Tuesday, August 22, 2017

Schoo, schug, schoough, schoogh, schugh, the bike tire of my old Bianchi as it rolls on the trainer stand..., the color of its frame of the trademark Celeste, almost of a Virgin of Guadalupe green blue, a hint of starlight, sounds as I pedal slowly through the night, relaxing, unwinding, throwing the muscles of my legs into a sort of match with themselves, calisthenics, like a baseball game, a rhythm, a changing of tensions, as if a sailboat now were catching the wind.  The bar rolls under the tire...  The legs, the quads, the calves, make their own invisible sound.

Underneath, within the bicycle itself, a smoothness that has withstood perfectly over time, over years, the smoothness of the mechanical chemistry of the Campagnolo factory, hubs, bearings, the crankset, set into lubrication for a thousand years if not eternity, the sound of an efficiency that overrides the sound of the back wheels tires passing over the roller bar that substitutes the road itself of this trainer stand the bike is confined by above the carpet, primarily by a clamp that screws down onto the back axle, sandwiching the carefully crafted  quick release hub.  The pressure holds the bike without squeezing out the vital lubrication.  The bicycle itself is a perfection of smoothness.  You're riding the same bike, in the same way, as Fausto Coppi, or Marco Pantani, going up L'Alpe D'Huez.  The same holiness applies, a moonshot on a bicycle, the solitary climber fighting off the brutish teams.

The banded muscle of the legs vibrate back and forth, pulling, pushing... kneading the bones around in their circle.  They tighten, they loosen, they jump and dance, and they speak to the organism as a whole, animated with life.

The fan is on before me.  Whir, whir, and another, the air conditioner behind the sofa, set to fan. It is summertime, August.  What the hell are you doing up at this hour anyway.  Watching Father Barron on the television screen, Life On Fire, story of Catholicism.




And now in the woods, or even as I type.  A strange feeling, one I am not used to.  The feeling of actual happiness, as I go to work.  The path, through the woods, level, then descending, then climbing.  As I enter the woods, a homeless man I respect but do not trouble, off to the left, living there, as far as I can tell, year round.  He once told me that it was against the rules to ride my bike on the paths in the park, and I politely obeyed, and then later--after my own encounters with mounted park police--he told me it okay to ride, and I thanked him and explained that I liked to walk and look at the birds.  A sort of friendship.


Platonov, Amongst Plants and Animals:

It was much like that opening scene.  The baby rabbit playing with its own droppings.  The simple anonymous man, 'hunting,' without the slightest intent to hunt, just 'getting nature.'



What has gotten into me, he wondered, on the path to work, through the woods.  He looked upon the decay of a certain fallen tree trunk, and the hill, seeing the beauty of its decay in the late afternoon forest-filtered sunlight, dappled, bringing out the trees fibers turning into brown dirt.   Down the steep hill, a massive tree, uprooted in a storm, on its side downward over the path of the creek that leads down to the stream.  The tenders of the park had cut through the thick trunk where it had come down on the lower path.  The dirt pulled up, the roots bare.  The tree down, the man saw, reclaiming some effort, that of being in nature, and it all making sense again.  "What is this strange almost unfamiliar feeling of old happiness, joy, contentment... Possibility."

There was the stream below, and each object in the woods along the path was a worthy subject of Atget, a photograph, all of it, infinitely so, composed naturally, how could one even know what the best part of it all was?  Was it the larger fallen tree, uprooted in a summer downpour of high winds, down below, or, near where you walked along with a deer grazing just 15 feet away near saplings planted in the restoration of local flora...  Overgrown, yes, but still, life, green, air, water, mineral, and some sort of fire, unseen.

Is it that it is August, the body full of the sunlight of summer, before the cruel clock change of early November, and then the winter, the holidays at work, the difficulties.

Who am I?  What is time?  I have found some happiness again, isn't that interesting...  In such a mood now, now, what he was going to did not seem oppressive, but almost rather presented itself as an opportunity, not so difficult to put into some form of being...  The man observed all this within and without, came to the low bridge over the stream as it came down from the manicured meadows where the stream was lined with stones making a slow series of tiny waterfall pools, and proceeded pushing his mountain bicycle up the paved road that climbed steeply.

And with the good feeling, a kind of awful raw sensitivity, a sense of a shimmering white-clad strength of spirit within.  Which he must have found strange, a thing going back to childhood with stuffed animals, infinitely gentle.  Idiotic, but acceptable.



... And Doctor, this is, well, you know, you're that age, you fall for a beautiful girl--in quotes--and you just think it's going to work out;  of course, it has to;  it's love, unselfish, Corinthian...  But it doesn't work out.  It's a series of unstoppable decaying events that are of misunderstanding.  And because of what that relationship, that she and he, that time perfect for such developments and new opening chapters, well, that becomes a bright spot, romantic, against a backdrop of the stuff of life.  The stuff of life, well, you think you'd just be happy, that home would always be home, safe, secure, eternal.  You think you've gotten thus far and doing well as far as that ideal career of being the great teacher of words, poetry, literature, the psyche, the subconscious methods of the artist...  The seeds planted, well, yes, of course they are doing well.

But the story starts to change.  People become mortal.  Time, finite.   Poetry and the passing of time, all the more meaningful and poignant.   And it become seen that life is not easy.

You get a little bit quiet.  College, and living amongst all the facile New Yorkers who like to talk and hear themselves talk is a lot different from those towns where you went to school.  Small town, small town, lots of land, farms, barns, roads, and here and there the settlements that happen upon the earth.

You make mistakes, as any 20 year old kid would, the usual foolishness, shyness, making things more complicated than they would have been for the self-confident...

The bright spot of life becomes a serious downer.  Isn't that strange.  The thing that was, as you saw it, as a net to catch you, a parachute, something to care for you just isn't there.  And you drop like a rock and hit the ground.  Such is fame, ha ha.

It's like the very thing that, that you think anyway, will make you happy the answer to your dreams becomes the thing the chemistry of the depression, itself a sign, a token, of maturity and adulthood and grave seriousness, coalesces around.   A precipitation in the brew of life.  The red herrings of life, so to speak, even as we ourselves are herrings...

And you know, not that I am anybody, but this is what came upon Lincoln.  The thought of the rain on the girl's grave...   Or was it an awful foreboding sense of all the duties that lay before him out there in the future beyond such places as backwater towns, New Salem.   It was almost as if he liked that sort of poetic melancholia.  And he even wrote anonymous verse in the local paper;  we might find embarrassing, but 19th Century enough to get away with, the couplet lines.  The guy was handcuffed, constrained from taking anything seriously that wasn't his stuff, like the greatness, like the unintentional eloquence, simplicity, his golden rectangle thoughts, his originality...  But what a burden, a kind of madness gently strained...

That's how I feel about writing.  I'll come up with something eloquent, perhaps.  And it won't be about the girl, the Princess in the book, anymore.   It will come as being about the noble voyage of the soul in a fallen world, I suppose.  It will be an attempt to recapture, if you will, the eloquence of Corinthians and the things of that nature, parables, little lessons that tell no story other than that of the soul.  Yes, reclaim all that.  Even if you're just a fake, a phony, who-the-heck-are-you-kid, even if you're just trying to sound noble and being a bad actor about it, without the gravitas necessary.  Like Lincoln, in his Brooks Brothers overcoat--he earned it.   And he too, well, at least in the storybook, is about that noble voyage of the soul.   Yes, I think he must have felt some kind of very deep sense of angst or pain, anxiety, whatever, some foreboding sense of natural disasters and manmade ones, so that he wrote, as if it were his sword, his pen, a protective powerful weapon.

Not everyone careth about the poor.  Most of us don't seem them as equals.  Not everyone cares about the problems of the poor.  Rather, we strive ourselves not to be poor, not to end up that way, horrible, we think, the trailer park, the urban hovel month to month, scary, the neighbors.

Poor bastard.  That's what JFK liked to say, 'poor bastard.'  He must have thought of Lincoln in the twilight of those very words, poor bastard, the war, the idiot generals.  And Kennedy himself, he too was a poor bastard, with all his health issues, his spine rotting away from all the cortisone treatments, all the things that are supposed to make you healthy and functioning but eat at you, the supposed cures.

Do I want to write when I get up?  No, not always, sometimes I'm too scared almost.  Too worried.    And it would be all the easier to wake up and just stare at your iPhone, Facebook, email, Google News, the weather, Tinder, Bumble...  Rather than face all your own crap.

Well, that's not going to help you get to the place of writing.

In John's Book of Revelation images, in which the just are redeemed and the wicked put in their places, Jesus comes and asks us, explicitly, to write...  How 'bout that.  Emily Dickinson loved that.  Didn't she...

What do you do, Lincoln, to run it all off?  Where's the release valve for the pressure?  It has to come from somewhere.  Why not the old Bible, the Good Book...  Psalms.  The Gospels...  Does that make me deficient?

All a bit tiring.  "Stand up and fight!"  No, later.  I got to go to work anyway, later, and hang in this state between writing and not writing, sleep's dreams and waking thoughts.  The administrative efforts of life.



