I am sad today, what's new, and feeling lonely.  I have slept through the whole day.  I called in sick, after vomiting in the metal trashcan by the bed.  I'd taken ibuprofen, a sip of pedialyte, soda water, water from the glass on the little blue bedside table, gone into the kitchen for a sip of V8, a tentative bite of quinoa, a tablespoon of cough syrup.  I had a hot headache, a cough, aches and chills the days leading up.  After getting up to empty out the bucket of liquid content of a wine like color, rinsing my mouth out, a quick brush of the teeth, I go back to bed and curl up under the comforter, praying I don't have to work tonight, the last of a four shift run, jazz night's peculiar swarm of requests to be entertained.  My brother's supposed to call.  I send a text into work, and an hour or so later, it's confirmed through the boss, via a text from my friend L who works the day shift and makes the schedule.

My brother has done well with life in the city.  He has excelled, I would say, knows how to be self-confident, knows how to get what he wants, knows how to be serious, and what not to take seriously, I suppose, as far as the things of the spirit and the psyche go.  He is of blood type B, the blood type of my broad cheeked boned father, rest his soul, the blood of the Mongol, adept at adapting to the conditions of city life and strife.  He'd called me yesterday, to check in, but I was wearily getting ready for work, calling him back from the woods I pass through.  "Are you working Saturday?"  "Well, I'm on call.  I don't know."  "Can you make us a reservation for four at our table...  if you're working (he implies.)"  Okay, I'm getting off easy.  I don't feel up for a substantive talk.  And that's part of the reason I am tucked under the blankets trying to find a comfortable way to lie still, in and out of dream and thought and the memory of things as they happened with the old girl, the Princess, of many times I didn't have the bravado to follow through with her.  And when you're sick you think of comforts, like a hug, and so I think of that time I went by her suite one sunny after noon early in the school year.  I'd noticed she'd been wearing a long skirt, split up the side, wanted to complement her on it.  Her roommate let me in, while speaking on the phone, and then she herself came out, said hi, and then turned and walked back across the mailroom and down the stairs to her room, and I was too stupid, too callow, too seriously minded, too emotional, to follow her glide away, as I should have.  Things you think about.  Things you think about when you are not feeling well and subject to depressions.

I on the other hand have not done well in the city.  And yes, it's sad.  Quite sad, in fact.  So that every day is quite sad.  So the thought of how a little bit of erotic tension could have had some small relief, really on many occasions, there more than thirty years ago, rises up from now and then, and always clouded by my blindness, foolishness, stupidity, you name it.  Healthy relief in that little battle of subtle communications at the gut level as are uncontrollable.  Even back then, I guess, I was weighted  down.  Weighted down by something only in the last few years I've sought to perhaps isolate.  As if you could fix a broken watch through isolating a piece of it.

I am from the type O blood, as is my mother, the Irish side.  Temperamental.  More in need of the fine tuning of returning to old ways that were ingrained in the human body long before the city came about, even before agrarian times.  Way before the modern diet came about passed on from the city, even more so than the farm table as far as influence.


When you sick and lying there listless, head and other parts of general ache, exhausted, run down, there is a chance to cleanse yourself from the habit of looking at the iphone, Google news, Facebook, Mail, headlines, whatever else.  That was not the way thirty years ago.  My father's era, certainly as an educator, his diction and habit of intellectual information went back, back at least as far as the Nineteenth Century, as up to date as he was with the Science Magazine articles of the current time.


I pull out an old book, a rare book.  D. T. Suzuki's The Training of the Zen Buddhist Monk, originally published in 1931.  It has pictures in it, drawn by a fellow who knew the ways of life in such places as the Zen Monastery.  As a young man he lived as a monk.

I ponder, maybe that is the way, to seek the silence, the meditation, to renounce the pain of sexual bodily desire and other such desires...  Maybe those old cats knew something...


Mom called around 4:30, having woken from a nap.  I need to go visit her.  It is one in the morning now.  I turn on the television to watch the news.   The Zen monks live light.  A bowl for rice, a rob, leggings, sandals.  As a young man, Suzuki would walk through the night, thirty miles, to visit his mom on weekends when he was teaching English.  Like my own father's, his father passed away when he was young, about six.  My father saw him once, speaking at Johnson Chapel, elderly.