Friday, September 29, 2017

So, you go to therapy, and every now and then a session yields something.  You might have the feeling, 'well, why didn't she just tell me that earlier,' but that's how it works.  It takes a while, bit by bit, finding the greater context in which to place things and understand them.  You find one piece of the puzzle, fit it in, and then because of that, maybe another piece fits in.

"You say one more word to me and I'll go to the dean and have you charged with sexual harassment." That's what she, The Princess,' said to me after I approached her one sunny day in the dining hall.  The night before it had been a full moon, and I'd gone by her suite to see if she wanted to go to the Full Moon Party down at the Zoo, a house down off campus past the football field.  Yes, it was awkward.  I shrugged and left quickly, asked to do so.  Great.

I'd told my therapist Dr. H. about it, sessions ago, I'm sure.  I think it was that, but it may have been another incident, like, what she said to me, and even on sensitive ground, speaking to a woman, the other side, really, in the battle of the sexes, even the therapist had to be moved, telling me that The Princess had treated me like "a low life."  Jesus Christ.

New Yorkers like to talk.  They like to hear themselves talk.  One of my first impressions, going to Amherst, observing the very first week.  They fancy themselves good at it, have complete self-confidence.   That was my impression of a lot of my classmates, actually.  It was hard to get a thoughtful word in edgewise.  They were talking like they knew what to say their whole lives forward.  And there was I, right in the middle of them.  Pushy city dwellers.

(The genetic kindly temper of the people in the countrysides of the nation have a slower turnover.  There is institutional memory, persisting longer, habits like politeness and conversational ability.  There is less difference between the current generation and, say, that of four generations ago.  Which tends to make people more pleasant, less caught up with the latest changes promising superior lifestyle...)

It made me sad, the whole thing with her, old Miss Princess.  She never seemed to give me a chance, or if she did, as I could see, it was right after she had performed some magnificent cut-off put-down of me.  Unmistakable phrases, quiet clear in meaning.  Like, "Oh, God..."

I hadn't realized the impact it was having on my whole adult life.   It is, I suppose, the decent people who feel these things acutely.  A louder person would have played the match with her, been loud back.  Well, that wasn't who I was.   The insinuations of her language dog my psyche thirty years later, isn't that funny....   Like I have to prove myself to be decent even before opening my mouth.  I guess that's why am I waiter, a bartender, even...  Jesus Christ.  I can't be a ditch digger, let alone a teacher, unless I feel myself earning the title, proving I'm not what she said I was.

And that's not how life works, how people do things.  People just jump into things.  Sure.  Qualified.  That old self-confidence people always talk about.  Jesus Christ.


In a way I'd wish there'd been a Jim character to keep my Huck company going down that old river, Amherst.  ("My Waterloo," a classmate, a lawyer, described her as, not too long ago, coming through DC.)  Jim would have been supportive, and we could have gone fishing, forgetting about her.  Cheering me up.  "Who are these people," Jim would have asked me.  "They are racist," he might have said, racist against us, me and Jim, a slave on the run and a college professors son whose parents were splitting up....

Yeah, so you add a little bit to your pile, figuring out the puzzle.  What keeps holding you back from all the changes you should be making in your life...

A decent guy is never going to find it in himself to be harsh like everyone else.  He still likes people, finding them more or less mistaken, but hey, we all human, we all, all of us, make mistakes.  It's the being patient.  Other people don't have much time for that.  Nope.  They got things to do, lives to lead, choices to make, every day, choices.  The only choices a good and decent person makes is to be good and decent, first and foremost, in the middle, and lastly....

But it is that sort of "Fuck You," "I'm a decent person," the being thoughtful, that is so revolutionary, when you look at it, particularly in the context of the world's operations.  Revolutionary.

It messed me up pretty good though.  Her insinuations led to patterns, ones which drove wedges between me and my family, me and my college career, me and living a decent life led according to my values.  Well, I kept up with the values, you can't not.  But things that get in the way....

A mushroom cloud of pain that wouldn't go away.  I brought her flowers.  I was inept with her, sure, that's how kids are when they are trying to be themselves, not be some sort of phony act.

When you wake up finally, there's a kind of horror.  There's sadness.  Watching the soldiers tell their stories of being back in Ken Burns' The Vietman War reminds me of it.  You don't trust anybody....  It seems like you'd be taken as a misogynist even for saying so.  "Well, she didn't mean it.  She only said that, like, once.  What's the big deal?"  Yeah, and maybe she might not have meant it to be a big deal, but it was.   And she will never even apologize for it, and nor will her abetting friends.  You have a hard time trusting anyone.  It's always, "you're the asshole," meaning, myself.