The day of the eclipse, I woke to a sort of WWI dream.  I'm handed a pistol, now that I've tried to step up, and I am charged with holding something like an Ernest Hemingway public square.  Someone much like my brother has enlisted me, told me that I have to, have to do the right thing, that I am being cowardly, and that all bad things are coming, and we must all now be in the greatest of defensive mode.  The airplanes, primitive and slow, like those of the first Great War, are circling now around from the left over the city skyline.  Aggressors have started to move in, and I discover, my pistol is really useless as far as accuracy and range.  To shoot at them is a joke, but there is much chaos.  The enemy is very aggressive.  Its individuals move about very quickly, appearing at random, and to shoot at them is like aiming a pea shooter at them.

The troops the honorable, like my brother, are in, are fighting off somewhere in the main defense of the old city, very serious, off to the right in my mind, and things are not going well.  The troops come up from the subway, like this is London during the blitz, and I shoot at the first "german" I see,which amounts to shooting uselessly at an enemy already captive, already basically dead anyway.  War is blindness.  I roll back and forth in my sleep.

Friday, August 18, 2017

At night, sometimes, in the summer, I go for a ride, late at night, while the city is sleeping.  Up past Kalorama, rolling on the sidewalk in front of the mosque, and then over the bridge, the far end the start of the long steady climb up Wisconsin Avenue and the Cathedral, there is a road less travelled, that dips down into the dell feeding streams into Rock Creek the other side of the creek, tamed by boulders and sewer outlets, beneath the original great hotels of the higher grounds, from the parkway.  The roads are narrow, well lit by street lamps, well paved, and hilly, such that one can plot out a course of hills to ride in succession.  At night there are bucks, two, with decent horn, in the front yards of home across from the Finnish Ambassador's Residence.

Lincoln, when he was here, as President, of course in the wartime, liked his nighttime horseback rides and walks.  One night, as is reported, he walked all the way from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue on up Massachusetts all the way up the Naval Observatory, not far from these night rides.  In your fifties, everyone has come to grasp everyone else's craziness and their own, and he found it not unfitting, and not unwarranted, to go out for such solitary trips, unprotected by bodyguards, on up to the Soldier's Home, where once someone put a rifle bullet through his top hat.  Something he shrugged off.  That's how wartime is; people get crazy.  Better to avoid, if you can.  If you can.

You're crazy, you know, your wife is crazy, each in an understandable and coming-by-it-honestly-enough through some curse of depth and talent and spiritual intelligence and intuition;  the whole country of people has gone crazy, and now the most crazy thing, war, is burning like an unstoppable fire, odd because you really just wanted to do something peaceful and biblical, which is to free enslaved peoples, and here you go, Bloody Kansas, this whole uproar just primarily because you were picked to be President, Jesus Christ, why not go out for a nighttime ride to clear the head and at least feel good in an animal way.  Let the rest of this bemudded town disappear below and behind my back as I gain wind, and find that fresh air that lets me deal with it all.  Thunderstorms, I do not care, I welcome, and shoot at me, I don't give a rat's hind as they say.

One day I'll be dead, anyway, and whatever small seeds this old prairie boy is able to plant through is beleaguered words, let it happen, the torch has been passed to a new generation, so it will be one day said, remembering my ghost.


Nighttime, if you live here in this powerful and protected town, is for those who live here, accustomed to it, locals, seasoned veterans.  Big cars darkly muffling prowl through U Street near the Chili Bowl, the old jazz corridors, people adept at being out and talking to each other as one big family, carnivores of fun and no small flirtations...  and in more sedate parts of the Northwest part of the town, where there are significant woodlands and fresh air of a sort lower than Lincoln's cottage at the Soldiers Home, near a favorite tree, and why not liberate yourself from the expectations of minds and punditry and let the imagined and the imagination speak to the silent night filled with sounds like running streams, unbroken by the nagging and frightful sounds of rumbling traffic, sirens, a speeding semi duty of U.S. Postal Service braking to pass through Sheridan Circle early before even the hint of first light.  Dave Chappelle could joke about the contrast, the white guy's night out, versus "his colored friend," that's a joke.  Lincoln,  you know goddamn right and well, loved a good laugh, a good carousing late at night to relieve things, much as he is portrayed a bit dry,  Well, to be so dry and noble, you know the fellows keel ran pretty deep, knowing and partaking in the depths of the waters of how men are, drinking, talking to women, telling stories...  The Second Inaugural doesn't come from playing paddy cake paddy cake, or a strict strictly legal mind.  He wouldn't have chosen to leave the Address at the Cemetery up at Gettysburg to be so brief, had he no sense of humor, and an Irish one at that.  Eloquence is a balance, my friends.  You got to know the shit to know the stars, as any country singer will tell you, vestiges of the earlier America and still a large part of its working soul.  Lincoln was not a plastic bullshitter, waving the flag for the annual Memorial Day concert on the National Mall.  Funny they even made a monument lit at night, such a character, who really is too interesting to be lit at night, who would have preferred some anonymity.


(And he wouldn't have cared so much about himself getting shot, but for the inconvenience of it, so much as them who are supposed to know such things plainly obvious about such men, as much as them letting that poor Kennedy boy get shot as a sitting duck, when they knew Oswald had neon signs about him...)


Hemingway, it strikes me, as I roll free, feeling that excellent feeling of being light and airborne and comfortable on the more modern of my two road bikes, the Cannondale, tires juiced up to near high pressure, my headlamp charged enough, just hungry for getting out into the night, Hemingway's stories are parables of fame, in one way or another.  He was a gentleman coming from a 19th Century literary tradition of gentleman like Turgenev and Balzac.  The Short Happy Life of Francis MacComber speaks of the decay inherent in running the literary business successfully, as do even early short stories hint, like the one about getting caught for poaching game out of season, having to hide out.

It was important for him to make a success out of himself at that venue, and indeed he succeeded, well enough and with some magnificence.  He is an artist, a good will ambassador, deserving credit for taking the time to explore human existence in a developed and sensitive way.  There is spiritual stuff in him, but more as a tale to tell than a complete focus on it.  He reached out to portray the lives of the poor and the injured and with some sensitivity toward those who live in cities, habits of cafe life, and those of the country side.

Hemingway's calling is his, and he hit it in a maturing form.

But knowing what you want to be at age twenty is different from the calling that happens further on in life.  Would one now know, these days, the full nature and meaning of their calling?  I wouldn't have known then, like I knew almost the opposite, even as I kept on.


Thursday, August 17, 2017

One night after heavy rain, after work, just following my return to the city from my mom's, I went out back in the garden and pulled out vines and weeds.  They came out easily and soon there was a good pile of them on the step stones.   In the morning, in the light, there a clump ten feet by ten, about four feet high of pulled vines, small trees, a miscellany of weeds that in the jungle weather and rains had overtaken the garden.  After a few hot dry days there now needed to be a way to get rid of the pile.

Too much to take out to be put in big hefty bags, I choose a late night after work, took out the weber grill from dusty corners, low on charcoal, found an eternolog made of recycled cardboard impregnated with combustible wax, built a starter fire and started piling on the vines, still green, some of them wet.  The dead of summer.  Smoke rose quickly, and then flames, and when the flames went down, I threw on more and the smoke was everywhere, the smell of campfire on the clothes.  I was careful, and nervous, and watching with a hose incase the flames rose too high or any neighbor might wake and call out, what the hell are you doing.  The hour got late, and the pile went up in smoke without incident.

Except for a small scratch on the back of the leg, as I'd been dumb enough to conduct this damp and dirty business wearing shorts rather than jeans.

And weeks later, after attempting to treat something looking ulcerous and the back of my left calve, red, itching.  In an attempt to topically treat, I'd forgotten my allergic reaction to the antibiotic Neosporin.  Bandages, sterile cotton, hydrogen peroxide, rubbing alcohol, tea tree oil, silver ointment, and Polysporin tube sat around the coffee table as I went to and fro from work.

So I sat waiting in the doc's office on a rainy morning, a copy of The Bhaghavad Gita in the recesses of my wet courier bag as I sat on the examination table, the paper crinkling beneath.

I am told just to cover it and leave it alone.  That's it.  Soap and water.  A bandage.

Funny;  best just to leave things alone, to let wounds heal themselves, no matter how bad, or infected, things might look.

It's a weak spot for me.  I came closer than I'd like to think about an infected wound when I first came to town.  There was a waitress who waited for the poor busboy sweeping up after the night, that first year at Austin Grill.  There was some sort of after work get-together, a break for the norm.  I rode with the cooks, who got there, and decided they needed they needed to make a cigarette run.  And I, being as quiet as I was back then, having a hard time expressing my will, simply opened the door of the moving car and stepped out into the alley of a DC summer night.  Later on I made it back to her mom's apartment with her, and she took care of the wound on my foot, which got worse.  It wasn't til one of my housemates where I lived down on Foxhall, Sandra Patty, a nice woman who'd travelled in Europe and wore European laundry which was often drying upstairs near the bathroom hallway, told me I needed to go to a doctor, gave me a name for one, shaking her head as she looked at the wound just inside and down the foot from my right ankle bone.

