Yeah, I guess I just get bored shitless sometimes.

There's only so far your own story and that which you know goes.  True.  If you're talking about writing.

When I want to write I get morbidly shy.  Perhaps it's because I'm a skinny person, weighing around 150 pounds, that it might be natural to be careful around other human beings.  Lessen the threat.  Avoid complication.  Skinny people need time with their thoughts.  There's lots of times when I want to write, too.

About this same time a couple of observations came home.  I think it was listening to our matron French waitress describe the selfishness of an important Georgetown customer--I had impressions of my own about her, waiting on her, like, once, demanding a glass of rose from out of the blue--that led me to finally realize how maybe it wasn't  bad thing, this not hooking up with the girl of your dreams back in college.  I mean, not that my friend was typical, but, you know, not that far away from the typical paragon...  No one's fault, that.

Yeah, that kind of a thing...  Harshness, it stood out more and more, and when I met young ladies from other parts of the world, from other cultures, I felt strangely appreciated.  A sort of bridegroom, rather than a deviant.  God bless Mexico and South America.  Or for that matter, old Polish ladies, god rest their souls.  I mean, I could always talk to anybody.  Because I liked them. Because I could understand them immediately, when they looked you in the eye and started talking.

And I had absorbed the harshness, as if that was simply the way life was, that whatever good you were attempting would end up obscure, unacknowledged, misinterpreted, and maybe that's why I'd gone into the restaurant business, from a generosity of spirit that was used to little reward.  I absorbed it into my psyche, but that was also the seeds of rebelling from it.  Like, 'you know what, fuck you.'

I mean, I know I, or rather it makes sense now, felt the need to get away from certain elements of the Amherst experience, like I wanted to get back to real people...  The grounds crew chapter of A Hero For Our Time...

But sure, you get tired of the same material or lack thereof.  The same habit, the same work.  You still have to write, but the weather is cold and dank, the night dark and windy, and the only reason I went out was to go get wine, down and back, not stopping in the bookstore.  And what can I write about, how can I make up a world of fiction to research and explore, in order to, as Chabon says, know more...

One of our better writers, I corresponded with him briefly, he's a big cheese.  He liked Washington, DC, good town, everyone striving, but in the end he knows he needs something.  Vice.  That's why New York's a better place.  He's an Irish guy anyway, what would you expect.  He took the trouble to tell me that.  We'd been to a Pogues concert in Northampton a long time ago.  I was asking him what he remembered, and it led to a brief exchange....

That was thirty years ago.   Imagine.

But the tediousness of not having any vices, that stays with me.  The sheer boredom of it.  The excesses toward the material, rather than the spiritual and the creative...  Judgment always following upon that choice...

Green chamois shirt from Beans, Dickies I wore through the winter.

The writer wants the time to write, it's how he does his work, achieves that which makes him proud, but when you're out of material, it can get weird.  The people who get MFAs in creative writing, they read a lot.  The workshop...  Things for people who write fiction.  Maybe that's where you find something, when you're feeling that adrift feeling.  Go back to your roots.  Relax.  Even if it is DC.  DC, you know, it had to have its rebellious elements, the Punks, Bluegrass music, Marion Barry...  African Americans aren't the only ones who want to sort of change things, or open up...

I guess that's why I like sleep, because inevitably, you dream.  You dream, you get back to your music, your roots...

What catches your eye?