So, yes, you're kind of broken.  Depressed, finally taking medication for it.   No retirement plan.  No suitable grown-up career.  And you get blamed for all that too, "your choices, your fault."   Which doesn't help.  All you are is a good person.   Perhaps not so effective at it, most of the time....

That's the crucifying world for you.  It's miserable.


Fit one piece in, fit in another.  Realize what the problem is, bit by bit.  Maybe that's how it has to go. You couldn't see the whole picture all at once;  it would be overwhelming.  So it takes time, finally figuring out who you are as a human being.  This is why people occupy themselves with things so they don't have to think too deeply, I suppose.

Even if you tried to be a good boy and write it down it might be miserable and wholly alienating that you wouldn't want to, and if taken as a writer, just for the sake of argument, it wouldn't be something you'd really ever want to talk about.  Or maybe you would, as part of the ongoing effort to get better, having finally realized how messed up you in fact are.


Writers get to be writers, I suppose, out of the desire to use words carefully, thoughtfully.  They might not be the quickest, the first in the room to respond to a stimulus.  That, to me, is a different mode of being than what I saw for myself arriving at college finding myself amongst New Yorkers, city folk.

There are all sorts of writers, I suppose.  Different temperaments.  Different walks of life.  Different walks of life.  Different attitudes.  Different sensibilities.  Joseph Conrad is Joseph Conrad, Anton Chekhov is Anton Chekhov, and Jack Kerouac is Jack Kerouac.  Kurt Vonnegut is Kurt Vonnegut.  Whether or not they even write.  An interface.  The person is important.  Should be more important than the writing.   A soul.  The writing is secondary if it is not the story of the person who is the writer.

Thursday, September 28, 2017

College is a time of transition, change, uncertainty.  You're away from family, everything's new and different.  It's a huge developmental task.  And if other things are going on then, uncertainty, stress, tensions back home, those compound the changes.  Normal ups and downs seem bigger, bigger blows for someone already in a fragile state.

Earlier in the session she'd asked me what it was like when it all blew up.  How did it feel?  Could change happen now without feeling like everything was blowing up again?

I'd not seen her, my therapist, in several weeks.  She had an important appointment during our normal time, and the next week I was headed up to visit my mom up at the university town where she lives.

It had been a validating experience, sitting in with a class at the SUNY with a colleague of hers, Sharon.  We were introduced as writers, a mother son team, and that was right.  Dr. H. acknowledged for me how life affirming it was, after I'd sketched it out for her.  The credential of writing a book, in terms of doing it no necessarily as the greatest writer, but as a form of education, writing in a way that was self-education, self-teaching, a process that itself was the deeper story behind the narrative, and therefore, truly, as an educator.  It had been the case that I hadn't quite known that, come to see, come to accept that.  For whatever that was worth.  And it did have some sort of worth, though obviously not in the direct creation of wealth, via a little book available through Amazon...  However personally somewhat awkward, as any roman a clef would be.

The visit up to Oswego to visit my mom, a ray of light into my situation, my sort of imprisonment.  Maybe I'd rebelled, as young people do, when feeling hurt.  But in the rebellion, the tradition, the genes, the values still come through.  Mom had written a book through her pursuit of the new life that had blown up my transition from home into the world.  Her's was a scholarly work, impeccably written.  Mine had been more of a literary effort in the sense that it feel with the realm of the novel and the short story.  Her work helped her, gave her a career along with the hard work of teaching, of education department tasks.  Mine had been a form of academic rebellion, I suppose.  Rebellions are costly.  They will leave you only with having strange jobs, strange lives and many unhappinesses.

And my own job was quite emblematic of foolhardiness and rebellion.  Week by week, no week an exception.  Nights working alone up at the wine bar, with scant help from downstairs, no late night sustenance to get me through the last few adventures.  People getting home far earlier than I and receiving the same financial reimbursement.  Having to deal with Jazz Nights at the bar, doing the complimentary wine tasting all by myself.  The closer.  Eating my supper all alone at the bar with a glass of Beaujolais to ease the pain and the angst.  Going back home alone on a bicycle, my courier bag slung over my back, having another glass when I got in, sat back on the couch, turned the TV on.

Waiting for the day off.   Scribbing a few thoughts down now and again.  At least some satisfaction in that, the process.


The Lexapro gives me diarrhea, but it seems to work with the mood stuff.  It might be putting a half tab of Propranalol, a beta blocker, into the mix, but that helps keep the calm.  Trazodone, I'll take one to help me sleep if it comes to that at some odd hour.  But the writing itself, that process, whatever it is, this is helpful too, as if questioning your own inner therapist.

Still, one needs a writing project.  A purpose beyond the self-explanations.