That was the time when I'd first came to town and worked two jobs.  The temp job by day, the busboy by night.  The doctor gave me an antibiotic, and showed me I needed to keep the wound clean, etc,. cleaning it out twice a day and keeping it elevated.  Both jobs were ones I had to do on my feet.  I remember sitting in a men's room stall where I cleaned the wound at lunch time in the office somewhere near 19th or 20th and L or K.  The scab gave way under as I swabbed it with the hydrogen peroxide, and black sort of hole opened up, and I almost fainted at the look of it.  I cleaned it out, didn't look too deeply at it, put the antibiotic ointment on it (I wasn't allergic to at that age), bandaged it up, took a deep breath and went back to work.  It hurt.  I took aspirin, and I got through my shifts, and eventually, I forget how long, it began to heal up, no more hole in my leg with black stuff in it.  No more gauze bandage to put over it and limp through a night standing on my feet running around as a busboy.

Healing is a wonderful thing.  And we all have our scars.  We all are, well, almost dead, either in the narrow good way a thing went rather than a bad way.  My brother's fingers remember on cold days holding together the electrical system that kept the motor of a fishing boat running, somehow under the cold sea water that had risen within the boat.  Numb and pain.  He doesn't tell the story often.

Some wounds, though, you have to, as I say, leave alone.



Actually, I found that my hospitality, it came at a good time in the world.  And that life and the world should throw my talents toward the job as it was and had to be dealt with was not a bad thing, once I got healthy, as August with a  belly full of sunlight allows, before the darkness of clock changes and winter night shifts and cold bare commutes on a bicycle.

You had to look at what is going now, as far as automation, globalization, the possibility of robots taking over, no more brick and mortar, etc., etc., etc.   There has to be some common reflection of the hospitality which is at our own spiritual reality as a high animal most capable of hospitality.

Outside on Connecticut Avenue, near the old office of my therapist, and near the alley that takes you from N Street and behind the old low brick stables that have stood since before Lincoln's time, behind the tall office buildings, the side door to enter the red brick cathedral of St. Matthews, there is a halal stand that serves lamb and chicken and felafel, for $6 or $7 a decent meal to have under your belly after the talk at the therapist office regarding your own mental health and life and history and existential situation, there is hospitality.  The young man is from Syria, I think.  I talk with him through Ramadan fasts when it is hot out...


It is a high claim, I suppose, to think you're doing something noble and spiritual serving wine and food.  There could well be Quixotic bluster to it, no doubt.  We are flawed representatives, earthy, sinful, fallen, living in a broken rattling world full of people grasping for power without the balance, perhaps, to keep a balance.

And it is enough to return, after one's labors, to one's own little peaceful chapel and place of prayer, a Buddha statue, some wine, incense, monkish duties, folding too many clothes, fixing supper, taking out the wine bottles, the plastic used, the trash.

I began to not really care about getting published and all that.  I'd found hospitality, and kept at it.  I'd written things as truly as I could see them.
I guess it had just been something I'd gotten use to, the idea of the artist as worthless in society...  something easily felt in a personal way.

Of course I had another job from the writing of whatever I was trying to write.  The published bildungsroman ended up costing more than it was worth after having to file the taxes for the piddling royalties.  (I did not intend it as a moneymaker anyway.)  And other jobs, you can get lost in them, forgetting your mandate to write.  You lose a bit of faith in what to write, why do it, why bother, in the effort to survive.  Hey, that's life, right.  And I guess to make life simpler, when you work your shift you see yourself as that individual doing that job professionally.

Fortunately, a good part of me could deal with the hospitality business, and I could keep a tight enough ship that bosses liked me and my relationship with the customers.  A fortunate state of affairs., in fact.  I got something out of them, I enjoyed being present with them.

But it took me sometime to realize rationally why I did it, or was able to carry on with it, as sometimes it could get a bit bleak and lonely and dark.  Maybe some sort of troubadour I wanted to be, or follow the tradition of Irish folk musicians, an oral tradition, part of being a poet, a bard, the ideal writer behind the acts of writing.  Yes, I liked the soundtrack, good for the muscles, good for the digestion.  I was shy about getting up and singing, and never had voice lessons like I should have in the formative years of self-cultivation.

I guess it began to happen in the course of my college education.  I cared a lot for written things of value, and the papers I wrote in assignments began to take longer and delving deeper into a subconscious realm.  Certain faculty members didn't understand that, and wished to keep me confined to the lines of academic production and credential which then would lead to more academic credential and production and all that.  My heart was not into that.  Or, I guess, with some informative period, and family observations internalized, I had to rebel.  Not that I wished to rebel.  Rebelling was ironic for me, as if it went against the very values my father had instilled in me, that deep clerical response drive to pursue the spiritual parameters at the core of education.  In the way my father referred to Julian Benda's concept of The Treason of the Clerics, a take on that period before, and I suppose after, WWI, in which professional institutional scholars fell into nationalistic habit, politicizing that which should remain most a part of the spiritual realm.  My father saw that the academic world of successful publishing thoroughbreds and loudly direct commentators involved with the political matters of the day, perhaps made inevitable for whatever reason of style or employment in the current atmosphere, was in large part a betrayal of the priestly class ever expanding the examinations concerned with the deeper realities that fall into spiritual learnings and metaphor.  It was more important for him, as a teacher, to declare, "Thou art that which is," than play the game.  And he had his own magnificent style, from those well-rounded days...

That's part of it, certainly.

But pretty much immediately I felt the effects of Cs and Ds, grades which I did not completely deserve.  Someone should have listened a bit better.  Sure, their focus was highly liberal, but it was also politicized, without much room for a wayward college professor's son.

An act of rebellion leads, I suppose, to marginalization, and so it was.

I kept a marvelous ache within, and I found something right and true in it.  Something beautiful, something with some integrity.  Staying above the fray, that of that politicized involvement.  To express that, I guess that would take some definition.  I don't wish to condemn scholars who note that the very language we use is charged with the directions of power and status quo.

In my studies, oddly as he himself had predicted, something slipped in.  A little bit of light, that must have been touched upon by my own inner sense of light and the things I responded to.  Somewhere, sophomore or junior year I found a double record of JFK speeches in the music library.  (I ended up paying the overdue fees on it, meaning to keep it for reference for a thesis that they chose not let me write.)  And on the record was that last speech, the one from, appropriately, Amherst, the Robert Frost library dedication speech.  "Where power corrupts, poetry cleanses."  "When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence."  And while coming from a politician, a consummate one, but also an educated man, a reader, there was that which I was looking for, that spiritual part of education, he's telling us about, or wanted to say.  (As if he knew somehow...)

But anyway, your own work is good.  It takes an effort to sustain.  And I gather, that with the sense of rejection I received there at what was supposed to me a shining moment, leading to other shining moments, things went, well, in their own direction.  I was laid a bit low.  Lost.

Well, you pick yourself up, and keep at it.  Came to Washington, D.C, worked as a miserable clerk, temp agency stuff, began whatever career I might be construed to have as a busboy.  It kept me active, running around, amongst people.

I had really wanted to do something akin to perceptions, albeit boyish, about Robert F. Kennedy.  His graceful sorrow, his eloquence, his reaching out into the spiritual realm of the Gospels, poor folk, Mississippi, West Virginia, migrant farm workers, yes, and his funeral train leaves a lasting impression.   A melancholic Irish man, with good reason, with an incomprehensible depth of soul searchers under his belt...

But when you're feeling low, and the world does not care much about this now embarrassing matter of the book you wrote, which touches painfully on things like being treated like a deviant or a low-life, exiled, besmudged and besmirched, such that one felt too ashamed of himself to be a fledgling prep school teacher or one of those routes...  And you get cast out of the spiritual forests and the literary light of New England and its transcendental waters...  exile.

How do you reinforce feeling good about the work that you do?  As a writer, it seems it happens and exists in secret.  Few notice, few have time, no compensation of any sort.  A professional review of the book, to the cost of paying Kirkus Indie Reviews, four hundred bucks, for a gross misreading, a misreading of a central passage, yeah, the obscurity of Amazon.

So, what do you do?  You go to a therapist.  You end up taking Lexapro, as recommended to you.  You take it once, nah, doesn't seem to do anything, and then, reluctantly, you try it again, wintertime, darkness, night shifts, holidays eating at you, old age of loved ones and distance, and no seeming way out back into the light and the sort of recognition as being a decent person that such an education (on the back's of immigrant's labors) might call for, you just try to get better.

A better mood.  More exercise.  Meditation, bike rides, walks, yoga.  And finally, less of a drive to medicate yourself from the pain.

But really, this must come hand in hand with the spiritual observations.

Such as:  the world of the city and commerce, beyond trying to collect the trends and the styles and that which is currently in fashion aping whatever else is fashion, will not recognize as important the efforts of the poet, the artist, the monastic.  The value is on consumption.   Why would people remove themselves from such Protestant work ethic successes as are so readily available, power, money, real estate, good looking competent spouses, the shared kitty, self-protecting itself against any weirdness and unnecessary and unprofitable pursuits.

