There is little purpose to writing.  It's all like the koan, a use of words differing from the practical.

It's getting on to that crucial point of the evening, when things could either calm down or get even busier.  Tillery, a legend of the DC music scene has launched into full Satchmo voice, What a Wonderful World, as the boss looks on, standing near the bar mouth, around 9 PM, having ordered his supper.  An eight top is sat in the back room, academics from the local university.  And the band, and the vocalist in particular, have become loud.  The bass, a red Sire Jazz Bass style, is thumping away, and Tillery is in full voice.  The dining room is full enough, a birthday to get ready for on table 50, all forms of mop-up, coffee, dessert, check presentation, payment processing are coming down the pike steadily, and the newly sat 8 top is ordering cocktails, Tito's dirty martinis, Bullett Old Fashioneds, Rye Manhattans up, Sapphire and tonics, a couple of wines too, as the server A reaches underneath me as I prepare the cocktails by the ice bin to retrieve a wine chiller bucket from below the sink.  Cocktails require focus.  And while the band started on softer notes, the singer with a husky soft style, now the music has created vibrations coming from all corners, noticeably messing with my innate abilities of echo-location and navigation.  The room has changed completely, into something foreign.  And in this state, men can get desperate.  I am joined at the bar by two older gentleman, and I do not have much to tell them.   And here it comes, Funny Valentine, and now Tlllery has summoned operatic volume and technique, showing off a bit, his pipes, and the tables, being unable to do anything else sit in rapt attention.  Jesus Christ.  All I can do not to throw down everything and depart out the front door.

But the musicians and the people here are largely friendly, and I empathize with them, perhaps a bit too much.   I pour the gals on the low table nearest to the bar, 57, who have enjoyed a bottle of Argentine Malbec, a taste of Bordeaux, to represent the old French style, and they smile receptively as I explain that Jazz Nights makes a barman very thirsty.   Water for the eight top.  The server is not built to reach the far side of the long table in the wine room, no.  The ladies, elderly, on the first of the tables in the wine room closest to the wine bar and the music, have had it, asking me to box up what they have not finished, and two cappuccino, one decaff, one regular, okay.

The boss's food comes up on the busboy's hands, salmon citrus app and mushroom fricassee, wondering where it is going, S8?, and I look at the dishes and say, must be B-----'s.  And around this time, I remember, yes, I have green earplugs in the change pocket of my Levis, and I stop, roll up one tight, pull up the lobe of my right ear, work it in the ear canal, hold it for a second with my index finger as it expands, feel it tight enough, and again, the acoustic environment changes, in a strange way, less the direct notes, more the strange thumping echoes coming from all and every direction.  And yes, goddamn, I think it's about time for something soothing, a glass with a bit of ice, a little red wine, slices of lemon, lime and orange, splash of soda, yes, it is time.   It was time an hour ago.


At the monastery, a day off.  The sleep aid put me into a good sleep quickly upon my return.  Back to D.T. Suzuki, Training of the Zen Buddhist Monk, back to whatever YouTube might have on the subject if I am not up for reading.  The sun is out.  I sweep the back deck clean of leaf and cat hair clinging bundles, fnding the body of a bumble bee beneath the air conditioning unit, its head oddly separated neatly, a dry curled up state for one of nature's miracles in death.  Having swept and dislodged he dry cat hair vomit, desiccated and tight, adhering to the deck's wooden planks, having shaken out the door mat and the small rug, I unroll the yoga mat and attempt a few poses.  Shoulders weak, pained, stiff in up dog.

It takes a monastery and the accumulated wisdom of spiritual literature to get, fully, the true nature of charity.  Charity demands the spiritual good, one of the higher points the mind can attain in its quest to understand the nature of reality and being alive.  Charity.  Doing good for no discernible logical reason, other than to be supportive of that which is also good, either in giving or receiving.  Charity, lived, is a lesson, and a beautiful thing, almost mathematical in its reach.   Emanating from which a good dose of mental health, a reassurance in the deeper logic of the world as it was created, perhaps itself out of charity, charity for all.


The bumble bee
did not receive
our charity.

I wish I had saved its body, but fishing through the plastic trash bag full of dusty detritus, leaves, unwound spools of clinging light grey cat hair it proves elusive to find.

Wist ye not, I was at my father's business.  That in and of itself is a lesson.  That the good will feel obliged and compelled, driven really, fully occupied by and with, the deeper truth, that wisdom which would explain why the celestial globes hang in the sky, day into nighttime, on and on, the sun shining upon us, warming us on cool autumn days.

One could gather that the pesticides and the spreading of chemicals seemingly beneficent of our own way in the world, our own industrial patterns, are not good for the earth, not the insects, not the bumble bee.

And charity is what it comes down to.  As contrary as that might be to business school logic and the shareholder's alternate realities of profit fantasy.

Either you're built that way, or not.  Either we in general are built that way, or not.  To receive charity, to give it.  To extend it from ourselves and the neighbor and the traveling stranger on out to the old seemingly inanimate objects of our own lives, that sometimes acquire dust in corners, but remind us of the different phases of our lives, like the old Citizen watch found behind the restaurant where one worked a long time ago, deriving the energy to keep ticking by the rays of the sun.  Like some of the old vessels that came from Madam Korbonski's life, a stoneware water pitcher with a blue cat figure on  it made in Finland, or an old Polish enameled casserole serving dish with lid and base.