Look on the good side.  Therapy got you over the thing that hit hard, the compounded issue, the precipitated, the person not undesired for, or, a teacher in some way, the issue sketched out as The Princess in a book, occupying the mind for a long time.  She was a good compounder, with a sense of humor almost, give her credit for that.

"She treated you like a low-life," a similar session with the Dr. H, the fruit thereof.  That had helped.  And so, finally, did the distance, the time, the disappearance.  And even finding a recent picture of her, helping me see in a new light.

But that still left me in the same situation.  Just feeling better, feeling a bit less overwhelmed...


So.  Figure it out.  You're a grownup.  Get on with your life.


A book is not a lot to show for it all, but I suppose it's better than nothing.  There restaurant journals never paid off as far as offering more flesh to a journey I would have been on anyway, and perhaps a distraction, albeit one that paid a few bills for a time...

Sunday, September 24, 2017

On Sunday night, the wounds of the restaurant heal over somewhat, if it's not too busy.  Things are put back right.  The hard shift of Saturday night and its excesses are put behind.  It's hard to cap the end of the night off, and I treat myself to the veal scallopini special with mushrooms, bok choy and garlic potato.  It takes a while to put everything away, the juices to sleep in the cooler, the sparklings wines pushed down into the ice bin, the bar top counter wiped clean, the paper work and the money rolled up in decent order.  The barman has a few guilty glasses of Beaujolais, goes off across the street, locking the door behind him to grocery shop at the all night Safeway, purchases meats and pedialyte, comes back, puts the cold foods in the courier bag, slings it over the shoulder, closes the strap, and out onto the bike to head back home.  S to R, R to Q, how many times...

The ride back, mainly downhill, then up past the Turkish residence, before along the cemetery fence, the words of Gordon Lightfoot's Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald play in through his mind.  The wind in the wires made a tattletale sound...  The last night, he had been somewhat foolish again, the last two, two women coming in after a party at the French Embassy, letting his plate of veal cheeks stay at 200 degrees in the oven, as much as he was very hungry.  Starting with a taste of the new Chinon, 12.5 percent alcohol, to ease through the final stretch of conversations, speculations of the nuclear situation in North Korea.  


When you get home, then the Sunday night wasn't so bad.  A couple came in for an anniversary, sat upstairs with you.  You just got tired at the end, but rode it out on the ropes, and then everyone went away silently, except the last, the dishwasher, with the flashing light of his bicycle already on as he departs with a call from the stairwell and out the blue door.  There is peace, and there will be enough to eat to get through 'til the day off.  Pretty simple living.

A glass of wine, chilled, in a tumbler, with a couple ice cubes.    Ken Burns' Vietnam War, Things Fall  Apart, the title coming from Robert Kennedy quoting Yeats that fateful year, 1968, Tet, "the center cannot hold."


Writing is like a moon shot, a calculation.  You start where you start.  You take your aim, you start out, you follow the trajectory.  And it's all on the subconscious, the unconscious, basically, what you are writing about.  You might have actually little to do with it, this life trajectory of what you will end up writing about.  No way of knowing, but just doing.  Just like a child draws;  drawing is fun.  You have no idea if you are just are not.  But you are aware of avoiding, I don't know, tricks, I guess.  You do have to be honest with yourself, and you will try, but still you have no way of really knowing.  Pot shot.  Dumb luck.  Flying more or less blind.  And with a lot of mistakes in your own personal life to remember, never able to forget, reminded as if by drumbeats, again and again and again, excel that perhaps the mistakes finally were actually a way of bumping around in the dark, as if hitting nubs and tree branches, in order to find a way.  You don't know.

But the earlier you make mistakes, or what might be the smallest error, a small percentage point of being off, or mislead, or simply not being yourself, not that you would really know. and then follow that mistake, the further and further off you will end up going.  I think of Hemingway.  He was close, he was well aimed, he was very careful, but still...  that small percentage point, the slight distraction toward what might lead to success of a sort, recognition, strong image creation, good character presentation.  And he was strong, a tough guy, brave, very good of talent and skill, very devoted.  You can find where he went right, but there where he is right perhaps there seems a comparable lack of energy and clarity, compared to his involvement in the mistaken illusory things.  Bullfighting, the drinking, the bars, the portrayal of characters, a bit of going overboard, a bit of bluster.   I myself find something redeeming about him, enough of it, but that is a personal assessment, coming down to a few lines of his in the later works.  

But if you go off a bit, early on, the improper angle will only be magnified, increasing directionally on the mark of the whole effort.   Thus it is better to begin very very quietly, unnoticed, rather than wishing to be popular, your work effected by that popularity you must absorb through explanations.  Hemingway brought us fly fishing, and the Big Two Hearted River, good things.  He did his best to ignore being popular, but he also participated in his image making like a politician might.  But he knew it:  It's best to write very simply, about things you've seen, things you know.  Very careful steps.  Hemingway wasn't the greatest of philosophers or saints, but he had a good touch, helping the writing of writers who would come after him, because of his earnestness.  Yes.  Scrupulous choice of words and theme, a brilliant enabling of the unconscious.  Psychology.  