I strive now to feel better about myself, to feel justified, at least somewhat, given the state of the bridges I might have burned, accidentally, without intention, in the attempt to listen to and heed something coming from within, as the strange and separate of us are sometimes better able and employed to hear.  And anyway, it would not behoove a mentality to stand against itself.  Better to seek the depths of bedrock for a foundation, as was once said and wisely repeated, if we are to have character as human beings, and the strength to carry on with what we see as a fit pursuit, one which a person might feel a special affinity for, a sense of personal tradition to carry through on, to not hide the light within.

Celibacy allows for a greater expression of hospitality, I read, in The Cloister Walk.  Yes, I suppose this is true, a correlation that at least made me feel a bit better.  Perhaps hospitality actually reinforced that which allows you and pushes you against your desire to be closer to that which is in the field of things in which celibacy exists, a weird part of spirituality that really was the last and least of one's intentions.  In fact, I hoped, and continue to hold out such hope, that it is within the context of the sacred and the spiritual that liberation from celibacy would allow.  Yoga, Tantra, chakras, the replenishing of the spiritual waters through the light of sexual contact between man and woman, the engagement of flow and polarity.

But I guess I was a damn fool with regard to the achievements of such, as if I were almost out to undermine all the nice relationship things I wanted to have happen, monogamously.

Yeah, I'd made some bad choices, thinking that sensual pleasures would fall into alignment, that wine is spiritual, that serving it is additionally so, and that this clear standing-up-for-what-you-believe-in would result in some beneficial ends and not the usual awkwardness and insincerity.

But if you're not valuing yourself for who you are, then you're not comfortable in your own skin.  If you're trying to cohere to social expectations that lie beyond your ken, that lie within a mainstream majority that you find either too challenging or not challenging or simply not engaging.  You can't fool yourself forever, you can't lie, you cannot be other than yourself.  In these matters.

And I was faking it.  I thought a bottle of wine, you know, that liberation was part of it, the dance.  That's when I seemed to feel more at ease, or when I would able to pick up the guitar and sing, that sort of thing.  And there is a precedent for it.  Like, take Shane MacGowan, who'd admit that when he got nervous--as you might when having to perform--you drink a bit.  "And I'm not apologizing," quote him being interviewed in the context of Ronnie Drew's passing, or maybe in a documentary of Fairytale of New York.  It was kind of how my brother worked, as I saw it, entering into the latter part of growing up.  It would be wrong not to enjoy a good beverage in a social setting, indeed!  Look at all his successful friends, enjoying the same.

Except I was too much a pensive type naturally, a bit of an Irishman, melancholic, quiet, feeling inhibited around certain crowds and people.  A drink was a relief from that, into a more free state of action and engagement.  And over the long haul, I found out, just by the nature of my psyche, my moodiness, that I had to be a person of moderation, exercise, aerobic activity.  Social venues put my into uncontrolled situations I felt vulnerable in, acting on my heart, not as rational or controlled, and as an adult, trying to be productive in the world, well, you have to be mindful.  As fun as the ride might be.  You still have to wake up the next day...

You have to stop from time to time and go back to the owner's manual.  And exposed as a bartender is, unfortunately, Christ, you get caught out sometimes, a late hit, running on fumes, having to deal with the loud, the intoxicated telling their stories and commenting about the music on the sound system, etc.  No, the kitchen closed an hour ago.


Yes, I remember my father once, telling me of his childhood, a teacher reaching out to him as his mother was laying in her deathbed dying of tuberculosis.   "Life can be pretty grim sometimes," he said.  A lesson he learned young.  And yeah, life can be lonely.  It can be difficult and unprofitable, lonely, bleak.  There were some times I felt very frustrated, for years.   But you can hope, you can hope that you'll learn something from that, that you'll be given some wherewithal, some strength, some endurance, enough to get you out of, who knows, maybe your own bad habits... to, anyway, a better place, a ledge of understanding and some perspective upon the 'why' of the climb.  There's literature for that, biblical enough, and not in some shallow sanctimonious self-satisfied way, a place blank from all that self regard, something free crawling out from the rocks that have fallen your way. Where you can honestly say, to yourself, look, I guess this was what I was after, all along.



There's a passage in The Brothers Karamazov.  I think it's when Alyosha is praying over the body of his mentor the old monk, and he rises in a trance, awake with some knew knowledge, and the other attendant monk gets it enough to just back up and let him pass, to not interfere with the spinning of someone else's wheels.  Perhaps it's one of few self-portrait touches we get from Dostoevsky, I'd like to think, anyway.  It's a picture of when you don't have a lot of back-up, not a wide public approval rating, so to speak, not a lot of popularity, nor recognition, or people being there to say, "I get you," but you have that crucial back-up, that support that's tailor-made and meant for you, just the right thing, probably too subtle for anyone--like anyone outside a monastery--to get, such as they are, involved with this and that.  Yes, you've put up a show, but this is who you really are, and certain animals, people, can sense it, smell it, get it, know vaguely how to guide you.  But honestly, it doesn't come very open.   It wouldn't be a realistic piece of 'fiction' if you received wide and unanimous recognition;  there would only be a tiny smidge of it, and you'd have to be paying attention to catch it, a kind of harmony, a tuning of notes agreeing, no waves of being off.

In the end you are like the light is, ultimately unquantifiable, impossible to explain except through the admission that there exists no clear understanding but that of being.


As I say, it had been difficult for me to accept, in a lot of conscious ways, doing the work I did, the odd peculiarities of a life working in the hospitality business with all the details that pertain to that particular job, geography and circumstances.  Very hard.  But you can lot live in fear and anxiety and paranoia completely for any longer than you must.  Yes, one life, a good profitable, enjoyable productive one, you missed out on, looking at potential and opportunity.  You fall where you fall, what can you do, and you have to accept that which you have to accept, and then, finally, we hope, come to some peace with it.  And that can take a lot of perspective, a very high one, even, sometimes.

I would offer, or I might guess, that in the acceptance on the part of Jesus towards the odds and ends of humanity, the fisherman, the Samaritans, the poor, the blind, the leper, the dying, the infirm, we see that most odd form of acceptance, that of one's own nature, call it true nature, reality, identity.  Rather than struggle with it, be forever a questioner, is not easier to accept easier to say, thy sins are forgiven, go in peace, first and foremost and primarily to one's own self, letting the chips lay/lie where they have fallen.  Faith, that last thing, that makes you capable of the work you need to do.

And perhaps Jesus had to get over the fact of being somewhat like the nagging essayist, the rabbi teacher without so much credential.  He had to get over that, that unique form of being his own kind of story-teller, in his own vein of the traditional oral culture with a long long history of stories and tales of uncertain and unclear meanings.  He shrugged.  They almost succeeded in throwing him off a cliff at the edge of the town he first lectured in, the crowd angered, without real reason, at what he'd said.  They ask his family to restrain him, this crazy man, before they do it themselves.  All of which he takes in stride and to peaceful ends.  Something made the individuals comprising a crowd look at him and stop in their tracks, at least at the beginning of his career, before he gained momentum and the popular tales we still attribute to him today, in no small reason because the stories of his miracles and his sermons and his steadying of his fellows protect him still to this day, keep him safe, let him be himself.  To let him be himself, the real guy, Jesus, to allow that truth forward, to such ends perhaps a little hyperbole, a few tall tales, a few liberties to make a story better or truer, you can't really argue with.  Those stories passed down serve to tame our own skeptical response, 'well, who the hell re you to claim such authority.'  An artist of any sort has to claim such a natural authority at that which they particularly do, Picasso being Picasso, and so on.

Was he an odd duck, heretofore?  Regular, but strange, unpredicted his eloquence.  He must have had a few odd habits, like that of taking forty days away in the desert for his vision to coalesce.  That he might have been regarded simply as "the carpenter's son" betrays a little mystification at the guy familiarly held.  Yeah, he's... well, he's...  He seems to fall into some form of the son of a scholarly man, as a carpenter must have knows a lot of, if you will, lore and knowledge and knowhow, not just making and doing things, but being able to explain his engineering and the solidity of his principles toward making solid lasting things out of lumber.  And the son seemed to have the same gift and aplomb for that which is a profession and a trade but which is more personal, like the individual touch and the depth of a person if you are intelligent, skilled, human, wise, likable, identifiable.  Jacks of many trades they must have been back then, skilled and resourceful, versatile, broadly confident at work of various sorts, who better, what better model of that than the carpenter scholar shrewd father Joseph with the lady Mary as his wife and foremost believer-in, and she too was no slouch.

And lastly, one gathers that they must have been fun people, friendly, easy to get along with, these characters from the stories of the Gospels and good natured Paul and so forth.  Politically likable. Good friends to have, in an enjoyable way, not oppressive or personally tyrannical or selfish and manipulative or just plain hard to get along with.


The wearing of any personality, though, might get tiresome after a certain point.  What you might have thought once was you, immutable, unchangeable, can turn out to be an illusion to be gotten ride of and put aside.  A problem of being a public persona, if you aren't grounded, and trying to get back to the deeper...

Tuesday, August 15, 2017

Why do you hide your light?

Oh, I don't.  Work, I suppose.  Hmm.  Don't you think I bring out some of my light at work, I mean, waiting on people?

Yes, you try.  Do you think you could do better?

