letters, they talked about books, real literary people...

I mused aloud about the shape, of music meets writing meets wine and waiting on people.  I mentioned putting up some of my musical attempts up on Facebook, like that Morrissey song Everyday is Like Sunday, or, the sort of Irish music I like, the Pogues, and my brother shoots me a message, take it down you look like a blithering idiot, you're fifty, grow up...

DC has come a long way being a culturally diverse town, she says.  Yes.  Thank you.  And there's a sort of a tradition, writers play music, musicians write, and you know delve into spiritual matters...  (I don't elaborate on Shane MacGowan for her, maybe some other time.)  Joyce, a fine tenor, pops through the mind.  And I tell her I'm reading a book my dad gave me about The Perennial Philosophy, the great Tradition that all people and all times come up with as spiritual wisdom, but it's a bit too much a history of ideas when you kind of want, well, just what is this Spiritual Wisdom, that's in the Upanishads and the Gitas, and Buddha and Islam and the Gospels...

I guess even a bartender could come up with such a thing if that is so.  Like the guy who tells me every so often to write A Bartender's Guide to Sanity...

My voice is dry, and I take in more water.

I don't tell her so, but it's kind of like paying to have a girlfriend for 45 minutes once a week, or for some feminine kindness.

And you wonder, where does the bad voice come from, the low self esteem, the negative feelings...

Then again, it would be nice to get into an MFA program...  It would be nice to be around people reading books.  But, but but but.

The next day, tired.   I softly do my yoga before work.