It is worth mentioning the differential.  If that is the sole contribution, so be it.

But it is, as you well know, not easy to write.  It is not easy to write a single thing.  And in that light it is acceptable to speak of tricks, short cuts, the finding of the false purposes and less fruitful paths of writing.  Better to find its music, wherever that is.  That point at which it somehow becomes art, no more, no less, sufficient unto itself, a voice as natural as it should be...

The girl, the princess, what does that mean to you?  That is a subject that comes up when we are having some sort of interesting state about following our instincts.  Confusion.

You're not learning anything worth writing about unless you are experiencing misery.  I think that is true.  That is the story of the classics.  That is the story of war.  The chance to be informed by the experience of hopelessness and misery.


Friday, September 22, 2017

I got on the road late, hard to say goodbye to mom, around eleven, and finally arrived at the door of the Old Gaul at seven.  The gypsy swing band was already in full tilt, and not at all quiet.  The bar was in a bad state of restocking.  Even before I came in, there were friends to talk to, and me, bleary eyed, ruffled and disoriented by flying on the road at eighty miles an hour over the hills of Route 81, then Harrisburg, then on to 15, then 270 and the last rush into the city of Washington, D.C., merging onto 495 and nudging over to get on River, then to Massachusetts. The boss called, where are you as I came up the hill toward the circle of American University, and I responded I was close to Wisconsin, though I wasn't really, traffic to slip through, the narrowness of the last stretch, finding parking in the lot across the street.  Back in the city.  Great.

Come up the stairs, throwing my courier bag into the stereo closet after retrieving a type clasp, finding a tie from above the power amp, tying it in the corner as people looked on with some curiosity.  The boss came over and fixed my tie where I'd missed being under the button down collar, and the young lady at the bar I caught up with briefly, no cold mineral water, not enough Sancerre cold, not any flute maison, beer poorly stocked, Jesus Christ, the dining room already full, and familiar faces wanting to say hi... a good friend in with his wife, just returned from the Balkans.  And me, feeling a bit broke.

A fine time the night before, taking my mother up to the college she retired from, a kind of triumphant return for a person shy of returning.

And I sigh as I finally can sit down to write now, the whole experience of return leaving me a bit shaky.  What am I doing here.   I tried to write, and tending bar got the best of me, and now I had this weighty personality of the wine culture dragging at me, and the boss is telling me the musicians only get one glass of wine, and charge them after there twenty dollar allowance for dinner.  At the end of the night, they get the bill and everyone's cool.  The band threw a tip, and I use it to charge for a glass of wine surreptitiously.  The last group of young folk I've been able to ignore for the evening come up to the bar, and the young woman wants another lesson in tending bar, tipsily.  Gotta get the rental car back.  But I have a glass of wine, and put up with them, though I'd desperately like to leave now.  It's my fault for engaging with them two weeks previously.


Back in Oswego mom and I are recognized as writers, and speak our extemporaneous thoughts to a classroom of education majors reading 'difficult' young adult fiction.  I speak a little too long about Dostoevsky's Notes from the Dead House and Twain's Huck Finn, and wondered aloud what societal issues they, given the innocent but worldly voices of young adult fiction, might now address.  It felt good.  Life affirming.  Vital to mental health and the sense of self-dignity.

In D.C., the feeling of having failed, that the efforts here were futile to allow for some sort of productive change toward a life that would be a good fit for me.  Here I was a simple slave of the restaurant business, of Frenchie and the persona I myself had been a fool to come up with.

I sip on green tea, licorice tea, pedialyte.  It would make sense that today would be a day of recovery after the long day of the intense drive, an intense night at work, taking the car back to the parking garage at the Marriot Wardman, descending six stories below in the low-ceilinged concrete tomb to the last level, the car rental company, parking the car and stepping out, the key into the overnight deposit slot.


But failure has a spiritual element to it, an adjustment to a more true reality...


Where do old writers go, when they can no longer sustain the jobs that bring them income?

The day off, he thought of all the pain, the late people keeping him, pushing him toward joining to ease around the final roadblock of getting home and his life back together, the physical pain, dragging himself in there, setting up where the young folks hadn't, the conversations, the bad habits he'd allowed to form, his methods, like Kurtz, unsound.  Monsters he had created, himself, willfully.  The glass of wine giving him energy to get through the last part of the night, the last customers after the jazz rattling his nerves, the hectic night's struggles to seat people, the young guy waiter lax, looking into his cell phone as the four top sat in the back...  That's life.  That's how it goes.