Well, yes, but there's a lot of anxiety just in trying to get to work, to get through work, you know, even without the money success end of things on top of that.  I guess that's why they call it work.  That's what they say.

Do you think there's a correlation somewhere, between the work you are doing now and that anxiety?

Well, yes, father, but on many levels...  Where to start?  The odd hours;  not being able to control when you go to sleep, how long you'll sleep.  There's everybody going about nine to five, and where are you?  And it's exhausting anyway, physically.  It is.  The pay.  That's another thing.  What household can live on one income in the city?   Where do you exist?  Where do you find comfort in being where you are?  I suppose that's why I tried bar tending, you know, because the restaurant seems like a home in some way.  You eat there, you find your friends, you encounter strangers who become in a way family.  The restaurant is a model, in a way.  You cook.  You clean up, put some things back in order, pretty simple.  And that's what you strive to do with your own space, you know.

But?

Bit yes, father.  There is some great lacking, hard to put a finger on.  I'm not saying I'm meant to be in a monastery, full time, silent.  But as a writer, I'd like to find, you know, that wise voice...  It just seems like, at least when I don't write, I'm not living up to the mandate I was given.



I feel I've lost my mandate, the strong spiritual sense my father imparted.  I feel miserable about it.  Exercise helps.  And work's not all bad.  There is lots of spirituality in hospitality.  I just read, in The Cloister Walk, that celibacy brings that out in you.  Well, I can say, that is true.  Very true, alas.

Anxiety.  I had one beer at the end of work last night.   Thought of stopping somewhere for a drink, so I ride up to Bedrock, go down in, guy checks my ID, I see my friend is bar tending.  I walk around the bar... nah.  I head home, which is hard, because there are girls out, women I should say.  It's not quite too late yet.  But going out is tainted.  And I'm a social person, I love talking to people.  But it never seems to go quite right, being out you know.  You're giving more than you're getting.

Now I have to get ready, off to Restaurant Week.  I hope the regulars stay away.  I'm going to pretend I don't know them.  I did my buddy a favor, switching shifts.  I was tired anyway, last night.  But it throws me off, you know, when you're plodding through the week.  Jazz Night is always a pain in the ass anyway.  Impossible, really.


I'd been good.  I managed to get through the various jolts of a Saturday night alone up at the bar in the doldrums of August without being pushed over the edge.  I'd had a beer, got out the door and on the bike with my courier bag and helmet, headed toward home, adjusted to going up to Adams Morgan to revisit the places and people of Thursday night, managed to avoid getting involved.  I got as far as locking the bike up and going down into the dungeon of Bedrock Billiards, as if descending into an aquarium.  There was the woman brave enough to tend bar, talking to a few bearded guys in tee shirts, I thought her attractive from the night of the Memorial for a friend's father, but the crowd, intent on pool, going up for air for a surly cigarette, did not engage, and so, you know, this is a waste, let me get out of here.  Which I did.  A woman who'd been out talking to a friend smoking a cigarette encouraged me to hang out;  I thanked her politely and she went through the glass doors and down the stairs.

Out on the street by the bike, I dawdled for a few minutes.  Two women walked by, one wearing overalls, hey, kind of cute, no?  a fun look.  But between the open bars along Columbia, that which might have led one to temptation, well, the bike got me here, it can get me home, easier in fact, downhill, just got to get past Russia House's temptations.  I unlocked the u-lock, slung it over the handlebars, and rode home.  I got in the door, dumped the bag, sat back on the leather couch for a moment, after pulling out the open bottle of wine, out of the fridge for the coffee table, had none of it, didn't even touch it, went to bed.  And even, even if I wasn't going to sleep right away, at least I was resting and it was dark and quiet, and I could relax.

And the next day, before work, I rode the bike, indoors, on the trainer.  I got up a good lather.  A little meditation.  And then I went off to work.  Sunday night.  I got there, feeling good, actually.  I'd cracked the code, finally, so it seemed.  A decent mood.

The evening went on.  And then, all of a sudden, around 8:30, I'm tired, it's slow, the bar stools are full, except for one seat,  I was very very sick of it, tired of it.  Talk about a kitchen renovation, a marble backsplash up against a window sill to go with the marble countertop, while I just wanted to proceed with my job, after the unannounced birthday, the conversations, enjoyable, but taking a huge amount of energy.   As humoring people for five hours straight does.

On Sunday night, just put it on auto pilot.  The Germans, a party of five, the girls stuck me with that, were dry and tedious.  Is the steak special lactose free, what's on the vegetable plate...  And then, to boot, on a tab of $175, a tip of $10.  Such experts, the Germans.  They came in asking for duck, where is the duck?  No, we don't have duck, except as foie gras.  The effort to talk politics, which they brought up, and I humored.

I got enough problems, just want to be done with the night, not be pushed into having a drink, my usual coping mechanism.

I just want to get out of there without being pushed into have a drink.  I just want to get to the Safeway, get restocked a bit, then go home, plan a visit to the doctor for the small scratch which is not healing well, take care of a few things, and mainly, just to get home, to do what I did last night, take it easy, chill, not have any beverage of the wine sort beyond the beer I've had.  Just bedtime, just relaxing, reading.

So Sunday night I got back home, got on the bike, necessary to help unwind as I rode, easing frustrations.  I had a little bit, not too much wine, and woke up tired the next day.

Friday, August 11, 2017

Sometimes you just want a day job.  Wake up feeling stupid.  Everyone else does it, why not you?  Shame.  You went to a nice funeral service up in Shepherd's Park, stayed out too late with the crowd. Restaurant people.  Well, on the good side you made peace with Johnny, an old boss of yours.

The day off.  The spirit was pleased with going to the service, but the shots of Jameson with the restaurant people crowd leaves it anxious, wishing to get back to the quiet, away from 18th Street.  The live music was great, but the rest was strange, a feeling of not being where your own mind is at.

Forgive us, father, for our stupidity.  Nice guys to hang with, but a different pace than the one you normally keep.

Blank look at the computer, the iPhone, what's happening, as if life were led now through the screen thing.  What can you do when you are feeling stupid?  You meditate.  Light some incense.  Take a shower.  Write a grocery list.

But it was not nothing to go seek out an old friend.  You'd worked for him briefly at his new restaurant, but somehow didn't take to it, almost twenty years ago.  You worked a couple of nights, but it wasn't your cup of tea.  You called him to tell him, rather than go face him, and you went back to the restaurant you were familiar with, used to, comfortable with.  You hurt him.   You weren't sure how it was going to go, but you were immediately forgiven, and had a nice chat, catching up, and it felt good.   And then later you talked to the bass player of the blues band that played that night at Madam's Organ.    The old religion, the old way, meeting people out in the life of a street, not always clean, sometimes rather messy.  It had seem called for anyway, to tag along with Jason and his friends at his watering holes along Columbia Road.  And you'd been careful enough to eat at the Korean barbecue, a nice bowl, a full meal.  You'd been careful enough about the shots too.  Beer.  It had been nice to put a suit on and go to a very different part of town, way up Georgia Avenue.

Maybe you'd even made a little progress in this messy thing called life.  A paycheck cleared, and that made you feel better.  There was not yet the energy to do anything resembling hearty exercise.

Observations from a memorial service in an African American funeral home would be that things are taken in stride.  All the ease of friendship and community.  Honoring each other with gesture, brother hugs, the clap of clasped hands.  A celebration of life.

Later I tag along.  The Greek American chef and his girlfriend;  the restaurant guy who now works managing property management, fixing and flipping, down to one night bar tending.  I feel like the gullible one in all this, out of place with shrewd city boys who know the streets and how to talk to women.  Relaxed hang outs, doesn't have to be fancy.

Adventures of a night.


All this is related to the nature of a calling.  The calling, as Kathleen Norris reminds us, in The Cloister Walk, is the story of one who feels the self-based original calling for poetry, the finding of an inner authority that is not based on credential as the rest of life and professions seem to be.  It includes the hardness of Jeremiah, the struggling, the difficulties, the world at odds with callings and the people who receive them.

To be a poet requires invoking your own authority, different from the credentialed academic...

Thursday, August 10, 2017

Nothing much
to write today
it seems.

Start small.

Let's see you, coming in on the end of the week, one more bar shift to go, Wednesday Night Jazz at the Old Gaul.  Sunday, went to work, sick with a cold, sent home, went to bed and slept.  Monday, the star studded farewell party for the singer of the gypsy swing band mainstay of Jazz Nights.  Tuesday, free wine tasting upstairs by myself.  Up at a reasonable hour, in limbo before work.  Nothing much to say.  Checking account low.  I guess it's good I've been pulling five shift weeks, not made easier by having to be the closer each night.

I couldn't afford the new apartment.  God was telling me something.  True I'd been on an expensive trip for my aunt's wedding.  That was a stretch of eleven days without working, plus the rental car, the motel room, dining on the road purchases, gas, taking a dent out of my checking account in the slow months of summer.

Feeling sad again.  One should never turn down the offerings of that rare friendship which is a spiritual one.

The job is hard enough, but that money just isn't there to be living here in DC.



