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.