Sure, the drive was long, the night long, the extra task to avoid an extra day of rental charge on the car, a Nissan Rogue, an enjoyable ride.  Jarring, the return to the city's stretches, after a week in the country and more or less normal hours.

But you'll always write as a teacher.  Not even directly to be a writer.  Part the effort to teach writing, by going through a long process of self-teaching that ended up where it did, as it did.  It wasn't about the effort to simply write, not to create any particular work.  The politics of writing.  The lesson within it.  Obscure, surely, but worth tracking, and relevant after so many stories have been told, so many books written.  No real intent to ad another one to the great pile, but rather shoot for obscurity, for the active magic within the process, the healing.  Less about the product, no attempt to make it flawless, more about the process, the life of words, ever-changing.

Would you then, having done an amount of the real work, of the writing which is teaching, rather need to discard the shell of what had been, to move on, toward the purer representation, in which the writing envelopes the writer and then changes him, allows him faith, forward motion, a kind of innate status reached perhaps indiscernible, but of more self-recognition, less lost feeling.  Then allowing for something.

Is it rude to write?  Is it an inappropriate act when you have friends?  Is it not embarrassing, to its very core, subversive to the polite interchange and not too much information...

Find some self-reflective truth, then to share it...

And writing, well, it does seem to fall into the field of education, almost as much as reading itself, this strange archaic ability to be able to express the true self through the writing process.  I saw the interest myself in a real live classroom, and it was unforgettable, reassuring, life affirming.

To see the classroom made me think of the old song, The Rivers of Babylon, where the wicked carried us away, required of us a song....  That was just how I felt, smiling away, even as I bled inside.  The true Israel Zion life I wished was only glimpsed in the little sketches I came up with.  It made sense I found this not where I was, where I am now, in the city on the Potomac, but back at my mom's town, the closet approximation of the vestige of my old hometown, the college town, with the campus up on a hill overlooking.

The story of Job has a distinctly Buddhist tone, as far as a tale...   How could Job be satisfied when all his family and loved ones are obliterated;  you can't just replace all of that with new versions, unless we are indulging in a tale about how we look at reality and what reality actually is.  There has to be some metaphorical sense to the story to Job's perception, a tale not too far away from the basic Buddhist one about the weariness of the monkey mind ever at war with peace with the present moment, now.

Sketches from Babylon, this barman writes.


It might make sense that the writer, if he really is one, has to maintain the kind of separate personality.  There has to be the easy-going side, the sense of humor and wit.  That bartender guy, easier to deal with than the Jeremiad-prone writer of philosophical tomes.

Job has to write.  His encounter with God's word, where were you when I laid the foundations, is a fine example of the writer's gifts evident throughout the Testaments.  It even sounds like the writer, who could even be, at least metaphorically, Job himself, has entered the flow in which words and thoughts are coming out, making sense.  The writer has satisfied the deep need to think on paper, to solve the deep frustrating problems of the thinking life.

It is only through our own that we understand the biographies, the conditions, of others.  And if we reach the realms of archetypical characters, then we've accomplished an important analysis of the human condition.  Then we are less afraid to face its truths, less afraid to address those facets of particular lives, from small ones to larger ones.

The best writing you will do purely for yourself, the kind of writing that you do when no one is looking, when you do not mind expressing the deeper facets of inner life.  When you do not care about anything but the inner truth.  And that is the way to approach any of the larger figures of literature and the spiritual.

Can you ever get out of the moods you do through?  There's always Job in the background.  And if we come under a sense of our own success, conspicuous, widely-known, a kind of fame, then we must wonder if and ask ourselves if we have lost our sense, our contact with, of Job and his condition.  Or for Peter, for Paul, for those things which are the properties of The Son of Man.

I would not blame a writer who would eventually chose to be reclusive.


Friday, September 8, 2017

Not looking at the previous blog entries, ill-written, jumbled, sketches skipping around, not facing the actual work of writing...

We watch in slow motion as Mother Nature becomes part of the book, part of the church, the logos, as it in fact always has been and will be.  Harvey, followed by Irma, the American majority being the American majority, developing, building, moving in, fitting in, driving to work, then back to the tract town homes, responsible, working on fulfillment, living the consumer lifestyle aimed for self-satisfying material success, and meanwhile, the sea is rising, and on top of that and the torrential rains, a string of major hurricanes.  All of us guilty, but some of us more sensitive, less about consumption, more about the smaller footprint...