Waking up, day off, nervous.  The realization I've been greatly taken advantage of by the restaurant business.  Which left me with nothing.    All those years of work.  Modest contribution to Social Security, a bit of knowledge, a lot of friends, sure, but in this world you have to take care of yourself. One guy has been on my side a long time, encouraging me like my mother to find plan B.

What was plan B?  Had always thought myself something of a spiritually inclined mind...

But everyday, waking up with anxiety.  The knowledge this is working not working out.  You can only labor so much, and rent at the new place, one didn't even have the energy to move into it, even as low as could be was steep enough.

Thirty years since graduating college.  No resume to speak of, hardly any skill, no real profession.  The son of man.  The fuck-up.   No better than his days as a landscaper, living at home, good at watering plants, petting cats, talking to old people.  Basically lost.  A hard enough worker, sure, when it came to physical things, but is the Amherst grad supposed to end up as a laborer the rest of his life?  My father was angry with the English Department, for tanking my prospects at a decent academic life.  I'd shown up as a good student.  What happened?  Did they care?

Well, I was through the workweek at least.  A funeral service to go, a friend's father.  At least, yes, I had friends, the social life the barman has.  But really, what the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck.  My brother permanently angry with me for my choices, for not "figuring it out."  My old mom  worried about me, etc., etc,

Not much you can do in one day to fix your own deep problems.  Change is very difficult.  But there is an odd good thing that comes through the habit of confession, of confessional writings.  You feel just slightly better.    You then aim for a peaceful evening, not biting off more than what you can chew.  Can't afford to go out, nor go on a date, nor buy a car.

I call mom.  She's sad she can't go visit Aunt Jean out in Saugus at the nursing home for her birthday. But there's no way that could happen.  I remind her our trip to Lee.  We have a nice conversation.  She retells a family story, on the subject of shoes:  when the Irish came here, tried to buy shoes, were told, no, you only bought one shoe for that price (crooked dealings.)  She's pleased I'm making the effort to go to my buddy Jason's father's memorial service way up Georgia Avenue.  "Take a cab," she says.  "I'll send you a little something in the mail."

I mention the Boston Globe headline, how climate change is heavily impacting New England.  We talk about Trump.  "I think it's the time for the wise spiritual being to arrive in  UFO and set things straight," I say, and she says I'd be just the guy to do it.

Climate response could in some way be comparable to our own bodily functions, the response to what we put into our system.   The body has its way of processing, our stool allowing for valuable biofeedback on how we process certain things.  Cheese ends up in little lumps at the other end of things, perhaps.  Perhaps more fiber would be a good thing.  Maybe alcohol leaves a burn in the gorge, to be avoided next time.  How does the nervous system feel?

Nature is telling us things.  Likewise with the mind, which responds as it does, a canary in a coal mine.  Will the new spirituality come up with a kind of dietary restriction, as older ones, for the planet, not just the body...

Are the bulk of out non-commercially related thoughts worth having?   Are they allowed?  Should they be entertained?  Or is one a crack-pot, a deviant for having them...

Mentions to the barman, "I finished your book," or, "how's your writing going," do not sometimes bring him pride.  "Your writing," the very sound of it, embarrassing.  What do you hope to accomplish?

And yet, everyday, you add a little more to the hodgepodge pile.  No one is a good writer, or everyone is.  It's just the weirdness to keep at it, to keep recording thoughts, and that's the basis of the effort.  That's all it is.

Friday, August 4, 2017

And so, and so.  The creature needs exercise.  He gets wound up, anxious, worn out by the physicality of work.  How can he strike back, strike through, as Ahab put it, through the mask?

An exercise, in putting thoughts on the Tour together:


The Col D'Izoard is on TV, the first time I'm able this Tour to get on my trainer stand with the Cannondale road bike.  The chain is in the big front chain ring and the smaller cogs on the rear cassette.  The first pedal strokes are slow.  It takes the body a while to warm up, but warm up it will, and it takes its own pace.  Ten minutes in, fluidity, and the pace, the cadence of pedal strokes, increases.  The body stretches out, comfortably on the bike, and the deep breaths come.  It's a good feeling being on a bike.  "This is the good part of me," one says to himself, and it helps to think you're back at it, working out.  I cannot remember the last ride I took that wasn't a mission to get to work or get home, just for exercise, like one use to taking the trouble to get up and down into Rock Creek Park.  Long Saturday rides out to Garrett Park, or further out into Potomac.  Past golf courses, way out, a turf farm, stables.  The countryside, quiet roads, a general store, the peace of the road, horse farms...  Those rides are better, obviously, when you've done a little leg training.  The muscles and bands of leg remember, all those rides taken as a younger fellow, and the feeling of a general cleansing that comes with the building perspiration feels very good.  It would be nice to get outside, on the bike, but here, at night, this will do.  Training.

The body is heavy, not much exercise while on a trip, a lot of driving, 1700 miles or so, too much dough, unavoidable on the road, and the belly area is not svelte as it used to be, and a far cry from that of the pros on the television, offering inspiration.  July, The Tour, comes as a kind of vacation, inspiring, quiet, scenic.  History, as the human mind can only remember, can only go back so far, such as is comparable to the enjoyment of a silent film, that's going back pretty far, and Le Tour in its history is almost simultaneous with that invention of the moving picture.  No wonder then, that it is the latest in the technology of filming so far advanced now, looks back on itself as an homage, both for the Tour and the ability of the captured moving image to tell a story, just by holding up a mirror to nature, capturing that oddest of moments, "now."

The landscape of the Col D'Izoard stage is strange and barren.  The riders pass through the steep gorges of the valley of the Guil in Queyras.  There are no spectators gripping onto the sides of the road here, bare pines, glimpses of that moonscape that marks the Dolomitic mountain stretches further up on the slopes.   The roads have not changed since Fausto Coppi climbed as the legend he was.  Nature is silent here, and no caravans of spectators.  The road is paved, but here Louison Bobet, Gino Bartali, Coppi, the old gentleman of the classic Tour fought it out, riding like birds on dirt roads, with elegant simple steel road bikes, lugged frames.

After a timed forty-five minute riding session, coinciding with the coverage and the post-race report, with a good lather rom head to toe, considerably wet, a hot shower, releasing the spine, and then some yoga.  Meditation pose feels good after the effort.  A headstand, plow, shoulder-stand, warrior.  I am tired from the week, and find myself lethargic and in some form of depressed mood.  I've been back to work for five straight nights, trouble falling asleep several nights.  Heat, throws the guts for a loop.  A series of naps follows as afternoon turns to evening turns to dusk turns to night and cooler air.  The body wishes to get back into running, or to get out for a nice walk without having to get somewhere, but the bike on the training stand is quite helpful.  And the aerobic exercise, the free movement, helps the mind in no small way.


The first sentences are slow, coming tentatively.  One is almost afraid of the keyboard, the lingering thoughts, those that come alone, but sparks of the brain which mean something and ought to be recorded.  Reluctant to face their charge, the reality of feelings, the sense of how things are a cause for a wish to start all over again somewhere else rather than holding the old bit in one's teeth and pulling vainly forward.  It takes 'til the beginning of deep night for the writer to get started.  Forget trying to line up a date, with going out, even with grocery shopping.  Momentum, time is what you need.  One thought gotten down will lead to another.  One stroke, then the next from the other side, like Tai Chi.  No wonder Ernie Hemingway liked boxing, the back and forth, a left then a right, the real thing, followed by a glimpse of the metaphorical quality, often self-reflective, inherent in the act of writing.



You have to feel comfortable on the bike.  You don't need to start out fast, you just need to know that you'll be in for the long run.  And that by each ride, be it home on the trainer, or out somewhere, and then maybe further, once inspired, and the traffic of cars tamed convincingly, you get more comfortable.  Your own work might never make the theater, but in the great tradition you will document a kind of a life until the end, through a lot of things, non of it necessary stellar, but a thread, a system of some health.  Don't start out too quickly, don't flame out writing some brilliant work exhausting yourself and setting yourself up for fame.  No, take it easy, do it slowly and steadily...  again and again.http://www.velominati.com/anatomy-of-a-photo/anatomy-of-a-photo-fausto-coppi/comment-page-2/





When the Tour de France came around, it took a while to wake to it, meaning I'd not been riding the bike, thinking even those good old innocent days of focussed rides down in Rock Creek Park when Beach Drive is closed to vehicle traffic, even the sports match of the Tour itself, childish and unimportant.  Ride the bike to work, eh?  No time go out on long joy rides.  Not even the rides close by, narrow roads in quiet neighborhoods with steep climbs.  Time to get serious, here at age 52, no time to 'mess around,' to 'fuck around,' to goof off, to do anything that does not immediately acknowledge and attempt to rectify the economic reality of personal situations...

The Tour was on, and the inspiration slowly built.  I had to go to work, and then I got to get ready for the big trip, I said to myself, as I watched the noon rerun of the Tour's opening Time Trial stage in Dusseldorf, where a significant rain was making roads and particularly the painted road indicators, cross walks, lane markings, slick and high up on the list of the immediate dangers the Tour riders will face through 20 stages and more than two thousand miles.