      Two servers have taken extended vacations at the same time, and the part time people are filling in, so don't expect too much from them.  I hit the Safeway after a busy shift, and when I get back home finally, lugging things back in the courier bag on my shoulder, Orion's belt almost vertical, three stars in a clear night sky, it's hard to feel sleepy.  I putter around, watch the development of Hurricane Irma, an overlay of all the development in Southern Florida's tracts to the west of Miami and the Everglades, get in a bike ride, pleased with the adjustments of the new bicycle saddle, leather, with anatomical cut-outs, have a chili dog minus the bun, take a pill and go off to sleep.  I wake to call mom, have some tea, make breakfast, encounter the runs, and go back to bed to read and rest.  Meditations turn to dream.  Ragweed, sapping my strength, is weighing me down.

And one of the few things to please me now at my age and in this time seem to be thoughts of Peter and Paul, of the organism participated in what they call The Catholic Church, entering into which people become an organic logos of the one true God, entering into the life of Jesus Christ.

I did not get to any church today, no.  I got up too late, too tired, my schedule completely off.  The church is a community, but today, a day off, I am laying low, licking my wounds, a bit of television to keep me company, "endless grilled shrimp at Red Lobster," before facing the dishes, trash night, the laundry.  Peace and quiet.

Downtown here, after the 11AM therapist appointment, I would go over to Saint Matthew's, coming by the alley from the backside of the great red brick church, into the side door, as Madam Korbonski liked to do.  12:05 Mass.  Following along, and even taking communion, careful to kneel at the end of the pew, bow as I accept, crossing myself afterward.

But take the Church back to the apostles, to Peter, to Paul.  Back to the juice, the original wine.  Lord, depart from me, for I am a sinful man.  The blinding light and the voice striking the soldier down, Saul, Saul, why dost thou persecute me?  Take us back, and then, to encounter the original form.


When you don't have the time or energy to write, burdened by work and this and that, there's not the time go back over earlier things, perhaps to edit, or clarify.  You have to keep, with what time you have, the ball rolling forward.  Writing is a tiny version of the things that happen in the celestial sky, always ticking, always moving, sun, moon, planets, stars, constellations, constant motion.  And so is everything.

After the efforts of hospitality, the slightly pandering to humor of the jovial aspect, and even the serious aspect of it, feeling inexplicably sinful despite all of one's bone and flesh involved hard work and load bearing, one craves incense, a church-like quiet and decorous behavior to be counted on.  One craves a kind of personal quiet, sad as it might initially feel.  This is work.  This is an effort, even as you'll never quite know which parts of it are misplaced and which might be track.

"There is but one God."  This is still a radical and revolutionary statement.  Still out of place in the modern city with all the abeyance to the popular gods and all the discussions the less guileless will cleverly engage in.  Will all the geopolitical details even matter much, once this globe of Earth regains its strength and viability as a part of the logos of the church, regains its proper place in such a way as it, by necessity, commands the attention it deserves.

Think of the pious people who took to the presence of the early church, the initial acts.  One must as an individual constrain to the reality of the just divine, just as the Earth's climate must, just as sea levels must rise, as sea temperatures must rise, just as native flora bear dying off.  The unjust parts of the being must too die off, the being finally getting serious.  There are things at stake.  The writer will stop with the stories that do not matter, will stop pandering to the many gods of consumption, will watch his own habits.

It is hard, very hard, to get serious. It takes a long long long time.  To get serious, in such a way, very old, traditional, would be unnatural to anyone immersed in modern life.  It would even seem unnatural to think, having viewed one's own self from the lens of the rational necessarily self-interested self-protecting member of the popular large, of some form of going into, joining with, reclaiming a spiritual life based on being organized around Jesus Christ and the church.  How would one even enter into such a thing, old fairy tales, quaintly faithful childlike innocence lining pews.  Is this what they mean by, "wrestling with an angel?"

Watching television I could almost gasp now at twelve thirty in the morning as Irma, September 9, scraping the northern coast of Cuba pauses, to fix direction, anticipating its turn north, a direct line to Florida.

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Have faith, Jesus said, more or less, to the men with him when the storm rose on the lake, as waves rose, as winds howled, as the boat began taking water.  The storm is part of all of this, part of being a disciple, part of being with The Son of Man.  Indeed, what might you expect, given how life is.  Quite normal, the storm.  Does, one hates to ask, the storm serve a purpose, a purpose aligned with the balance of That Which Is, the one God of the Old Testament and the New, who is nameless, an I Am.

The apostles would have known that, what the storm is like, the radical remaking, the transformative process into the new reality.

The "Come to Jesus moment," they call out sometimes on the night news coverage in the context of the political life...  The speech pattern, the habit of modern dialog.  But what would it actually be like, actually entail?

But how could you not be inspired, modern cynicism aside, by the tale of Jesus gently calling to Simon Peter, an ordinary fisherman, a failure in the sense that he must keep toiling, even when he catches no fish as he did that day, working close to naked.  Peter knew himself to be a sinner, and though we might have no idea to the specifics of his own self-estimation as "a sinful man," we get it, our own uselessness to live an actively pious life helpful to others.  The littleness of our accomplishments even when we have a day off from the regular steady toil... frittered away with self-grooming, with household chores that bear precedence over whatever social life you might struggle to have with your own hours such as they are, as if you had the energy to overcome the lonelies.  That shrugging off of Peter's is a realistic detail of the story, and so are the words of Jesus himself, quiet, understated, "fishers of men."  As if there weren't enough distractions for these poor fishermen trying to take care of things, their families.  To take that step, to be a disciple, to go with Jesus Christ to be a fisher of men, would be a step into a great unknown, and if not the complete resigning abolishment of a customary career, a step into a form of unemployment, in modern terms.

Jesus would have liked him, this sinful man, the fisherman Simon Peter.  He liked him for a reason, for good reason, for excellent reason.  Jesus was not a loquacious type, not to waste his words, and his words toward Peter are cleverly selective in their choice, as they would be throughout the whole interchange between the two.  "It is good that we be here," the humble fisherman says, as if anyone is listening, while the luminaries speak with each other upon the ridge of the Mount of Olives.   (I am relying heavily on Father Barron's Word on Fire, explicating Catholicism.)

Perhaps he, Peter, was honest, to a fault, maybe he was bashful, overly polite, maybe given to amateur attempts at poetry, thus the thoughtful eloquence of his lines.  Perhaps he was intelligent beyond his job and societal function.  He would have been at a crossroads of humanity, dealing with all types.  There is no mentioned woman in his life?  His mother's dwelling?  Maybe his goodness was interpreted by the practically minded women of his age as a bit odd, not exactly creepy, not living in a creepy kind of way but a bit off from the usual husband type, a friend, in that awkward spot that left Peter with enough time to ponder sinful thoughts when he was not hard at work as a fisherman merchant.

For Peter the world came to pause for him, when the Jesus the Christ approached.  As when watching on television a massive hurricane approaching.  That small break so craved for in the tiring routine, what's next in life?  how to get there?  how to change? coming toward him.  The great storm that brings fresh air along with its destruction of the old and the past.

For Paul, different, but also a beautiful story.  The voice of the master calling, gently despite the show of heavenly command.  The voice of a lover who's been persecuted, had imposed upon him the embarrassment of interpreted motives, all of which that missed the mark, the human being, the heart, the real intent unrequited, but still one's job to call upon people, as gently, as eloquently, as poetically, as truthfully, as honestly one can.  Could it have been a woman upon whom Jesus voice comes, "Saul, Saul..."  Wanda, Wanda...  Maybe that scenario would have raised to many eyebrows, raised the intrusiveness of interpretation.  In a way, that ties us back into Peter's situation, the way this writer has formulated it based upon his own experience, all a writer has at the end of the day to go on...

Peter, Jesus, Saul, they all have that misplacement of understanding in common.  This sense of being treated like a lowlife.  This sense of being in an injustice that goes far into personal lives, for more personal  than the justice of the normal laws, the lawyers, the paperwork, the court, the judge and the jury.   There does seem to be a hypersensitive to these sort of problems in the New, that if thy neighbor accuses thee, seek reconciliation before thou has lost everything...

A creature of political fortune,  Lincoln--we overuse him--could write about the loss of the bondsman's two hundred years of unrequited toil, perhaps in the same vein, the thousand shocks that flesh and reputation are heir to, the stabs because of offenses, that hit the good as much as the bad are stuck with for one small social mistake or another.  Jesus cleanses.  The old literature, the tales of Job and Jonah, cleanses.  The storm is calmed, the disciples remain in the boat, engaged.  Not cast off and away, as those who would be by buying into all the modern gods.  Only the one true who is and must be nameless and unseen, coming forth through faith...



The moon is above now, the crickets cheeping rhythmically, without with syncopation of the departed cicada, and the writer writes what he can and the clock ticks, the laundry groans in the basement, the oven beeps coming up to temperature for cooking burgers.

Would Peter and Paul have ever met?  Two different personalities, one could say.  Paul, Saul, was, obviously in a certain realm, prosecutorial, a man with an ambitious career, putting himself ahead while others go down, a zealous kind.  Then he reformed, and one mode turned into quite another thing.  Peter might have taken things out upon himself, but he was not an up in arms hater, but more of a go along with it kind of guy, thus distinguishing Jesus as someone above his own sort of walk of life.  Jesus begged to differ with one, the other he more or less confronts, albeit in an honest way, not mincing his words, as if they had a history together, a point of commonality.

The word of history tells us that the two did meet.  Paul came to visit Peter for fifteen days in Jerusalem.