Once a habit, as soon as the Tour de France started, to get home from work, put bike shorts on, get on the bike on the trainer, unwinding from a shift, getting in a workout, building up a good lather.  All while unwinding from a shift, often enjoying a glass of French red wine to help the overall soothing.  The time lost getting ready for bed as soon as manageable, worth the time getting back in shape.   It's hard, tough, when work is at night, and when the body has a hard time falling asleep, and a hard time getting up, at least with time to do much before going off to the bar again, to set up for another night, and another night closing it down.

Yes, it's an old story, something from some form of adolescent childhood's end, where you are trying to find a moral compass that reflects you and your awesomely true parents, kind of like King Arthur, kind of like, by extension, Wyeth paintings, of father, son, and grandson, Lord of the Rings, and along comes this long race through historical France, passing all major rivers, all major towns and regions (at least by the general idea of it), applauding those storied towns that are at crossroads.  The French people, regional as their cheeses, and more, characters linked to this landscape of natural human coexistence with nature...  France is not all Paris.  There are a lot of very small towns...  And on the television, castles, fortresses built on high outcroppings, the farms, the old buildings, houses, abbeys, vineyards, fields, roads lined with plane trees...


And so, I'd been doing my yoga sometimes, and then not sometimes.  A few stretches following a hot shower, to keep the spine limber, the legs loose, the upper body in some form of shape...  The red Saeco Mario Cipollini era Cannondale Caad5 road bike I'd ordered with Campagnolo Chorus had stood in the living room on that bike stand trainer with the roller bar and the radiator heat release attachment to it that got quite hot if you'd gotten a decent workout in.  And then, finally, I got on it, and started pedaling some, even if it was just after a shift and I was relaxing drinking a bottle of chilled Beaujolais.

And then, even better, I brought out the '98 Bianchi Velocé celeste green/blue bike, the last year of the lugged frame, and with the automatic easy finger Ergo shifter not working on the right end of the handlebar, the chain set in the rear cluster's smallest cog, unable to shift, plotting to find a down tube shifter mechanism like I always wanted, to go classic, old school bad boy back in the day Tour, I put that bike on the stand and found again what made me fall in love with a bike that was, to my budget, an ungodly sum of $1,100 back then in 1999 or 2000.  Back when I was making about, I don't know, $28,000 yearly starting out trying to be a grown man.




Back as a high school kid, and earlier growing up, there was no problem getting exercise.  I had a used Peugeot UO8, blue, not in the best working order, but fun.  As soon as the winter receded from the roads, I was out there.  And before, I'd been a distance runner out on those country roads, cross-country skiing in the winter, making trail through the woods through powder snow.  I knew how to handle my body, I made the time to go riding, and things went along well.

Is that the animal has a hard time focussing, a condition of Attention Deficit Disorder, ADHD, or whatever you could call it...  There are any number of shades of it, and we all have it, to varying extents at varying times.  Even just in our daily ups and downs.  Some of the work situations we face really do have ups and downs, just in their nature, just in the reaction you must have to them,

The Specialized Foundation has set up an ad campaign.  A kid tells us, having a hard time grasping a concept his teachers give him, riding the bike, here at night with headlights with a group of buddies, lets him catch up with the world that speeds by him when he cannot get his rides in.  "Outride ADHD."  "A bike ride a day helps set them free," the advertisement ends as kids have fun with a night right on mountain bikes, headlights finding their way, a group ride.

Seems like a weird connection to make.  You're in your fifties, and you still need that forty five minute ride, else you unravel into paranoia, anxiety, all that stuff...  I mean, not that bad at all, just that the ride turns all that might be negative into the positive, a lesson for us all to know and comprehend and remember and practice.

And here is the day off, and it's hard to focus, to clean the apartment.  I feel that need for quiet, to catch up with a world that has sped by me yet again.

I am sorry I'm that way.  I have had a hard time focussing.  This is true.  The world has come as a jumble, with lots and lots of thoughts uncaptured, uncultured, un recorded.  And so I needed the monkish life, and in the physical load of tending bar, which itself was at least some form of load-bearing exercise, a physical challenge, much more organically satisfying to me than sitting in an office being poked by the clerk's ringing phone line, the computer screen...  I needed to ride, I needed long rides.


And that was what I wanted to do, when I began at  the Old Gaul.  Work, say, three shifts, then take those long bike rides necessary for my spiritual and mental health.  That's not the way life is though.


Why does one find himself in some subtle form of anguish there on the first day off after a week of work, after all the efforts, physical and mental, all the people you had face time with many in some depth.  And along comes this little bird, here in summertime, when the days of light are longer, the old Tour, reborn afresh.

Blondin wondered out loud, why the feeling of wanting to chase the riders like the young boys he'd see by the side of the road as the Tour went by, wishing, as they did, to be one of them....


As the 2017 edition of the Tour wound down, I went looking through YouTube.  Battles of Coppi and Bartali.  Louis Malle's Vive Le Tour, excellent.  I come across a beautifully shot hour long documentation, done by a Dutch Crew, The Tour, 1953.  High definition movie film.  Who cares if it's in Dutch.  The map, like at the start of Casablanca, takes it counterclockwise around France and surroundings.  Each city with a bridge, a cathedral, a few of the sites.  I put a fan on my laptop to keep it cool, plugged it into the television, got some entertainment out of that, particularly, as always, the mountains.  It even starts out with an homage to the original edition, the riders in the gear of the day on bikes as old.

I rolled, and thought, realizing I that I might as well ride, as I can realize I have little idea what I'm doing now of any importance, significance, or value, other than showing up to work, as I suppose many a Tour rider has to do over the years, leave the glorious road behind and go back to work pumping beer or whatever, and the footage whatever you can find is not bashful about showing us towns and work towns, and work places, the old Bourinage still with its mines and factory chimneys there in the distance, no need to hide anything.

And who knows, somewhere within, off in that work place off the side of the road in the filmed distance, who knows, perhaps men would have remembered their grandfathers telling of a strange red-haired Dutchman who came to preach earnestly to them, wanting to go down in the mines with them, and like just like they did, and eat what they ate.  The organized Church, needing their business model, their high claim to high fundraising, would of course not liked this interloper, and banished him, shaming him.  And one day he would be a painter.  A painter of men and women, of meals, of rooms, of fields and fruit trees and olive trees, and ancient roads, drawn by the exotic sleepy-eyed women, one young Rachel, sent to Pasteur for a cure for rabies from a dog bite, he might well have met in Paris, and the light as well, of particular towns in the South of France...  The colors.  All feeding his creative bursts that went all day and into the night, apparently.



The day off, I reiterate, as this is just living in the present, and echoing Vonnegut's refrain, "and so on," I sleep and sleep.  The night before, wound up after the jazz night, the initial exhaustion that caused me a deep nap back on the floor of the wine room, the effort to get back home on my bike, I do laundry and organize the trash, run the dishwasher through.  A small cut on the back of the leg doesn't look so great, so I tend to that waking up finally, a quick ride, adjusting a new bicycle seat, old school, leather, good for the soft tissue of men's parts, then another nap while the fan keeps going. A run to the Rite Aid for odds and ends.  And then again, an odd time to be awake, for most.

But this is August, in DC.  The crickets are singing their background song in the dark vegetation, cooled by night and thunderstorm.

And one feels the energy, the wish to go out and run, who knows, run ten miles or so, to work that energy off, which otherwise would cause one's skin to burn almost with anxiety.  And lots of reasons to have anxiety, in this world.  A job one is never quite satisfied with, and often enough ashamed of, lacking professional ease and credibility.  The starkness of finances.  The distance, too far, to one's old mom.

The bike is a safe place, here in the living room, on this trainer stand.  It's worth the room it takes up, even if it might cramp a few yoga poses.  I can put the old Tour on, have my calming glass of vino, and seem to escape, just as I did as a kid, getting out of the house into the refreshing air  and nature.  I could not handle living in a big city like New York.  I like the nighttime.   The slow zen of my ride, one leg down, then the other, and then a circle coming, not unlike Tai Chi.

The beast was never made to sit still.  The animal needs miles, forests, streams and rivers to cross over, rocks to climb, landscapes to pass through, a vista of the natural, a kinship with the animals and fowl of the air.

And to not write, this too will drive you absolutely crazy, too much pent up mental energy, needing to run out like a fish caught on a line to break free from, to break free from.

Only then can one get back to that lotus position, the incense, sitting before the Buddha, breathing, still, enjoying peace.  The wild boy within, the hard man, is tamed, just barely, just barely.  Not confined like a circus animal, the pavement hot, the traffic, the noise of downtown, as the nervous person nervously heads to the therapist appointment.

Modernity, passwords, all the things one has to do, to be organized in this modern world, too much.


I take those long sleeps, body and mind not caring enough to get up, nothing pressing to do, why not just sleep, when seasons change.  Perhaps the original human being ran and ran, after game, and then, once enough was had, the workweek done, the party immediately following over, rest and rest, no alarm clocks, just peace in the dark cave under fur.  And when the beast wakes up again, he needs to run again, to leap, jump agile, to hold onto things and move them with accuracy.



My hours odd, with a new pair of Brooks running shoes bought on sale, after writing some of this, before having any wine, the usual reward, I go out for a jog.  It's dark out as I warm up with tentative steps down the street, and onto Massachusetts Avenue.  I venture alone, munching on an apple;  up the road a block or two, yes, the need to vomit rises in my gorge, and fortunately, it is mainly just apple, several heaves in the bushes, as I walk along the embassies of the row.  Crossing over the bridge, the rosy fingers of dawn approaching off to the east over Adams Morgan.  The traffic picks up now, and the quiet street of darkness is now unsettling me, a highway.  Up to Nelson Mandela, and then turning around, wishing to get back quickly.  Birds awake in the morning, and they have trees and wings where they are untouchable, belonging to the air which haves no highways, no noisy traffic of machinery, big trucks, dump trucks, police cars, motorcycles.  I wish to get back to my little monastery rooms.  Humanity would not have survived without a very good instinct and ability for hiding, for escaping being hunted for meat and whatever other satisfaction himself.


They will give you a hard time when you have such a life.  When because of having the Type O blood type, you need that long form of exercise, aerobic exercise.  And the nerves out on the road as dawn comes, what are all these people doing, having figured it out, going to work with such aplomb, fearlessness and discipline.   Are they able to conveniently turn their minds off?  Deficits of attention, I know, are widely diagnosed, but they weren't in my day.  I went from being the bright student, the deep patient reader, into some kind of person with difficulty "paying attention."

Who am I?  But if the rest of us understood, the plight of the organic creature trying to fit in...  And why should it be adulthood and full strength of maturity that it should be suffered even worse?  Couldn't you endure it through childhood, and then get over it?  And now you have bills to pay, and non-existent retirement, and the stresses make it worse, a real sense of life falling completely apart, even as you maintain, maintain, show up to work, do not mess around, do your yoga, see your therapist, take your medication, eat reasonably if not flavorfully.  Why, Jan Jansen, should it come upon you now, of all times?  You've done as little wrong as you possibly could, to your own knowledge, as far as being a decent human being, right?  Walking around feeling stupid and honestly beleaguered by a job, heavily.


At one strange point in life, you turned gentle.  You passed on that being a competitive kind of a thing  like the macho guy at the gym pumping iron, then going to work to make a lot of money as a financial advisor, or a high powered lawyer.  For you, that quaint college desire to "be a writer" became increasingly important, even as it descended quite remarkably as far as offering any real tangible usefulness.   Such are writings fated to be, a useless pile of notebooks four feet high, full of drivel.   Even that "book you wrote," even you want to hold out away from you, as Kundera writes somewhere, as if it were a bag of excrement.

Except the process.  The process always seems to offer some reward, down at a gut level, like Irish music, bypassing the brain.

Monkey mind, be calm and still.  Things will happen, as they will.


Looking around now at the apartment, what a marvelous collection of things.  Rocks from hikes, books, lots of them, cooking gear, tents, sleeping bags, jackets and gear to protect oneself from the elements.  Bicycles.  Herbal medications.  So many odds and ends, memorabilia.


I light some incense.  Frankincense and myrrh.   It does help calm.  There is the double edged sword: for to get better, you begin to see that you might be a depressive.  You've never labeled yourself as that before, you never really felt it.  There was always something at hand to take care of it.  The kid goes out for a bike ride, a run.  There's a calming glass of Beaujolais at the end of a shift that has tweaked you in a thousand ways, many small pricks.  And when you do wonder, well, maybe, maybe I am.  And then you say, well, yeah, yes, it looks like, it looks like, it looks like this could quite well be the case, given where life is no, habits, (all that not worthy looking into here for these purposes), looking at other people's lives, looking at them as homeowners, people able to function downtown in that pit--they must have some blinders on by habit, which in turn lets them be the kind of shitty people I am obliged to wait on that they act like, unless there is something that by my own minuscule holy presence leads them to see the other, the calming one, the one who does little else but wait on other people with a more or less pleasant attitude over a creditably long period of time, like twenty five years in this fisherman's bag.  Twenty five years, more, imagine.

But when you are diagnosed, or it makes sense, hmm, a kind of debilitating gloom sometimes, a seeming dissatisfaction, a nervous anxiousness that needs some physical outlet, like the bike, like I suppose living on Skellig Michael, like keeping a library, not to make money, but to have a truly monkish life of reflection and texts about the human condition and nature, and of the plants, the trees, the animals...

Is it just wintertime, the lack of light?  The holidays of impossible travels and responsibilities that other people seem to handle quite well and shine through with good humor...   What causes it all?  Too much effort to be social?  I mean, we always preach to other the importance of friends.   But for some of us, it's their hours, their terms, and you always have to go back and admit the state of shit you're in, how irresponsible you are, a fuck up, par excellence, but that you still show up for work, when work is unclear, and still write these haphazard little pieces largely as a device to ignore all the bad shit coming up humanity all over the world worth praying for, the terror people go through in many places, and what can you do, but try to be your own little point of light and lack of cynicism.  How awkward, how awkward.

Voices got into my head, telling me perhaps I wasn't doing all I should.  Whereas I was feeling like I could do all I could.  I just was focussing on the things that I could focus on, that were tangible to me.  And in all that I never disliked anyone who was not unkind to me.  My lesson to teach, not about somethings, but about other things, not about methods of writing or articles worthy of income, nor recipes, nor wine wisdom to cash in on, but a general one about liking people, a kernel in each one, not a judging bone, and loving--as Dostoevsky himself gives us in his greatest of creations, the dual character Father Zossima the master and his acolyte Alyosha--a love of common people, of people the more ambitious might frown upon associations with.



The Tour has passed, and for a while, there is nothing on TV.  I fall into the habit of constant CNN, broken by a nice piece of a nature photographer traveling Ireland's Wild Coast, beginning at the Skelligs with the limestone steps cut into the steep climb up to the beehive monastery, to break the mesmerized stare at all the upsetting things going on in the world, not the least of which is the man in The White House now, addicted to his takeover of self-promotion and Fox News tactics of the big darkening lie.  As one cabbie here described him, Mafia, of a real estate kind with lots of unsavory ties in his dealings, a lacking of moral sense.    The PR distortions of truth incite the actions of those precisely who feel they need some sort of action, some sort of standing up.  The actions of the incited are those of bigotry and lacking.

There was that break from it, The Tour, and I had trouble catching it, but caught just enough to remind of me of something.  Maybe it was the rare spectacle of the race in the old days, everyone in France on the side of the road, nuns, school kids, old people, priests, families on picnic outings, all participating somehow.  The historical landscape of France comes forward, the churches, abbeys, bridges, cathedrals, the bastides, the high-walled castles built on high outcroppings, the chateaux, the vineyards, one region different from another, the weather.

This particular Tour de France fades, as if I weren't sad enough about everything else.  But you can't make them keep riding around, riding around.  The only proposal would be to cover a bunch of normal joes, perhaps from different countries and cultures, covering the same route, left to their own resources, a really old school kind of a Tour, without the constant pressure of team cars and the race tactics, a bunch of guys, not even that kind of high fitness level natural athlete.  Tribesman, a group of restaurant guys, with the sound on, to catch their jokes and their foibles.  At the end of their shift, their ride, we could find them finally sitting down to a dinner of local fare, local wine, if so inclined, and with an emphasis not on competition but in the grace of being out on the road, the picaresque, the receptions back and forth between traveler and travelled.  Their might be specialists in lingerers, poetic types, the bull strong guys who are practically talented in making things work out, that group who might chat with the locals, some with eyes for the ladies.  The emphasis would not be on speed, necessarily.  Though of course, the effort would be mighty and be a measure of endurance.  No one is ever ready for the Tour.  As they ride, they get in shape, because they are not so completely professionals, but have other jobs, things like that.

The Tour de France, perhaps now particular as I go through mid-life, reminds me of the spiritual, of the balance we must keep in our own lives between the illusions, the illusions of ease and getting ahead, consuming things that on the ends of both parties, hopeful consumer and the illusions of the offering,  on one hand, bringing yourself forward presenting yourself in an honest way, and on the other, the offerings of comfort, the ideal lover match.  Come to find out, everything is a struggle, and sometimes it's best just to bear your own burdens without complicating it with reaching out for 'supposedly fun things' that leave you sad in the end anyway.  An honest tale, the endurance of life, and as they say, you need the legs for it, and yes, fortunately God gave us legs.

In the final, the Tour invites me to look again at the calling, the calling to look for those things which do have meaning, which are true, the things of poetry, easily taken in, easily remembered, the simplicity of Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians, by example, and he or she who could remember and place such words in some form of context is no common idiot in these burdens of being alive.  How do you soothe the soul at the end of the day, when you've run this way and that way, and feeling all the while that you just want to, seriously, go home.

Kindness, and that love spoken of, is super-human.  It does endure all things, seeks not itself.  And such statements upon the reality of our physical presence, they hold out a soothing cup of water or cleansing tea to a road-wearied soul, where small acts of kindness indeed go a long long way, the refreshing wine of some sort of sacrament closely tied to the deepest realities of existing in the world.  What Paul writes is true.  It stands up to study and test.  And to consider, in some way, the departure that those types of spiritual thinkers, Merton, Buddha, The Cloister Walk by Kathleen Norris.  The Tour reminds me of the sincerity.