Peter, a strong man, intelligent, sensitive, poetic, a good guy, a good conversationalist, an adventurous sort, had run afoul of the self-centered opportunistic priggish authority types of Judea and whatnot.  An ostracism, rather than support, from the womenfolk.  The women folk didn't necessarily mean it, but their efforts were brutal upon him, such that he didn't mind talking to fish or muttering with the fishermen types.  Peter, a wandering type, not unfriendly with strangers, but an adult grown self-conscious about this fault of irresponsibility, so that he is attempting to cover himself from the long standing subliminal accusations against him mirrored by the charges against him which he denies before the cock crows of following strange itinerant types.  Jesus knows this about him, reading his heart.  Knowing the peculiar misery that the life of a fisherman, being so busy in the moment as to forget your problems, during the down time, the self-questioning, as bartenders face in late hours before sleep and before shifts...

Paul, of a very intelligent and lettered legal mind, abhorrent to the liberties the new sect of the Christ was taking, was on the other side, a paranoiac, or rather a realist, about the machinations of society to create deviants out of people.  Never would he be naive drifter of waves like Peter, gullible.  A great relief he found in his dramatic conversion, nailed down by the holy light, the heavenly finger pointed at him, "stop."

Peter begins as gullible, an over believer, tamed by the hardness of life.
Paul begins as the ultimate skeptic, whose eyes must be opened...

Of two different temperaments were they.

And yet, and yet, they found a common ground, happily, even joyfully, despite.

Do we live through our own lives primarily as a way to discover the essentials of the incarnations of such figures as those of the inception of the church, people like Peter and Paul?  Perhaps the analysis of our own little personal biographies are a means of understanding the original archetypes.

A radical, as Jesus was, is a problem, for others, even for himself.  But the radical side is the creative side...


Tuesday, September 5, 2017

Busy eve of Labor Day.  Running around, regulars, a good night to talk, but I am stretched.  The job gets done, over and over, but, there are certain things that need attention.  Peace-making after an incident, the visit of one couple involved that got involved with another, the spark from the reaction to the hurricane in Houston.  The problem stemming from the familiarity, a good thing, in a barroom.  I wasn't there.  Four nice people got into an argument that got a bit ugly.  An old restaurant manager of mine comes by with a date.  He has a restaurant in Del Ray, very cool.  We'd been through a bunch of stuff together, and on Facebook, kind enough to look me up.  He flatters me:  "a hard-working guy."  What higher compliment is there.

"I like travel," every person on dating sites will tell you.  How about waiting on people, on accepting everyone who might walk in through the front door, to talk to, to figure out, to make reasonably pleased to expectations and beyond that that of their own individual personalities, as what is, finally, hospitality anyway.  I've done that act for more than twenty five years.  And doing that without having to create some kind of commercial personality beyond what I actually am, what I actually do. For whatever...

At the end of it, after counting the money and putting the wine away, I have to rest on the banquette in the wine room before I have energy to pack up and head home.  I sleep for an hour, wake up not refreshed, but better for getting back on the bike.  Back in the apartment, I cannot fall asleep, finally end up taking a pill, then sleeping 'til six in the afternoon.  Labor Day.  Brilliant, sunny, clear, the blue sky.  It's ragweed season, and that will take it out of you, believe me, not quite predictably.

Don't blame myself if I have nothing to write about.  I work, I have a job.  It's tiring.  

Writing is a commercial game.  You wouldn't do it, unless you were making money at it, no?  Why be stupid.  Learn to write copy.  Sell organic soap, or recipes.  Write something that will sell.


Therapist says, commit to something.  That will be the cure.  "Okay, honey.  Okay."  And what have I been doing, for the last thirty years?

It was my fate, to come to a city, a capital, of something.  There is a pattern in that, and staying  back in the old valleys, questionable.

One should be rich enough to travel, to take vacation.  Yet the poor cannot do this.  They travel, like I do, through practicing hospitality, innocent friendliness.

In that way, our own narratives merge with the story of a Jesus Christ, a Buddha.

To look forward to a work shift was often difficult.  Consuming, physically.  (well, what would you expect.)  But that it got you nowhere, as far as being in the logic of the reason of every other job, money, security, retirement, bells and whistles like travel.

But I found people on the vapid side, even as they were good people, when their own conversations leaned toward the pleasures of consumer travels.  Good, but not quite full of light.  Good chatters, good senses of humor.  People, real people.  Enjoying the comic, as people do in bars.

Every shift I worked, I worried.  Almost consumed by worries.  Prepare, prepare, then deal with it.  And it was very stressful.  For many reasons.

So, what was the way, the only way left really, to, as a good friend had asked, with much meaning and insight, to, as we say, Relax.